A retired sound engineer in Blaby has about 175GB of music on one drive, a good deal of it transferred from his own tapes and records over twenty years and none of it available to buy again in the versions he made. The drive lives in a USB caddy on the desk. It began clicking repeatedly whenever the machine started and stopped registering altogether, and his first instinct was that the caddy had failed, which is what most people conclude and what he spent a fortnight testing.
| Media | A 3.5-inch SATA drive in a USB caddy holding about 175GB of music, much of it transferred from tape and vinyl. It clicks repeatedly on start-up and no longer registers on the machine. |
| What was reported | A bare SATA disk running in a USB enclosure, clicking each time the machine starts and never taking a drive letter, roughly 175GB of transferred music that could not realistically be made again. |
| Fault class | Mechanical, in the drive rather than the caddy. The heads were failing to read, so the drive never readied and never identified itself. Two replacement caddies produced identical behaviour, which is the fortnight of testing arriving at the right answer by a slow route. |
| On the bench | Taken out of the caddy and left unpowered, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply with the click interval timed, opened under laminar flow with heads and surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA by head map, the volume parsed in R-Studio from the image and a spread of albums played through before the set was written to fresh media. |
A caddy is a socket, a small translation circuit and a power connection. When it fails, the drive disappears silently: no noise, no light, nothing. It cannot produce a click, because clicking requires a head assembly moving, and the caddy has no moving parts at all. So the sound itself ruled the caddy out before any testing began, and the fortnight spent on replacements answered a question the noise had already settled.
Testing the wrong component is the most common way a fortnight is lost. There is nothing foolish about it: the caddy is the cheap part, it is the part you can replace the same day, and swapping it is the only experiment available at home. But a clicking drive in three different caddies is a clicking drive, and each of those experiments is another start-up spent on a mechanism that has a finite number left.
A 3.5-inch drive in a bus-powered caddy is worth a separate mention. Full-size drives want more current at start-up than a single connection reliably supplies, and a drive that browns out during spin-up can produce noises that resemble a head fault. That was not this fault, which showed a steady click at a regular interval with the supply well within limits, but it is the one situation where the enclosure genuinely can be to blame.
A collection built over twenty years is not replaceable in any practical sense. The individual recordings may exist elsewhere; the transfers, the corrections and the ordering do not. That is worth saying because it changes the arithmetic people do when they are deciding whether a recovery is worth the money, and because it is the reason a single drive should never have been the only home for it.
The drive came out of the caddy and stayed unpowered until it went on a current-limited supply for one profiled start. The click interval was regular and the current trace showed a spindle at proper speed under a head assembly achieving nothing, which is a head fault and not a supply problem.
Opened under laminar flow, two heads were damaged and the surfaces showed light marking in the outer region and were clean elsewhere. Matched donor heads were fitted, alignment was set, and imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA ordered by head map. Music files are large and mostly written in long runs, so the image came back with whole albums intact rather than a scatter of fragments. R-Studio parsed the volume and a spread of tracks was played rather than counted.
The collection came back essentially whole: a handful of tracks in the marked outer region would not play cleanly and were listed individually rather than passed off as recovered. Everything went out on a new disk, and he was advised to make the second copy this month rather than next.
A single disk is £300 + VAT. Opening one is mechanical work the published exclusion covers, so 50% was settled upfront and the remainder once he had played through the recovered folders.
If it clicks, stop swapping caddies. A caddy that has failed produces silence, not noise, so a clicking drive has already told you where the fault is and every further test is a start-up you cannot get back. Take the drive out of the caddy before you post it and send the bare drive, wrapped so it cannot move; the caddy is not needed and is only one more thing to lose. This is the opposite of the rule for a drive in its own sealed housing, which travels whole, and for a My Passport or My Book, where the case must come because the key lives in it. If the drive is a full-size one that was running from a single connection, mention that too, since a marginal supply is the one case where the enclosure really can be at fault.
Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.
A drive that cannot read its own service area never gets as far as introducing itself
Uneven access is a drive telling you how much time it has left
Finding a deleted file and returning one that opens are two different pieces of work
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.