Dropped a MyBook WD 8TB Helium Drive onto slate floor from 2M ... I attempted to plug the drive in to see if it worked .. all I heard was a high pitched sound then nothing. The drive still spins. I'm not sure if the platters are scratched or not - I think they may not be?

I took the drive to Ontrack which I believe is worldwide and they said there was mechanical failure (I knew that already!) and no one in Hong Kong has the equipment to open & repair. And they said that even if they could repair the hardware, the data is encrypted by WD, so the data would be unrecoverable - is this last part correct?

I'm thinking of getting an xray of the HE drive to see what position the arms are at and if they are mangled. I see somewhere on this forum that this sort of drive has been unscrewed/disassembled successfully ..

My next question is - if the arms just need placing back in the correct rest position, if the drive is opened in a vacuum environment, and then reassembled with no He inside, would the drive work enough to get back the data?

The other idea is to drop the disc from the same height the opposite end to see if this helps!

Any advice please ..

Right now this drive is unrecoverable, there is nobody who can work on this problem, I'm one of the few who even has at least some support for these drives (there are no commercial tools to work on these drives, I have my own) and I'm telling - I won't be able to recover this drive with this problem, at least not right now.
Maybe in the future somebody would have tools a desire to work on this model with such problem.

Opening or dropping this drive won't solve the problem, believe me, I'm in data recovery field for more than 20 years.

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Ok .. many thanks for that ... keep us posted on any new developments on He drive data recovery

Do you have a backup of your data?

Where would the "high pitched sound" be coming from if not a head crash? :-?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

That was the back up .... I have since been able to get most data back from scavenging through all my old HDD - I'm just losing Oct 2020 to present ..

I would imagine the high pitch sound came either from the motor under extreme strain trying to move the arms across the platters ... or is was the sound of the platters being scratched by the mangled arms trying to move across ...

I found a company in UK who has the correct equipment for helium filled discs recovery/repair ... no charge if no data recoverable.

Which one?

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

@OP
Careful, there are many marketing scammers claiming this and that.
Don't forget to post progress updates.

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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

Oh, dear...
I can smell bullshit from down here.

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Interesting - if true

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

out of context....I had a Seagate 12TB Helium case, device dropped, HSA clicking.... It was under warranty, sent it to Seagate labs, they recovered data.

How much they (Seagate) charged for Data ?

And did they tell what they did?

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

It was under warranty (I had to argue a long time as they were telling me it was not but the drive was from July 2020 and they give three years warranty), so it was free. I only had to pay for customs when they returned the drive with the data. Seagate doesn't offer DR for drive without warranty, their Lab in Netherlands is only to cover the "DR rescue 3 years program. When you sign the contract, you accept that if the DR is successful, they will keep and destroy the drive... so I couldn't get it back... If they fail, you can ask the get the drive back.

The drive was clicking, it was dropped from a table. They told me they recovered 99.5% of the data. They didn't provide file list and I couldn't check what they recovered before they sent the drive... it looks like they did a good job, they got 8TB of data. I told them to keep the drive until I confirm it was 100% ok.

When I shipped patient drive, they send me a new 12 TB to compensate (I had to pay customs 33 CHF) and they returned data on 10 TB HDD with bitlocker enabled and pw was sent by email.
So now I have 12 TB + 10 TB + DATA for 70 USD (customs) but I don't have patient drive to check what they did.

Yeah, I was just wondering if there was a remote chance they recovered the data without opening the drive.

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

Seagate's data return policy is interesting. Does anyone protect their users' data when sending it via mail?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Most likely the least GDPR compliance hassle.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Doomer Sir ,
Hello hope all is good ,i have had ZERO experience on these but i think because the seal gets broken and then helium comes out so even if mechanical way you correct drive you cannot seal it the way it was earlier and fill helium into it ,Heard they have a sensor for this also ,Might be sensor sends signal to PCB via HSA connector ,Might be that section can be hacked to fool the sensor

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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

I saw someone questioning if my post is "true" on https://groups.google.com/g/datarecover ... 9EdF6I0lIk. Yes, it's 100%. That was the Patient HDD... the only bad thing in my case is I can't get Patient drive back to see what they did.

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/ ... -recovery/