No other badge covers as much of the storage in British homes and offices, and these drives break in ways that belong to the brand alone. A Passport whose key lives on its bridge board instead of its platters. A shingled Red bringing an array to a halt. An Elements that comes apart cleanly where a Passport never will. One WD drive is £300 + VAT, and the assessment that tells you which fault you have costs nothing at all.
£300 + VAT covers one Western Digital drive, and the assessment in front of it is free. Passport, My Book, Elements, or a naked Blue, Black or Red lifted out of a machine. Boxes holding several disks, My Cloud among them, are arrays instead and open at £500 + VAT.
Almost everything further down this page is ordinary bench work. This bit is not, and it explains why a steady trickle of entirely recoverable Western Digital drives turns up here already beyond help. Prise the shell off a My Passport of any recent vintage, lift out the 2.5-inch mechanism, hang it off a SATA port or a caddy from the kitchen drawer, and the computer will report a disk of exactly the advertised size holding something it cannot identify at all. Certain utilities will then draw a partition table across the confusion, which makes it look convincingly like a file system that has come apart. It has not come apart. The unit ciphers every sector it writes, straight out of the factory, with or without anybody choosing a password, and the key is held by the electronics now sitting in the empty case beside you.
Which is exactly why the Cambridge booking-in form spells this one out: a My Passport or a My Book goes in the parcel whole, cable and all. Not the mechanism. The complete unit, its own case, the lead it shipped with. That is not fussiness about packaging. Split the two halves and the recording becomes unreadable to this laboratory just as surely as it is unreadable to you, and there is no equipment anywhere that changes the answer.
How the key is stored depends on when the unit was built. Passports made up to roughly 2013 hold a normal SATA mechanism wired by a short ribbon to a small interface board, and the cipher lives on that board. Later ones dispensed with the separate board entirely: the USB socket is fitted straight onto the drive's own controller and the encryption engine shares the same piece of silicon. The construction changed; the rule did not. Platters and electronics are a matched pair, and one without the other is scrap.
Handled properly, none of this is difficult. An image is taken before anything else happens. The key material comes out of the original electronics, and if those electronics are past saving, a donor board from the right family goes in so the chain survives the transfer. Everything after that runs against the copy — your drive is read, never written — and what comes back is the folder tree you remember rather than a screenful of random bytes. One version has no route through it, and it is fairer to say so before you pay for postage: a password chosen in WD Security and long since forgotten. At that point the encryption does precisely the job it was sold to do, and nobody in Britain undoes it. Encrypted and BitLocker drives maps where that boundary falls across every kind of locked volume.
So the instruction is a dull one. Case, board, screws and cable stay together and all of it goes in the box. Already taken it apart? Put every piece in the same parcel — opening it has cost you nothing by itself. What costs you the data is what tends to happen next: writing to a bare ciphered disk, or letting a repair tool make an attempt on it. A condensed version of this section sits on external drive recovery with the other portable makes.
This badge covers everything from a Passport in a coat pocket to the Ultrastar disks in a server rack, and six patterns account for most of what gets booked in. Not one of them, on its own, tells you whether the trouble is electronic, firmware or mechanical — which is the entire reason the assessment exists and the entire reason nobody is charged for it.
Light on, possibly a chime from the machine, and nothing whatsoever in Explorer or Disk Management. Portables lose their interface electronics considerably more often than they lose their platters, so this is generally the better answer of the two. A seventh port will not rescue it, and each attempt spins up a mechanism that may be hurt already.
Clearance between head and platter in a 2.5-inch mechanism is measured in fractions of a micron, so a portable dragged off a desk by its own lead frequently begins ticking from that moment on. Pull the power now. For as long as that drive has current it is machining away its own recording surface, and none of that is retrievable.
Windows announcing that drive E must be formatted before it can be used, on an Elements that behaved perfectly last week. Damage to the volume header or the file table, generally from a write cut short or a lead tugged mid-copy. Not one of your files has moved. Say no, unplug it, and keep every repair tool at a distance.
Mains-powered 3.5-inch boxes die at the power stage far more often than on the platters. One that spins, clicks once and goes quiet, or one that restarts every few seconds, is generally being starved of clean current rather than mechanically finished. A stray adaptor that happened to fit the socket is a common cause and an expensive one.
Running sweetly for twenty minutes and then sitting motionless for an hour means one of two things: sectors the drive cannot read cleanly, or a shingled model rewriting bands behind your back. Dragging folders in Explorer is the worst available response either way, since it retries indefinitely and heats the drive while it does.
Move a WD portable into a different enclosure and it reads as nonsense by design, not by damage; the same goes for a drive reporting its correct capacity with no recognisable file system on it. Both are everyday work. What stops being everyday is the drive somebody then allowed Windows to initialise.
