This morning I power up my puter and hear the dreaded clang clang noise from the hard drives.
My ST31500341AS was failing. I| wonder if freezing it will work or sould I get another HD and swap the heads to recover my info. Is it possible to use voice coil from a similar HD and not exactly that model?

hi,
may be is better if you read the posts about DIY in this forum.

If the drive felt i don't think that freezing or cooking it will help anyhow, and about VCM Voice Coil Motor is not the read/write head... anyway in 7200.11 you need to match some features (model could be not enough), so may be if data is important is better to contact a pro; for Mexico you can contact beto from this forum ( http://www.itdataservices.net/)

Bye
Luca

_________________
Data Recovery pro in Italy
www.ultrarecovery.com

The drive havent suffered any physical damage, of that I am certain.
I did browsed the forums and I guess I did thought of it as something very simple, guess it is not.

In this same computer case I had another SATA drive fail, due to heat issues I suspect, since that fail I made some holes in the case for the intake of air of the fan that is blowing right on the hard drives. Some months later comes the fail of the Barracuda. Btw the specs are:
S/N 9VS33CKY
7200.11
P/N 9JU138-302
Firmware CC1H
Data Code 10216 Site code TK

Most of the data is downloaded, although there are some Solidworks models I have been working on that would be nice to rescue.
Is there anything I could try by myself without opening the drive perhaps?



Thanks.

P.S.
I guess I have learned my lesson now, it will be RAID 1 from now on for me for my data. I dont know what pair of HD to get though, I am more inclined for WD but I ask your advice.

P.S.2
Btw could you link to the DIY section, thanks again.

without the correct equipment and know-how the answer is no.

IMO no hard drive is clearly better than another -- just get the cheapest drives and KEEP THEM BACKED UP!

DIY/Beginners area is here: sticky-important-topics-beginners-please-look-here-first-f16.html

If you want a second opinion on the drive, you can send to me in LA. If I can recover the data, it's $300 -- if not, no charge and I can refer you to another company (but you're looking at ~$1245 probably). 300dollardatarecovery.com

BTW... Unless you know all the ins and out of RAID, instead I recommend just cloning or backing up your drive to a second drive. RAID is cool, until it goes down. Just cloning the drive to another drive is easier IMO.

-Brian

_________________
$300 Data Recovery - Los Angeles Data Recovery

Thanks Brian.
I do not know how RAID works and from a brief reading the wiki I think my choice would be RAID 1 with 2 identical drives, since I would like that the 'cloning' to be automatic as I am not trusty enough for any periodic task by myself.