A dental practice in Oadby moved its records onto a new server and kept the old archive on a 1TB WD external, on the reasoning that it was rarely needed and would sit in a drawer. When it was finally needed, it clicked steadily for a few minutes, never appeared, and then went quiet as though it had switched itself off. The practice manager assumed the second symptom meant the drive had died completely between attempts.
| Media | A 1TB WD external drive holding an archive kept after a server migration. It powers, clicks for several minutes without ever being recognised, then goes silent as though it has stopped spinning. |
| What was reported | WD 1TB external, began clicking, never recognised by the computer, clicking stops after a few minutes and the drive goes quiet, archive of older records needed off it. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The heads could not read, so the drive repeated its start-up sequence until it reached the limit its firmware allows, at which point it spun down deliberately. The clicking and the silence were the same fault at two stages, not two faults. |
| On the bench | Not retried on arrival, lifted out of its enclosure and profiled on a current-limited bench supply with one start captured and the spin-down timed, opened under laminar flow with the head stack and both platter surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head, the archive parsed from the image in R-Studio and a sample from each year opened before the set was written to fresh media. |
The silence was designed in. A drive that cannot read gives itself a fixed number of attempts at its start-up routine. When it runs out, it stops the motor rather than sitting there spinning uselessly, which saves power and saves the surfaces. From the outside that looks like a drive dying in front of you. It is closer to a drive knowing when to stop, and it is the same behaviour every time it is powered.
Clicking has one meaning worth acting on. The head assembly is being driven out to a reference position and brought back because the read failed, and the noise is that movement reaching its stop. It says the motor is turning and the electronics are working, and it says nothing about how bad the head fault is. That question is answered under magnification, not by listening.
Nothing about an archive makes it more fragile. The practice had half-expected to be told that data left alone for two years had faded. It does not. What actually threatens an archive drive is that nobody notices it has failed until the day they need it, so a fault that would have been caught in a fortnight goes unnoticed for years and the second copy that should exist never gets made.
The number of attempts is the only figure the owner controls. Each start-up puts a damaged head across the surface again. Two or three make almost no difference. An afternoon of them can polish away the recording layer in the region the drive keeps returning to, which is exactly where it needs to read first. This one had been tried perhaps five times before it was put back in the drawer and the practice rang.
It arrived in its enclosure and was not plugged in. The disk came out and went onto a current-limited supply for one profiled start: the spindle reached speed and held it, the head assembly moved repeatedly without result, and the drive spun itself down after a little over three minutes, which matched the practice manager's description almost to the second.
Opened under laminar flow, two heads showed damage and the surfaces beneath them were unmarked across their full radius, which is the outcome that decides whether the job is everything or something. Matched donor heads were fitted, alignment was set and imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head, so a deterioration part way through would have cost one surface rather than all of them. R-Studio parsed the archive from the image and files from each year of it were opened rather than tallied.
The archive came back whole and went out on fresh media as a plain folder tree, so the practice does not need any particular enclosure or software to read it in another five years. The original drive was returned with the recovered copy and a recommendation not to trust it again.
A single disk is £300 + VAT. This one needed its lid off, and clean-air work is named in the published exclusion, so 50% was payable upfront and the balance once the practice had confirmed the records.
Do not read the silence as the drive getting worse, and do not read it as the drive settling down either. It is the firmware ending a start-up sequence it could not complete, and it will do exactly the same thing next time. The mistake to avoid is treating that as an invitation to keep trying, because every attempt moves a damaged head over the region the drive most needs to read. Software cannot help here: the tools that talk to a disk need the disk to answer first, and this one never gets that far. Unplug it, leave it in its enclosure, pack it so it cannot slide about, and post it insured. An archive drive that has failed once should be replaced rather than reused, whatever comes back off it.
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.
Beeping is a mechanism drawing power it cannot turn into movement
On a My Passport the key lives in the case, so the case and its cable travel with the disk
The quieter the fault, the more times an owner will try it, and the tries are what cost
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.