Hey, First post here.

So I recently had a HDD fail on me. It went from being recognized and showing folder structure but having all of its files inaccessible to being completed unrecognizable by windows. I tried the freeze trick, it didn't do anything. I tried opening the HDD without(stupid, I know) a clean-room to check for stuck head, debris to see if something broke, ect but nothing seemed out of order and I didn't touch anything. I tried a new external controller and that didn't work. I called a few places and got the consensus its probably not the PCB board.

Hopefully somebody can shed some light on what exactly is wrong with this HDD and if I can recover the data myself or need to send it to a recovery service, which is probably what I will have to do. If anyone knows whats up with the drive based on the symptoms described in video description and the way it runs then thanks a bunch, If I gain knowledge I will try the pass the knowledge along next time somebody has this same issue on this forum. If the case is I have to take it in for service I would love to hear some opinions on who provides the best file recovery services in the US, bang for buck, ect.

Thanks a bunch for anyone who read through this!

This is the video of how it runs and a description of what happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE8OV9zlpNA

Not a PCB issue for sure, so don't need to order any other PCB parts.
Definitely bad sectors, high chance of firmware problems, and some chances a head is bad.
Can you do it yourself? More than likely not. On your own, you could try getting a terminal output to get a better idea what the drive does.

Who to recommend? Since you opened the drive and seems to be a budget issue, not sure. It's like saying "my car has problems running smoothly, I sort of peeped around to see if I can fix it, but to fix it properly I want to take it to a mechanic who will give the most bang for the buck!" Well that guy is likely the mechanic from the corner who does side car repair jobs. Most people, who care about their car working properly and not spend even more money after what will likely be a screw up, would not take the car to him.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I see what your saying, so I called around to figure out the rates of different places are.

I got 600 or 1000, 350-1200, and 650(50 for analysis) flat from Seagate site (http://www.seagate.com/services-softwar ... -recovery/ , https://seagatewtb.secure.force.com/submit/), anyone have any experience with using the company that makes the drive, I read a few negative reviews on yelp, not sure though overall.
These are the places I called so far.

http://www.sertdatarecovery.com/
https://www.datanalyzers.com/new-york/b ... -recovery/
http://filesaversdatarecovery.com/locat ... lo-ny.html

And the last place I looked at was:
https://www.securedatarecovery.com/services

It seems like I am going to go with Seagate since they are the ones that make the drive and probably have a lot of them coming in. For $650 if they recover the data they also send back a 4 TB HDD with everything on it which is nice.

Anyone have any input? much appreciated!

Based on your link for Seagate in-lab recovery service, the recovered data will be loaded on their cloud. You will be downloading the files from there. So, not so sure about receiving a 4TB drive back. A 4TB Seagate is roughly $100-$120 in market value (for Seagate probably cheaper, but still), so if they were to charge a flat $650, then more than likely will not be happy about losing the expense of an additional drive. No business would be.

Overall, reviews are not that relevant. It is really about the damage on the drive and often the price. Customers in general are very emotional and look to be vengeful through reviews. Are some companies (talking about those that know what they are doing) better than other? Sure. But it is not so much about the data recovery itself (the what), but rather the overall service (the how - being friendly, explaining the process clearly, explaining pricing per damage sustained and so on, local company convenience, etc) - aka "the service experience".

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

@labtech, thanks for the reply. Yeah they are charging an extra $100 if you want your data returned on a 4 TB HDD instead of the cloud, so the total price goes from $550 -> $650. Probably going to Seagate when I'm feeling wealthy but for now data isn't urgent.