Seagates fail along lines of their own. Service-area damage that removes a perfectly healthy disk from the BIOS. A shingled BarraCuda quietly overwriting itself after a format. A Backup Plus whose bridge has died in front of an entirely ordinary SATA disk. This page covers the ranges, the faults that belong to each of them, and what can honestly be promised. One drive is £300 + VAT after a free assessment.
One Seagate drive is £300 + VAT and the assessment before it costs nothing. BarraCuda out of a desktop, a FireCuda, a lone IronWolf, an external Backup Plus. Recorder disks are £400 + VAT and a whole NAS or RAID set opens at £500 + VAT.
This goes first because it is the Seagate story that costs people files for no good reason. Every hard disk sets aside a private region you never see, and in it the drive keeps the things it needs in order to be itself: a translator turning the addresses a computer asks about into real positions on the platters, a running list of sectors it has given up on, per-head calibration figures, and its own name and capacity. Corrupt any of that and you get no error message, because the machinery that would raise one is the machinery that has broken. The disk either says nothing or says something absurd.
Viewed from the desk, that is identical to a dead drive. It spins, it sounds exactly as it always has, and the BIOS carries on as though the cable were unplugged. Sometimes it appears with a capacity of zero, or a tenth of its real size, or a model string of scrambled characters. Seagate produces more of this than any other manufacturer, which is why so many of their disks end up in a drawer, or a skip, with every file intact.
Recovering one means ignoring the operating system entirely, talking to the disk down its own diagnostic terminal, mending or stepping around whatever has been corrupted, and only then taking a normal image of the surfaces. Few tasks in the building are more satisfying, precisely because there is nothing physically wrong with the thing: platters untouched, no filtered air required, no donor mechanism to source, and as a rule the entire contents come home. It also falls inside no fix, no fee, since it is neither an electronic nor a mechanical failure. The one thing that turns it awkward is a drive that has already had several rounds of a repair utility thrown at it, because those tools write.
The instruction that follows is short. A Seagate that has vanished but is still turning should be switched off and left off — not run overnight on the off chance, and certainly not handed to software offering to put it right. HDD recovery covers the same territory across every other manufacturer.
This catalogue reaches from the BarraCuda under a kitchen desk up to the Exos disks in a data centre rack, and the ways they stop repeat often enough to be worth setting out. The first two entries are the pair most often mistaken for a disk that has died, which is why they lead.
It spins, it sounds entirely normal, the machine behaves as though nothing were plugged in. On this manufacturer that points at the service area rather than the platters more often than on any other. Genuine fault, repairable, and not a single file has necessarily been lost.
Zero bytes, a fraction of the real size, or a string of scrambled characters where the model should be. All three describe firmware rather than mechanics, and the recording surfaces are usually untouched. Repair utilities are the wrong instinct here, because they write to a disk that has not yet lost anything.
Heads that can no longer work out where they are, usually after a knock or after a great many years of service. Each restart from here onwards grinds away more recording surface. Kill the power, leave it dead, and put no faith at all in freezers or a firm tap; both convert a recoverable disk into scrap.
Where a Backup Plus or an Expansion pulled out mid-copy usually ends up. The partition or the file table has been damaged, and Windows is proposing the single action most certain to make it worse. Refuse, take the lead out, and let no repair tool near it.
Start, click, silence, start again. On a mains-powered desktop unit that is very often the power stage or the board rather than the mechanism; on a portable it could be either. Listening to it through a wall diagnoses nothing, which is what a free assessment is for.
A copy that runs at full speed and then falls to a few megabytes a minute is meeting sectors it cannot read cleanly, or is a shingled consumer disk whose staging area has filled and which is now rewriting bands in the background. Either case wants imaging hardware, not a file manager and an optimistic evening.
Here the two big manufacturers part company, and they part in the direction people least expect. Open a Backup Plus, an Expansion or a One Touch and you generally find an unremarkable SATA disk with a small USB adapter in front of it, doing translation and nothing else. No cipher. Connect that disk to a SATA port and, in the ordinary run of things, it mounts and shows you your files — which is exactly what a WD My Passport will never do, for the reasons set out on the Western Digital page.
