Hey fellas,
Is it just me or does it seem like Hitachi drives are just tough? I have had a few this month that I didn't think would be recoverable but ended up being real troopers. I had one that had its top cases pressed against the spindle while it was on. The heads basically welded themselves to the platter and required a head replacement. Some other drives that end up like that just cannot be recovered even after a head exchange. But man, these Hitachi drives just... the just hang on like a MMA Grand Champ.

I have another that has platter damage on surface 1 (single platter). The bottom platter I have already imaged but the top one is a bit rough. After doing a second head exchange (head 1 died on the first donor) it is still imaging. Before I couldn't even get past about 1.5mil sectors. Now? It is nearly halfway done and moving slowly but steadily.

Do any of you seen the same thing? Have anyone of you seen drives that you think will just give up the ghost but just keep going like a trooper?

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Remember, take your time. Be persistent. If you have doubts stop. Check, then proceed again.

Yep, I've seen the same thing. I've had quite a few where there was one or more heads that's so weak it could barely read more than 100Kb/s. Expecting it do die, I'd leave it imaging for as long as it lasts and sometimes manage to get the whole drive imaged that way. I had one take a full month of imaging that way, but it was stable and eventually read 99.9% of all sectors w/o issue.

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Hard Drive & RAID Data Recovery Services
https://www.data-medics.com/raid-data-recovery/

Older desktop drives yes, they are pretty resilient. Had one a while ago with head "skid marks" over large areas of the platter, but with 3 head swaps got about 70% of the clients important files

Newer drives, especially nasty 7mm laptop drives, not so!

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PC Image Data Recovery
www.pcimage.co.uk

Sean ,
Whats your take on the Now Toshiba branded drives .I have seem PC3K adding a few into toshiba Techno utility ,Which means a totally new architecture unlike hitachi .Infact they added one more model in Version 6.2 .Also Most older toshibas that get detected in pc3k using DLE series hitachi

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon
CDRLabs Data Recovery - [ Chandigarh ,India ]
My Data Recovery Experiments - > https://www.facebook.com/chandigarhdatarecovery

Those ones I am think that they are still made by Hitachi but specially for Toshiba. As far as I can find, Toshiba does not have its own 3.5" drive fab.

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Remember, take your time. Be persistent. If you have doubts stop. Check, then proceed again.