Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

My production computer has 4 x 3 TB WD HDD in RAID-5 as the data drive: Any one can fail, be replaced, and the system will rebuild with no data loss.
THIS is backed up over GB Ethernet to a 4-bay home NAS with 4 x 4 TB NAS certified WD-Red HDD in RAID-5 (fault tolerant with 12 TB accessible)
You must have NAS certified HDD in a RAID configured NAS because the drives are almost constantly re-writing data
And the NAS certified drives have firmware designed to minimize head thrashing.
Finally I back up the NAS over a USB-3 link to a 4-bay (3 x 3 TB drive) hardware based RAID enclosure configured in RAID-0
I only do this final back up every couple of weeks and turn the HDD enclosure off between backups - should last forever ??.
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Yes - - I am a bit paranoid about data loss after an experience similar to that of the OP (mine was back in the 1990's)
I feel his pain !!
IF he truly had a Head Crash - - then there was likely physical damage to data sectors on the disks themselves (scratches)
And I would only recommend attempting data recovery through an EXPEN$IVE Reputable Clean-Room facility that specializes in that task.
I can't recommend the OP try to power up a HDD that may have had a head crash as additional damage could result.

AlanD Loc: TC, MN

I am truly sorry for your loss... but, I too had the same issue. I backed up photo's on the attached hard drive, but it crashed. I was fortunate that the son of a close friend was able to recover those files, along with many other files from the "crashed" disk. Unfortunately, later, I was attacked by a "Krypto" virus which not only attacked my computers main drive, but also the attached auxiliary drives. I hate to ask him again to recover the files, but they are still there. In other words, perhaps, a crashed drive is better than a trashed drive. Good luck with their recovery.

AlanD Loc: TC, MN

I am truly sorry for your loss... but, I too had the same issue. I backed up photo's on the attached hard drive, but it crashed. I was fortunate that the son of a close friend was able to recover those files, along with many other files from the "crashed" disk. Unfortunately, later, I was attacked by a "Krypto" virus which not only attacked my computers main drive, but also the attached auxiliary drives. I hate to ask him again to recover the files, but they are still there. In other words, perhaps, a crashed drive is better than a trashed drive. Good luck with their recovery. I should also add—perhaps a good reason to backup to a cloud drive...

Jim216 Loc: South Carolina

I feel your pain.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I'd just point out that without opening the drive and examining the platter for physical damage, the OP has no way of knowing if there was literally a head "crash" (often "crash" is used in a generic way) or some other defect; and if the drive has been opened in a non clean room environment, then the ability to recover the data may have been compromised. My sympathies go out to the OP.

blackest Loc: Ireland

It's quite easy to hear if a drive is spinning or not, generally its the heads that instead of with drawing from the platters and parked have been stopped extended. the heads ride on a very small cushion of air, even a speck of dust is bigger than that gap this leads to the heads sticking to the platters and the drive doesn't have enough torque to spin up against the braking force of the heads.

If you open the drive outside a clean room it will usually spin up after but the dirt in the air if not bits of platter will soon create havoc and kill the drive after a couple of hours, it can work long enough to recover 90 - 95% of the data usually. It's a risk but it can work.

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

Not sure if that's true or not - - I've seen the motors inside a HDD - doesn't look like they'd take 'NO' from a speck of dust.
Again - - if there truly WAS a HEAD Crash - - meaning the read/write heads for some reason impacted the spinning disks - - data loss is inevitable.
IF the Crash damaged the file allocation table sectors, data recovery will be much more difficult.
IF the drive simply won't spin up - - then clean room recovery is probably the best option.
irreplaceable data should be considered priceless - - $1000 for a clean room recovery may well be worth it in the long run.

blackest Loc: Ireland

It's not a speck of dust which stalls the motor but the heads resting on the platters and it's grinding the dirt into the platters afterwards which does the damage. and ensures the drive is now terminal, even though it now spins and reads most of the drive, it will not do it for long.