Three qualifications belong with that. Seagate does sell external models built around a password, and those cipher in hardware precisely as a Passport does, so the naked disk out of one is unreadable in the same way; if the unit ever asked you for a password when you plugged it in, it is one of those. Next, a shucked drive occasionally sits dead in a desktop machine because of the third pin on the SATA power connector — a reset line enclosures never bothered with and some supplies hold high. That is not damage and not the drive's fault, and an external drive that has stopped working covers the trap and the way past it. Third and most important: none of this is an argument for opening a failing drive at home. A disk that mounts is a disk being written to.
Even where the bridge is doing nothing clever, the board carries the model, the revision and now and then a firmware quirk that matters once the disk goes on the imager. So send the unit as it is. Already taken it apart? Put the shell and the board in with the drive. Opening a Seagate external has ruined nothing on its own — the harm arrives with what usually comes next, which is a determined attempt to copy files off a disk that should have been imaged first.
LaCie has been part of Seagate since 2012, and taking the aluminium off a Rugged or a d2 will normally reveal a Seagate mechanism inside. That range has its own page here, covering the beeping, the orange bumper and the desktop units, at LaCie recovery. Seagate also took over Samsung's hard disk business years back, so a spinning SpinPoint is treated here as a Seagate; Samsung's solid state drives are an entirely separate line and have nothing to do with any of it.
Seagate names its ranges rather than colouring them, and the name is a reasonable guide to the life the drive has had. Five years of writing camera footage wears a disk quite differently from five years of holding a games library, and the recovery follows that difference.
Desktops and laptops, and the drive posted in more often than any other. The point to note is that many consumer BarraCudas are shingled, the widely sold 2TB models in both form factors included. They image slowly, and a format on one starts a countdown rather than sitting harmlessly until something overwrites it.
One name, two unrelated products. The older hybrids bolt a small flash cache onto the drive's own board alongside the platters, so that flash cannot be read as a separate device and may still be holding recent writes when the board dies. The newer FireCuda blades are NVMe drives and go to the flash bench instead.
Built for boxes that run continuously beside half a dozen of their own kind: conventional recording, vibration sensors, longer duty rating. One on its own is £300 + VAT. A complete set out of a Synology or QNAP that has dropped its volume is an array rebuild from £500 + VAT, priced on how many disks there are.
Surveillance, written to without pause by DVR and NVR recorders and tuned to keep the stream going rather than stop and worry about a bad sector. They wear out instead of breaking. Anything lifted from a recorder is £400 + VAT, and recorder work is one of the stated exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Rack capacity in servers and storage shelves, often SAS rather than SATA, and almost never alone. Where a whole set arrives it is a RAID rebuild rather than a single-drive read, and the first two things anybody needs are the bay order and what the controller was doing at the moment it stopped.
A generation whose firmware could drop a disk into a busy state and remove it from the BIOS with every platter perfectly intact. That episode ended long ago. The lesson survives it, and it is the one at the top of this page: on a Seagate, missing does not mean finished.
After firmware, the classic Seagate is a dead controller board, usually courtesy of a surge down a tired mains supply or the wrong adaptor plugged into an external. Boards can certainly be changed. What cannot be done is ordering the identical part number from an auction site and screwing it on, which is what a dispiriting number of the drives arriving here have already had done to them. Every board is matched to its own mechanism by calibration values unique to that disk, and those values have to make the journey with it. In some families they sit in a small separate chip that can be lifted across by hand; in others they live inside the main controller, which makes a straight swap pointless and the job considerably longer. Board and chip level work is among the named exclusions from the guarantee, so it carries 50% upfront.
Shingled recording tucks each track partly beneath its neighbour to fit more onto the platter. That is a fair bargain on a disk which is mostly read, and a poor one on a disk which is rewritten, because altering anything mid-band means rewriting the entire band. Consumer BarraCudas have worked this way for years, in both sizes, and it has two consequences for anybody who has just lost files.
Time is the first. Imaging one is slow and refuses to be hurried; a 2TB shingled disk can absorb a day and a half where a conventional one takes an afternoon, and that assumes everything else is behaving. The second consequence is the serious one. Delete or format, and the drive marks those bands free and may rewrite them during its own housekeeping, wiping out the old content rather than merely unlinking it. Deleted data on a conventional disk waits to be collected. On a shingled disk it is being eaten while the drive sits there apparently idle. A BarraCuda formatted by mistake should be unplugged within the hour, and recovering data after a reinstall goes through what a fresh copy of Windows leaves behind on the same volume.
