Hi,
I also have one of these fail on me couple of days ago.
Always used to tell friends that if their drives still spin, I could get their data recovered for them.
How little did I know about it and the world of DR in general...

It is the first drive of mine that has failed in just over 20 years.
Still spins, but is not visible to any Windows system regardless if connected by SATA or by USB caddy/external enclosure.
I managed to get two-thirds of the data backed up before it failed but the transfer rate was increasingly slower as it went along.
Then it caused a couple of BSODs and then went to Silicon Heaven and became invisible (to OS).

Two questions:
1. Has anyone any idea what went wrong (and what are my chances of data recovery)?
2. Read somewhere that Seagate offered Free Data Recovery on these drives due to their high failure rates. Is this true and if so, how does one access this?
Drive is still under warranty till May and I am in Western Australia.
Cheers and thanks.

I had the same drive fail but it turned out to be PCB board issue and I managed to get the data back (relatively cheaply).

I am not expert but does the BIOS recognize the drive? If so you can go a little further with some linux based tools (like hdat2).

Based on my experience - my drive died after 3 months. While Seagate sent me a replacement drive under warranty - they did NOT offer free data-recovery. But given the failure rates on these - I think they should.

Interesting you say that, in the space of two year, I have had 3 seagate drives all from the same family fail. I wonder, is this a inherent problem with these family of drives, or is it just my pot luck?

Sensei_
There is some cloud company that publishes HDD reliability reports and our 3TB drives appear to be the worst drives in history with almost 15% failure rate.
2nd least reliable drive was WD 3TB unit with 4 or 5% failure rate. The average for other drives being below 1%.
They have over 35,000 hard drives in service and they continue to use these 3TB Seagates as they are significantly cheaper in US than other drives and it takes them only 15 minutes for them to change a drive in their redundant RAID array.
Or so some other people on the Internets say.
It is different for us though.

I have noticed that you are also in Perth and have sent you private message with my mobile number.
Perhaps we could meet and try to swap the PCBs to see if any of us can actually get some data back.
If I was the lucky guy, I would certainly pay you for your effort.

Hi,
Is the drive recognized in BIOS when connected in SATA ?
Is the drive recognized by the disk manager in Windows ?
If connecting the drive in USB, did you try with several wires and sockets (or tested you dock also with a working drive) ?
Have you the possibility to remove the torx screws of the PCB and look if some component is burnt ?

How I wish I found this forum earlier. My 3TB Seagate drive has also failed.
Its still under warranty having bought it from Harvey Normann. Should I return the drive for RMA, but how about my data? Will they recover it?

They won't recover the data under warranty, that's certain.

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This is quite interesting. Rockeater has the same model as mine (3TB Seagate HDD) and I am also in Western Australia. Could this be a bad batch of drives? I am gutted, 2 years of pictures and videos of my kids were in that drive.
Has anyone of you called Seagate for warranty?
If there was an issue with their drives, they should have recalled the product. Its an understatement to say that I am starting to be a Seagate hater.

These DM001 drives are all of very poor quality IMHO.

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

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

yes, they are definitely rubbish, just judging from their failure rates.