pcimage wrote:
Have you looked inside?
We a seen a few of these that have been “DIY’d to death” with platters you can see through!

I disagree !
I do have a PILE of those drives (exact same model) that i did buy from eBay as "broken" at a very cheap price to refurb.
From my experience those slime 500 GB HGST ARM drives to suffer from a patch of bad sectors that are consecutive or if not consecutive they are typical near the same LBA range.
In other words from more or less 100 drives of that type (slim 500 GB HGST ARM) 90 of them were refurbishable by adding defects to P-List and the ones that were not re-usable were because the amount of defects didn't fit the P-List ...
So in my experience those models don't fail often with heads problems and platter scratch that are un-recoverable.
I did have a huge amount of drives from media devices as well like HCC545050A7E380 - Also slim 500 GB HGST and i did manage to refurb the majority of those with defectoscope HRT test moving bad and slow sectors to P-List.
To note that on those models if you use FORMAT UNIT or SECURITY ERASE the sectors are written but when doing verify bad sectors will still apear.
Sollution is to use HRT defectoscope and move defects on "scan" test to P-List and then use format unit (or security erase) to create full access to sectors or to use victoria to scan the surface, jot down the LBAs that have problems, set Victoria to sect blocks of one sector only on the range of bad sectors, get the log, use SeDiv with HGST ARM tool to move to P-List defects on Victoria Log. Newer versions of SeDiv can import Victoria log direct to P-List.
HRT have the advantage to scan each sector when found defect instead of blocks like Victoria. So HRT is easy to use as Victoria + SeDiv do require to set Victoria to 1 sector as you do need for the log to have entries for all bad/slow sectors and not just the first sector on a block ...
But of course this doesn't apply to data recovery, just to refurb drives ....
At any rate i'm just writting to tell that on those models what i do see the most is patch of bad blocks sometimes even on the start of the drive - LBA 0 - but most times on the middle of the drive and NOT full damaged heads, pre-amp or full surface problem ...
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