Strip a My Book down to its parts and you have a 3.5-inch disk, a bridge board and a mains adaptor in a plastic tower. The adaptor gets less thought than any of the others and causes more grief than all of them. These boxes are specified for a particular voltage at a particular current, and a generic supply with the right barrel will cheerfully leave the drive short at the exact instant it demands most, which is spin-up. The result is a unit that resets itself part-way through a write, over and over, month after month, until the file system is a heap of transactions that never finished. On an image that is untangled without much difficulty. On a drive still being asked to have another go, it cannot be untangled at all.
Recent My Book generations cipher exactly as the Passports do, so keep the electronics with the disk. The difference shows once the bridge itself has died: the mechanism behind it is a bog-standard SATA drive, and as soon as the key chain has been carried across it behaves like any other desktop disk here. Some of the larger models turn out to be two disks striped or mirrored inside a single shell, which is a different job at from £500 + VAT rather than a single-drive one, and nothing moulded into the case tells you which of the two you bought.
Not every WD external is married to its board. The Elements and Easystore ranges have generally gone out without a cipher layer at all, which is why they are the units enthusiasts buy to harvest the disk inside, and why a mechanism pulled from one usually mounts without argument. Treat them as the control experiment. Bare disk out of a WD case reads normally? You had an Elements or an Easystore. Bare disk reads as static? Passport, or a My Book of recent build.
Two qualifications ride along with that. Western Digital has moved back and forth across the range over the years, so the model number moulded into the underside is a far better guide than whatever the family is called on the front. And a sizeable share of the slim WD portables carry no SATA connector on the drive at all — the USB port is soldered to the drive's own board — so there is nothing to plug in whatever the label promises. A disk with a USB socket where you expected the familiar L-shaped SATA pair has just answered the question for you. Slide it back into its case and stop.
The colours are not packaging. Western Digital assigns them by design intent, so working out which one you are holding tells you a fair amount about how it came to fail, and occasionally about how many minutes you have before you should switch it off.
The volume seller — family desktops, cheap builds, the 2.5-inch disks in laptops of a certain age. Perfectly sound in normal service. The catch is that the 1TB and 2TB 2.5-inch Blues use shingled recording, so they image slowly and dislike being written to for long stretches. More single-drive jobs here carry this label than any other.
Where the performance went: 7200rpm, conventional tracks rather than overlapped ones, a longer warranty. Blacks run hot and get pushed hard, and they tend to stop suddenly instead of fading. Heads or bearings, usually, which means opening the drive under filtered air and half the quoted figure before the work starts.
Made for boxes that never switch off. The naming split is worth knowing: plain Reds were quietly shipped with shingled platters, a decision that generated a great deal of anger in 2020, while Red Plus and Red Pro stayed conventional. Put a shingled disk into an array that is trying to rebuild and both the speed and the odds go the wrong way.
Camera duty, inside DVR and NVR boxes, tuned to swallow several streams at once and to keep writing instead of pausing over an error. They are used harder than anything else in the consumer catalogue and they reach the bench exhausted rather than broken. A disk out of a recorder is £400 + VAT, in the recorder band, not the single-drive one.
The rack-mounted end of the catalogue, and the branch that traces directly to HGST. They come out of servers, storage shelves and small business boxes, and hardly ever on their own. Where a whole set arrives it is an array rebuild from £500 + VAT, priced on how many members there are.
Green was the low-power range, discontinued years back and merged into Blue, and Green or Blue 2.5-inch mechanisms are what you find in Passport shells from that period. They spin slowly, run cool, and after ten or twelve years they usually decline steadily rather than stopping dead — which makes them the ones worth acting on the same week you first notice something.
Overlapping the tracks like roof tiles buys extra capacity and costs flexibility. Rewrite something in the middle of a shingled band and the drive has to move the whole group, which it does in the background through a small conventional staging area kept on the same platter. Day to day you might notice an occasional pause and nothing more. During a recovery it changes the arithmetic completely.
Start with the practical part: these disks image slowly and will not be pushed, so a 2TB portable that used to copy overnight can occupy a working day and a half. The part that decides outcomes is the other one. Once a file has been deleted or a volume formatted, the drive counts those bands as available and is entitled to reuse them during its own housekeeping — which means the old content is genuinely destroyed rather than merely unlinked. A conventional disk leaves deleted data sitting quietly until something writes over it. A shingled one has a countdown attached. Formatted a shingled Blue or a plain Red by accident? Switching it off inside the hour is worth more than every piece of software you could buy, and deleted file recovery sets out what survives that window.
