Hello,
Let me introduce myself. Brendan's my name, I live near Washington D.C. and work in software development for a huge 3-lettered computer company. But when it comes to hdd repair, I'm just a hobbyist who thinks he has more spare time than he really does.
I do find the internals of hard disks fascinating, and keep wondering things such as "was it really necessary to store firmware and bad-block maps on the disk platters, with no fallback to eeprom or multiple copies on other platters, making bad blocks in the system area nearly fatal? That just seems like asking for trouble"? But I suspect that's a cost issue, what with the prices of ATA drives so low. And I guess it keeps most of you in business!
I will probably have some questions in the future (having several boxes of dead drives, most of which don't have anything currently important on them). However, most of my business and important data is now RAID-ed *and* backed up, so none of the queries, knock on wood, should be too pressing.
I have lurked for quite a while. I'll try my best to be a patient learner, and perhaps a useful contributor over time. And...a big Thank You to the software developers and other technicians/artists who contribute here and elsewhere.
-brendan