I've been getting a large number of external drives that have tipped over. I've had a terrible time recovering them, with a very low success rate. Today I have someone bring me an INTERNAL hard drive that had bad head plow. When I asked for the circumstances, they told me their entire computer had tipped over. Good grief!

I'd say my success rate for tipped drives is less than 1 in 10. Sometimes there are scratches that, once I have a new head stack in the drive, seem inconsequential (believe it or not). That is, the new heads skip right over the scratch. Most of the time, though, the media toasts the new stack.

What kind of success rates are you guys having with these tipped-over drives?

We usually have a 5 to 8 out of 10 rate. It really depends on the brand and degree of fall. Maybe we have been lucky?

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

It depends. Usually chances are lower, but depends on circumstances. Of course with scratched platters the entire recovery process is a pain in the ass and the result is uncertain until you get the data off the drive. Who knows ? I accept these cases with no implicit or explicit warranty (I cannot recover what's not physically on the drive anymore).

5 to 8 out of 10?? Perhaps if it's something as trivial as a seized spindle motor, but don't tell me you're recovering drives with platter damage to that extent. Simply not possible unless you've got one of those magic DR wands.

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Data Recovery Ireland

Its not a pipe dream...

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Normally the chances are very low especially when after dropped the customer turn the drive back on, this will create a scratch across the platters. But I have cases when customer did not turn it on when dropped, the data is fully recovered.

But 99% people will try to turn it on after dropped to see if it is still working.

My success rate for dropped drives 1 out of 10 due to platter damage.