I am new to hard drives but will be comming into a large amount of seagate barracuda 160 GB SATA hard drives. The majority of these will have bad platters or bad heads. Does anyone know where I can purchase platters and heads for this drive, and the approximate price. Also, if the cost of the platters or heads is within tolerence, I was thinking of purchasing the Salvationdata HD HPE PRO for $350.00. As I said earlier, I won't be dealing with data recovery, just in repairing the drive. Any help and tips would be appreciated since I just started looking into this a couple of days ago to see if its feasable for my situation.

If you are new to hard drives, then please don't waste your time or money. It's not economically viable to repair these drives.

You cannot buy platters or heads on their own, so in order to repair a drive, you will need to buy a donor, which makes the whole thing a complete waste of time.

"As I said earlier, I won't be dealing with data recovery, just in repairing the drive" - It equates to the same thing really!

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Data Recovery Ireland

Thanks....I can buy all the ones I need (just bought 25 yesterday) for 40 bucks plus shipping. Just thought I'd try to save the business a little money, which is money in my pocket. Now, I will have 25 that dont work and I might still try to make 10 good ones out of them( every one that I don't have to buy increases my profit margin). The HD HPE PRO is only 350.00 and since I"m going to be seeing hundreds of these failed barracuda's in the future, fixing even a third of them will make my overall costs decrease. Is the HD HPE PRO a good repair station(so to speak) or is there a better one out there of equivalent price.

I do appreciate the info though, I have been searching all over the place (even calling seagate which was a waste of time) to find parts. OH...one other question....are the platters interchangable......say, the bottoms from 2 hd's to make one good set?

No offense intended, but you don't know enough about the challenges of hard drive repair to understand that what you are undertaking is NOT financially viable.

You'd be far better off to figure out which logic boards are good and sell them by themselves on eBay or whatever.

Besides, no one wants to buy a used hard drive with a broken seal.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

This project is gonna come back to bite you in the ass if you proceed with it. The chances of a) you repairing them successfully & b) the drives operating successfully for more than 5 minutes are slim at best.

Worst case scenario is that whoever you sell them to comes back and sues you if they lose data and find you sold them a defective product. You may end up with a lot of pissed off customers, which in the long run, will destroy your reputation and ruin your business, all for the sake of making a few bucks on a whim.

Don't be offended by my posts, but jono is right, you dont know enough about what can go wrong here. Remove the PCB's and sell them on ebay, it's the only way you can get out of this positively.

Why do you think somebody sold you 25 of them for $40??? It was a great way for them to get rid of a load of scrap!!

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Data Recovery Ireland

Hi,
If you throw enough time and money at the pile of drives you will get some of them working. The success rate is likely to be low.

Then if you really hate somebody you could sell them one of the drives. They will soon be back complaining the drive wasn' t working and they had lost their precious data.

And if you hate yourself you could use one of the drives for your own data. Only yourself would be to blame if it failed and you lost your precious data.

When people talk about repairing a drive in 90% to 99% of cases the repair is only to carry out a succesful recovery. After that the drive is just kept for spare parts if a similar case comes along.

I wonder how many people here in this forum would re-use a drive after a recovery.

Even if it were a 'simple' firmware repair I still would never use that drive again for storage.

I would never ever re-use a repaired drive for data storage.

Asking for trouble.

Forget this idea. Nikimi and MDT did

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

I have to strongly agree with Jon, CK, Dick, and Pcimage. Data Recovery is very technically challenging, and difficult to get into properly. In a way, repairing or refurbishing drives is more difficult. I only need to fix a drive so it works for the hour or so it takes to image it. Fixing a drive so it's actually usable for any length of time is well beyond my abilities, equipment, and interest. Also, opening the drive means removing the label, making it obvious to any technician that someone was messing around inside the drive. You COULD buy a bunch of working 160GB drives, use most of them figuring out how to transplant heads, and MAYBE if you're extremely lucky, wind up with 1 or 2 drives that might work long enough to sell. Taking 25 bad drives and 25 good drives to wind up with 1 or 2 unreliable drives (160GB no less) worth maybe $75 just makes absolutely no economic sense. That's why almost nobody does it. One could argue even the drive manufacturers themselves are not that good at repairing their OWN drives.

Sorry to drag this out even further but if you have 25 Drives and say you wave a magic wand over them and fix half of them, using the other half as parts, yielding a MAXIMUM possible value of 12 x $50 (maximum value of a drive like this), you would end up with $600 in your pocket for all this trouble? Again, IT DOES NOT MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE TO DO THIS! Forget it and move on..........you've probably lost $600 of other business you could be doing instead of thinking of this! Don't forget, they cost you $40, add shipping and packaging, testing, electricity, coffee, etc etc. You see where this is going.

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Data Recovery Ireland

made my day

Hi ,
Atleast Make a Clean Room Table and Then Try this the Success Rate Will Be Higher .....

PS :Salvation Has this Table Kinda thing

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

thanks for all the good info guys. I did take one apart this morning and decided that the time and effort to repair one of these is not worth it. Frankly, I dont have the time to do it and it certainly isn't cost effective to have my employees do it either. Just so you guys know, there would have been no pissed off customers since I had never intended on selling these drives. The only one that would have known that they failed was me. The only money I would have made from these is the amount that I would not have had to spend on buying working drives. But, I had the idea and had to persue the aspect of doing it, but now, on to other things. You guys are great, especially your openness and honesty.

My humble opinion :

1) I would buy ONLY factory refurbished drives , assuming refurbished to FACTORY SPECS. not done in a cantina. I have seen factory refurbished MAXTOR drives with a label clearly stating the status (refurbished), also I Know ExcelStore drives are refurbished too, and - last but not least, some models in Maxtor N40P are mass-refurbished drives.
2) I have successfully repaired and thoroughly tested (electrically and signal analysis after selfscan) hundreds of drives and also re-used again for my non-critical storage , or used them as spare part as the customer was CLEARLY ADVICED of the non-new drive, and with normal use they are still working after 2 or more years. Obviously NO opening of the HDA was involved in this repair procedure.
3) Doing mechanical work on HDA outside a class 100 or less clean room to repair drives for selling them, unless you are over the internet and not at reach of your angry customers - for me is suicide, not business.
4) Don't know where you are located, but here (southern Europe) the HDDs are so cheap that only mass refurbishing of FIRMWARE ONLY and subsequent selfscan, and ALWAYS IN HIGH QUANTITY is convenient.

In my business , my strength was and always will be my honesty : I'll give a refurbished (even if thoroughly tested) HDD only to a customer that really want it (can't afford a new one - don't want to buy a new one ANYWAY) and keeping me absolutely out of any claim of any nature regarding the drive : I'll give it to you AS IS, working but without guarantee (I'm not inside the drive).
You can use such refurbished drives maybe as intermediate carrier for DR assuming it may fail with no further warning anytime and having another copy at hand , only when the customer says "got the data safe and sound and your job is done" you can delete the 2nd copy.
I had no issues and no claims and no problems working as I explained. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll never get "that" rich, but I don't need no trouble.

Your opinion ?

Did u check the 25 drives u bought ? What were the problem , how u r sure that its head problem ?