Newsbob Loc: SF Bay Area

I have had hard drives crash and it really hurts. Even if everything is backed up, there is still a lot of work to get everything back the way it was before the crash.

My concern is not just a crash, but also something terrible happening to our house, such as a fire or theft. If you live in certain areas of the country, you can add hurricanes and tornadoes, and even floods. So I decided I needed offsite storage as well. I decided to use Carbonite. I've had it for more than a year now, and it has saved me a couple of times when I mistakenly deleted files. I bought the $99/year plan, which allows me to back up an external drive as well as the installed drives.

The only problem with Carbonite is that it takes a long time for the first backup. I probably had 6 terabytes of data, and it took about a month to get it all done. But now, updates are reasonably fast.

I suppose paying for space on DropBox or Box or any of the other cloud services would work as well, and possibly might be cheaper. But Carbonite works in the background, and I don't need to remember to back up. It just happens automatically.

My 2¢

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

I've heard that carbonite is horribly slow - - recovering a single file may be tolerable, perhaps even a full directory - - but I just have to wonder how long it would take to restore an entire 6TB.
The other thing is - - it may store the files, but it won't store the disk structure.
I have a separate system drive (2 x 512GB SSD in RAID 1) 100 GB SSD swap drive, and 4x3TB HDD in RAID-5 as a 9TB data drive.
Yes - - I did build my own.
I back up the system drive using Macrium Reflect (free for home use) to an external HDD
And the Data Drive back-up per my previous post.
But you're right - - if the house burns - - it likely all goes down the toilet. I would definitely make an attempt to save the computer and NAS.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Nice design. I'm a fan of SSDs. I currently have 7 Intels across several systems, and most have been online for almost 4 years without a failure yet (I know I'm tempting karma by mentioning this). Here in Raleigh, NC, Google is busy burying Gbit Fibre while AT&T is hanging it overhead from the poles, and Time Warner is running scared after monopolizing Internet access (cable) for many years. The point being that the time to "seed" the cloud or recover files is going to drop dramatically with Gbit access and change the off-site equation provided it's available in your area and you can afford the price. The word is the Gbit access will be ~$80/month when it's available later this year - we'll see how well competition works, but the paradigm is changing...

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

OUCH !! $80 per Month ??
I'll rent a safe deposit box and keep HDD copies off site.
OR - - get a freeware encryption program and leave an encrypted copy of my data drive with trusted neighbors

aellman Loc: Boston MA

Forensic labs have magical ways of recovering data, as long as there isn't physical damage to the disk. I urge you to look into this option. Your disaster is why I use automatic continuous cloud backup with Carbonite. Best $60 a year you can spend. As you found out, ANY hard drive can blow up at ANY time. I very much doubt that this problem is unique to Seagate, one of the largest drive manufacturers. Good luck! >Alan

aellman Loc: Boston MA

Just found this data recovery lab in Watchung, NJ. I'm sure there are many more:

http://datarecoverynj.com/

blackest Loc: Ireland

If the disk spins up and has read errors or says this disk is unreadable and needs to be formatted then you can make an image file and then repair the damage on the image and recover files from it. If the drive is stalled it may mean drastic measures. Of course file recovery is usually never 100% some files are usually lost but people are generally happy if you can recover some.

1)Hard drives can fail with corruption of the data and partition tables.
2)The most common is for the heads to be crashed on the platters and can't spin up
3)or finally the hard drive controller board is fried. With the third option it is possible to change the board if the tech has a copy of that drive model to hand.

As you can imagine with hard drives being replaced with new models all the time the last option may take time to find a donor drive. Some drives may have been standard on a particular set of models so not too rare. Techs tend to be packrats so you might be lucky.

The real answer is to be properly backed up but most people are not. I would generally only work on drives in the first category and the second only if they couldn't afford top tier data recovery. I don't have a clean room and its a gamble.
I've yet to find a drive with a shot controller that a) mattered and b) I had a replacement board for.