Ownership in this industry moves about, and it is worth tracking because donor parts follow the same route. IBM's disk division went to Hitachi, traded for years under the HGST name, and was bought outright by Western Digital in 2012. So anything wearing an HGST sticker, and every Ultrastar sold since, is a WD product in each of the senses that matter at a bench: same spares racks, same firmware families, same head architecture. Searches for HGST recovery still arrive as though it were a separate craft. It is not, and a drive with that badge on it gets the treatment any other WD would get.
These are small Linux computers, each with its own file system, and on the multi-bay models the volume is distributed across the disks in software rather than sitting complete on any single one. Take one disk out, connect it to a Windows machine, and Windows will offer to initialise it. Accepting that offer is the most damaging single click available at that moment. Refuse it, shut the box down, remove every disk, write the bay number on each, photograph the front panel while the disks are still in place, and send the set together.
Pricing follows the array rules — from £500 + VAT, climbing with the member count — and the detail lives on NAS drive recovery next to Synology, QNAP and Buffalo. That page also deals with the boxes that turn out to have been running as a plain stripe all along, with no redundancy in them whatsoever, which is a larger proportion than most owners would believe.
A great deal of flash carries this badge too: Blue SATA solid state drives, the SN-series NVMe blades fitted to most current laptops, and the whole SanDisk catalogue since the 2016 purchase. Those go to the flash bench, priced at £300 + VAT with NVMe on the same rung, while SanDisk cards and sticks are £250 + VAT. The limit needs saying plainly rather than buried in a footnote: delete or format something on a solid state drive that is otherwise healthy and it is usually gone for good, because the controller has been told those blocks are free and wipes them itself within minutes of the machine going idle. Curiously, an SSD that has failed outright and stopped answering commands often gives better odds than one still working, which is the reverse of what people expect.
Every WD job runs the same opening. The unit gets booked in, goes onto equipment designed for disks that answer back, and two working days later there is a report. It settles three questions — which layer has failed, whether the key chain can be carried over, and what share of the data is realistically coming back — and only then does a price appear. That price is written down and it stays where it is. Nothing up to that point is chargeable, and nobody here talks a customer into a recovery the report says is not worth having.
Logical faults, meaning a deleted folder, a format, a shredded file table or a partition that walked off, are worked entirely against an image; your drive is read and never touched again. Mechanical faults mean opening the disk under filtered air, fitting a matched head stack and asking it for one supervised pass rather than running it until it stops for good. Whatever comes back goes onto fresh media, and the original is either posted back or destroyed securely, whichever you specify in writing. Hard drive repair covers the mechanical side at more length.
Some of this cannot be done, and a two-minute call now beats a fortnight of hope. A My Passport locked with a forgotten WD Security password stays locked for ever. Anything written over — by a full format, by a Windows installation onto the same volume, by weeks of ordinary use after the files vanished — is destroyed rather than concealed, and no software reaches beneath it. A shingled disk formatted last month and left plugged in has been quietly overwriting itself the whole time. A drive already opened on a kitchen table has usually picked up the dust that finishes it. And soldered flash cannot be removed from a mainboard, so there is nothing to put in a parcel.
One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT with NVMe blades on the same rung, and a Passport or My Book counts as one drive whatever its case is made of. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. Anything with several disks in it — a NAS, a RAID set, a twin-disk My Book — opens at £500 + VAT and climbs with the member count. Recorder disks are £400 + VAT, and so is a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted volume. The guarantee reads: no fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs — four exclusions, each invoiced at 50% before the work starts, because donor parts are bought for one named drive and not kept on a shelf for drives in general. Approve a figure and a single-drive recovery is normally finished inside 2 to 4 working days. Decline it and you are out the return postage and nothing else. The price page lists all five bands with VAT shown separately.
The lab is at Vision Park in Cambridge, seventy miles off: M1 south to Junction 19, then east on the A14, and Junction 32 leaves you two minutes from the door with parking outside. Reception signs devices in Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. The great majority of this work still arrives by post — Passports from houses in Oadby and Wigston carrying a decade of photographs, Blues out of towers in the Cultural Quarter, Reds from four-bay boxes in the distribution units at Magna Park, Purples pulled from recorders in shops along the Golden Mile. Nobody collects, and there is no counter in Leicester, so a tracked parcel really is the fastest route. Badge says Seagate instead? The Seagate page covers what changes. An external drive that has stopped working and what CHKDSK costs you deal with the two situations people most often worsen before ringing, and hard drive recovery takes every other make.
On a My Passport or a My Book the key sits on the board rather than the platters. Leave it switched off, keep the unit in one piece, and let the free diagnostic name the layer that failed.
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.