I would like to say hi to all hddguru members! You do a great job!

Last year I bought an External Seagate drive at 3TB for my data, everything was fine, drive was really good apart from sometimes when it would not respond (something like the drive was getting into some kind of sleep mode) and I had to unplug the power cord so as windows could recognise the drive again and show the folders.

Anyway, some days ago I accidentally drop the drive from a 0,5 m height while the drive was inside the enclosure and was not working at that time so the heads should be parked and not above the platters when it was dropped. I think this is a good thing.

Then, next day I tried to switch on the drive and starts normally, spins up, it does two sounds (I uploaded the sounds because I cannot explain them as they are not typical click sounds that I have heard in the past in another seagate external I used to own). After these two sounds, the drive spins down and does nothing (like it is not powered at all). I tried 3-4 times inside the enclosure, same thing.

Seagate Sounds



Next, I removed the drive from the enclosure to plug it directly to the motherboard SATA. The disk inside the enclosure is a Seagate Barracuda 3TB ST3000DM001.

Model of hard disk



Same thing while I plugged it this way, it is recognised by bios after waiting 1-2 mins and it is recognised by windows and installs the drivers (when I plugged it for the first time), it shows only in disk management (not in explorer) as unallocated and not initialised with a capacity of 128 GB. Strange thing is that the disk spins down at about 5-7 seconds after I switch on the pc so how could it be recognised by windows?

Anyway, I will have it send to a professional data recovery company, I just wanted to hear your thoughts about it as you are the gurus in such matters.

I have not powered the disk since then, so it was powered maximum 10 times after the drop. I am not doing anything to it as I would like to better chances to save my data.

Thank you for any comments on my problem,
Apostolis!!

I just watched this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql9TEGWHXWs

It is really fascinating to see how your hard drive looks inside

Good morning to everyone, any thoughts on my case?

Hello Apostolis,

Sounds that the drive has problem with heads.For sure its not DIY.

You should send it to a pro if you want your data.

Regards
Maestro

Yeah, tomorrow is going in for a diagnosis at a professional DR company, I have 2,5 TB of data in there, not all of them are of equal importance but I hope platters are ok so the whole disk can de saved. I never really realised how fragile hard disks are, I always treated them as a black box. I have encountered many drive failures before (1TB seagate, 500GB WD and 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD), only the SSD was RMAed from OCZ. I will let you know about the progress of the recovery process

RAID bay arrived yesterday so safety comes first from now on, I was thinking for four 4TB WD Red NAS before the drop so as to implement a RAID10 setup (or RAID5, I have not make up my mind yet as to which of these two is safer in case of a mechanical or logical failure), but now I have second thoughts, is it really a great idea to have so much data in one disk? Maybe I should buy four 2TB drives. I really do not know. The RAID is going to be on 24/7 and the pc never really shuts down

I will also take another external which will be connected to pc only once every day for a daily backup of crucial files only (just to be sure) in case RAID fails, I really does not trust anything mechanical right now