A number of Seagate lines ship with the manufacturer's own recovery plan bundled in for a fixed number of years — IronWolf Pro, the FireCuda range and several external models among them. If your drive falls inside that window and the plan was registered, use it. It has already been paid for as part of the purchase price. Ten minutes with the original order confirmation is worth spending before you ring anybody at all, this laboratory included. Where the plan lapsed, was never registered, or the drive was never a covered model, the bands below apply as normal.
The disk goes onto imaging hardware that sets its own timeouts and steps past a difficult region instead of hammering at it, and where it is warranted the assessment goes head by head. Two working days after arrival there is a report, and it answers three questions: what has failed, how much of the surface is realistically readable, and what the job costs. The figure is fixed, it is written down, and it does not move afterwards. If the honest answer is that the work is not worth doing, the report says so, and the only thing you are out is the postage in.
Anything logical is worked on a copy, so the drive is read and never written to. Anything mechanical is opened under filtered air and given a matched head stack from stock racked by model and firmware family, then asked for a single supervised pass and retired. Firmware faults never require the disk to be opened at all, since the work goes through the service area. Whichever route it takes, the results come back on fresh media and the original is returned or securely destroyed exactly as you instructed in writing.
Anything overwritten is finished. A full format, a Windows installation onto the same volume, or a fortnight of ordinary use after the files disappeared all write across the very space that would otherwise be searched, and there is nothing underneath to reach for. A shingled BarraCuda formatted a month ago and left switched on has been steadily rewriting itself since. A disk opened somewhere that was not a clean-air bench has usually collected the dust that ends it. And on FireCuda NVMe blades, as on any solid state drive in working order, deleted files are normally beyond recovery, because the controller erases freed blocks off its own bat within minutes; SSD recovery marks out exactly where that line sits.
One Seagate hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, NVMe included, and an external such as a Backup Plus or an Expansion counts as a single drive. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. Anything holding more than one disk — a NAS packed with IronWolf, a shelf of Exos out of a server — opens at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count. A SkyHawk or any other disk out of a CCTV recorder is £400 + VAT, as is a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted volume. No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs, which is why head work and board work take 50% of the quoted figure before they start. Approve the quote and a single-drive job typically finishes in 2 to 4 working days. Every band is published on the price page.
The journey is the easy part. Cambridge is seventy miles from Leicester — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east, roughly ninety minutes — and Junction 32 puts you two minutes from the lab with parking outside; reception takes drop-offs Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Most drives come as tracked parcels regardless, from engineering firms around Loughborough, from the sheds at Magna Park, from farm offices beyond Melton Mowbray, and from students in Leicester whose only copy of a dissertation is on one BarraCuda. Nobody collects and there is no Leicester counter, so the post office genuinely is the quickest option. If your badge reads Western Digital, the WD page explains what changes; hard drive recovery takes every other manufacturer.
Firmware brings more Seagates to this bench than broken mechanisms do, and firmware gives everything back. Switch it off and let the free diagnostic say which one you have.
Almost every branded drive on this bench arrived by post rather than by car. Seventy miles of M1 and A14 in a footwell is a rough ride for hardware that has already stopped behaving; a padded parcel is not, and it is insured for the whole journey. Hand one over at a Leicester counter on a Monday afternoon and Cambridge is usually booking it in on the Tuesday.
There are two packing rules here and they contradict each other, which is the point. Anything in its own external case is posted sealed, screws untouched, with the lead it was sold with: on a WD My Passport or My Book the key that makes the recording readable is held on the board in that shell, so a naked disk is so much static. Anything bolted inside a computer, a NAS or a recorder is posted on its own, because Cambridge dismantles nothing and any repair shop will free it in ten minutes. The exception with no way round it is flash soldered to a mainboard — if it will not come off, no parcel exists.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Cambridge Data Recovery on the label. Driving is perfectly reasonable if you would rather not trust it to the post: seventy miles, M1 south as far as Junction 19 then east on the A14, an hour and a half on an ordinary day, and Junction 32 puts you two minutes from the door with parking outside. Whichever way it comes, the telephone call goes out the day it is booked in and the written figure follows two working days later.
Uncertain whether yours is one of the units that travels whole? Ring 0800 689 0668 before the tape goes on, or work through the free online diagnostic instead.