I've been coming to this site as a visitor for some time and want to get more into the action. Does anyone know where I can get large quantities of bad drives to help train myself in the art of HDD repair (essentially practice)?

Currently I am a Network Tech supporting 250 users, so I don't get too many bad drives to play with (or the time to play with them). I love diagnosing computers with their problems, but its starting to get less challenging, so I thought data recovery would be a nice challenge to go forward with while providing a valuable asset to my company.

I understand that this is a long shot with these kind of drives going out as donor drives, but I thought I would check just in case.

Thanks!

Ebay? I know there are regular sales of small to large lots of bad drives.

I would imagine that these would probably skew more toward the unrecoverable than a normal sample, but I could be wrong.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Just getting HDD to play with an test is not going to be enough on this one. You need tools also to do the job with this one. You can get drives from Ebay and stated by drc in this one but then after you have them how are you going to see the problem on them. Simple computer can not read the SA of the drives and help you determine these problems on them. You will need to invest in some tools to assist you on this one. Good luck

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

Thanks for the ebay tip, looks like a great place to start.

I understand that data recovery and hard drive repair require some specific tools, but after reading several cases here, a lot of the problems can be traced back to the PCB. Every little bit I can learn makes recovering data that much more likely.

Thanks for the info gentlemen!

Agree about ebay, I bought batches of hundreds of faulty hdd's to practice on years ago

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

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

how many drives ur looking for? capacity matters?
i have more quantities than you might imagine most of them are 2GB max. is 6GB
my old collection, i think some of them are still working btw
PM if you wanted and willing to pay for shipping
no joke, i have alot

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

That is really tempting and thank you for the offer, but I remember the last time I saw a drive of that capacity was on my Win95. I think for the sake of PCB components, I'd need to stick to a bit more current.

Actually you got it wrong.. For the sake of your future in DR... you need to start with the 20gb 40gb and smaller.
If you can take it apart- fix it enough to get some data of-- You can gain experience and pass to Level 2.

And you will be surprised how many companies still use 20gb hdds in arrays! I had a 40gb to recover recently.. they still out there.

But if you insist i have a few hard drives for repair here- 120Gb to 1 TB- You interested?

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
Picasaweb- Pictures and movies | Dropbox - Documents and other..

Oof... Shipping a hard drive through customs sounds like a giant pain in the add ass. Thanks again for the offer, but I think I'll be sticking with ebay.

No problems with customs- the chinese tought me well.. and not tax either. Just pretty expensive DHL/UPS cost for allot of KG's ; its not feasable.. look locally pal.

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
Picasaweb- Pictures and movies | Dropbox - Documents and other..