What it is
Mechanical failure means a moving part has stopped doing its job. Most often it's the heads, the tiny arms that read and write the data. Sometimes it's the motor that spins the platters, or the platters themselves.
It only happens to hard drives, including the ones inside external cases and RAID arrays. SSDs, USB sticks and memory cards have no moving parts. When they're physically damaged, it's usually a broken connector or board, which is an electrical problem.
What you might notice
- Clicking or ticking: the heads are failing to read and keep resetting.
- Spins up, beeps, then stops: often heads stuck to the platters, or a seized motor.
- Grinding or scraping: something is touching a surface it shouldn't.
- Very slow, freezing reads: a weak head struggling with every pass.
Why every restart matters
A failing head doesn't just stop reading. As it struggles, it can touch the platter and scratch the surface the data lives on. Every power-on is another chance for that to happen, and badly scratched platters are one of the few real limits in this work.
That's why the advice is always the same: turn it off and leave it off. Don't freeze it, tap it or open it, and don't run recovery software on it, because software keeps the drive reading for hours.
What we do about it
First we confirm what has failed, without pushing the drive harder than it can take. If it needs opening, that happens only in our ISO 5 / Class 100 clean room, because dust on a platter does real damage.
Failed heads are replaced with a matched set from a donor drive. Matched means more than the same model number: firmware family, head count and manufacturing site all matter. With the drive working again, we image it once, weakest areas last, and rebuild your files from the copy.
What's possible, and what isn't
When a drive was switched off early, a mechanical failure is often recoverable. The repaired drive isn't meant for daily use again, which is why your files come back on separate storage.
When the platter surface is badly scored, the data in those areas is gone. We'll tell you if that's what we find, and if we can't recover your files, you pay nothing for the recovery.