An architect's practice in Quorn keeps its site photography on a 4TB wireless Seagate that sits on a shelf and is reached over the office network, with roughly half of it in use. It began making a noise that the practice manager described as a soft repeated tick, and at the same time it stopped appearing on the network. Nobody switched it off, on the reasoning that turning it off might be the thing that finished it. That reasoning is exactly backwards, and they were told so on the telephone before anything else was discussed.
| Media | A 4TB wireless drive, roughly half full, used as shared storage over an office network. It has begun ticking steadily and no longer answers on the network at all. |
| What was reported | Wireless Seagate drive, 4TB with about half in use, has started making a repeated ticking noise, no longer connects over the network, site photography and current drawings on it, recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. Behind the wireless electronics is one ordinary 2.5-inch disk, and that disk was failing to complete its start-up, so there was never anything for the network side to serve. The ticking was the head assembly retrying a read it could not complete. |
| On the bench | Powered down on the telephone before collection was even discussed, and not run again; the disk removed from the wireless housing and profiled on a current-limited bench supply with the retry interval timed; opened under laminar flow, the heads and both surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope; matched donor heads fitted and alignment set; imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the head map watched throughout; the volume parsed in R-Studio and drawings and photographs opened in the software that made them before release. |
A wireless drive is a disk, a battery and a small computer, and only one of those can tick. The radio, the web interface and the app on somebody's laptop are all layers over an ordinary portable disk. When the disk cannot start, the layers above it have nothing to publish, so the unit drops off the network. The failure looks like a network problem from every desk in the office and is not one.
Leaving it powered was the expensive instinct. The practice reasoned that a drive left running could not fail any further, which is the opposite of what happens. A head assembly retrying against a surface it cannot read is in contact with that surface, and hours of it will polish away the layer holding the material. Switching it off cost nothing and stopped the only damage that was still accumulating.
One disk is one disk, whatever is wrapped around it. Multi-disk sets are quoted from a higher figure because the work multiplies with the member count and the array has to be reassembled before anything can be read. A wireless box with a single disk in it has none of that. It is priced as the single drive it is, which surprised the practice manager more than the diagnosis did.
The unit travels whole, which is the exception rather than the rule. For a laptop or a tower the instruction is to send the disk on its own and leave the machine at home. An external in its own enclosure is the other way about: it goes as it is, in its case, with its lead, because the enclosure is small, protective and occasionally holds electronics the read depends on. Nobody at the practice had to open anything.
It arrived unpowered and stayed that way while it was booked in. The disk came out of the housing and went onto a current-limited supply, where a single start showed the pattern that goes with a head fault: spin-up completing, then a repeating cycle of seek and retract at a steady interval, with the current stepping in time with the tick the office had heard.
Under laminar flow, two heads of the four were damaged and the surfaces beneath them showed light marking at the inner radius, consistent with the drive having been left running for a day or so after the noise began. Matched donor heads were fitted and alignment set. Imaging on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA was run head by head with the map monitored, the marked region left until last and read in short passes.
R-Studio parsed the volume out of the image. The current job's drawings and the site photography behind them were opened in the applications that had made them, and the small number of files sitting in the marked region were listed separately rather than being quietly included.
The practice got back all of the drawings and all but a few dozen of the photographs, those few being from a single folder in the damaged band. They were given the list rather than a total, so they could see precisely which site visit had lost images and go back for them if it mattered.
The unit held one disk, so it was quoted as one disk: £300 + VAT. Opening it in clean air is mechanical work and sits outside the published guarantee, so 50% was settled upfront and the rest once the drawings had been checked.
Switch it off at the mains rather than waiting to see whether it recovers. A noise that repeats is a mechanism failing to complete something, and leaving it powered lets it keep failing against the surface that holds your material. Do not take the unit apart to get at the disk, and do not put that disk into a caddy to see whether it reads better there, because a mechanically failing disk gets fewer attempts than most people spend on diagnosis. Send the whole unit as it is, in its case, with its power supply, since an enclosure travels perfectly well and the bench would rather open it than inherit one that has already been levered at. If it is a box with several disks in it, the instruction is different: those go as bare disks, labelled with their bay order, with a photograph of the front of the chassis taken first.
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
Silence after clicking is the drive giving up on schedule, not a second failure arriving
On a My Passport the key lives in the case, so the case and its cable travel with the disk
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.