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PDR / The jobs we take in / Hitachi data recovery

Specialist · Hitachi and HGST mechanisms

Hitachi recovery in Plymouth. A lineage, not one drive; the label's model code says what is on the bench.

Hitachi disks arrive from across Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall, and they are older than most of what reaches us. Travelstars lifted out of laptops, Deskstars from desktops and from inside external cases, Ultrastars taken out of servers and NAS boxes, and the occasional CinemaStar from a recorder. The badge has changed hands twice — IBM's disk business went to Hitachi, and Hitachi's went to Western Digital — so the label may read Hitachi, HGST or neither. Read us the model number and the MLC code beside it.

Nothing readable? Most jobs carry no bill Free diagnosis, then one written price Boxes come to the lab from Truro, Newquay and Tavistock

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Hitachi symptoms, and what each points to.

Yours not here? Start at the triage →
What shows upWhat that points toWhat to do
A Travelstar ticking in a laptopHeads on their way out. The recording underneath them is intactPower it down and leave it
Listed by the BIOS, size 0GBA broken service area. The recording surfaces are unharmedBench work through a serial link
An Ultrastar a PC will not listEnterprise sectors are not 512 bytes, so a desktop refuses themUsually recoverable
A Deskstar slowing month by monthSectors retried again and again as the heads lose strengthTake a copy off it now
An Ultrastar has dropped out of an arrayA member is offline. Rebuilding onto a weak disk deepens the damageHalt the rebuild and ring
A Touro external has gone quietTouro cases hold a Travelstar or a Deskstar insideTell us which case it is
Getting it to us: wrap it so nothing can shift, cover it for what it is worth, and post it tracked to the intake lab in Bristol. We cover the postage back. If you want an engineer to check the packing before the box is taped, ring first. It is spelled out on the contact page.

What sits under the badge, and how each gives out.

Travelstar, in laptops and casesThe 2.5in mechanism, and the bulk of what arrives here. It sat in laptops for years and afterwards in external cases, sometimes with a USB board soldered straight onto it. A tick from one of these means the heads have gone, and what follows is matched donor parts and a slow, patient copy.
Deskstar, and the IBM lineThe 3.5in desktop drive, and the part of the range with the longest history behind it: IBM built the first hard disk, sold the business to Hitachi, and Hitachi sold it on to Western Digital. Labels from all three eras turn up on the bench. A Deskstar slowing month by month is losing head strength, and the reads grow longer as it goes.
Ultrastar, and CinemaStarThe drives built for one setting. Ultrastar goes into servers, arrays and NAS boxes; CinemaStar was made for recorders. When one of these fails you are generally looking at an array rather than a single disk.
The service areaEvery one of these disks keeps its own working data on the platters, and among it the translation from a block number to a physical spot. Damage that and a mechanically sound drive reports 0GB, or announces a capacity that is not its own, or spins and says nothing. Nothing you can run on the PC will reach it, because the drive never finishes starting up. The repair is made over serial at the bench.

What happens to a drive while it is here.

Cases in the log →
01

A number on arrival, then the free diagnosis Free

Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.

Diagnosis at no chargeA single written figureYou owe nothing yet
02

Listened to before it is opened

No computer is involved yet. The disk is photographed, the model and MLC codes copied from its label, and then given a few seconds on a bench supply so an engineer can hear it. A tick, a beep and silence each mean something different. A ticker goes straight off again.

Photographed as it landsWhich part has failed
03

Imaged before it is opened

The full surface is copied first, and everything afterwards happens on that image. Weak zones are taken in short passes with the worst areas held back to the end, which on a tired Travelstar can run to days. Your own disk is never written to; the wear is spent on images.

Copied before any repairYour disk stays untouched
04

Heads, or the service area

Which of the two decides the work. Where the heads have gone, a matched stack goes in under filtered air — model, firmware revision and build code all matching. The read that follows is slow. A damaged service area is another job: mended module by module across a serial link, lid never lifted.

Donor heads under clean airService area over serial
05

You give the word, and it ships back

Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.

You see the list and decideWritten to fresh mediaWe pay the postage home

The faults we see most

  • Travelstars are what get posted in — 2.5in Hitachi mechanisms out of laptops, and out of external cases where a USB board was soldered straight onto them. They tick because the heads have worn out. No software alters that, and every fresh attempt at powering one up costs a little more of the surface.
  • A disk showing 0GB has not been wiped — what it has lost is the directory to its own contents, and the platters carry everything they carried yesterday. A PC cannot reach a mechanism that never manages to introduce itself, so the job runs across a serial link instead. It is among the steadier work we take on.
  • Sealed helium drives get one opening — the larger Ultrastars are filled with helium and welded shut, and that seal cannot be put back afterwards. So the whole read is planned before the lid comes off, and the mechanism is treated as having a single working life left in it.
  • Photograph the label — a Hitachi or HGST label carries the model number, a part number and an MLC build code, and on a head job all three matter, because a donor must match the build as well as the model. Inside an external case the label is hidden, so read out what is printed on the shell and leave the rest to us.

What comes back, and what will not: most Hitachi faults are unremarkable. Heads wear out and are replaced. A service area breaks and is mended across a serial link. A tired mechanism reads slowly and, given the time, reads. The surface is the part we have to be blunt about. Heads that have already been dragged over the platters leave scoring, and a scored track holds nothing — no laboratory retrieves what is no longer on the disk, whatever it charges to try. Overwriting is the same story: a format followed by a month of ordinary use takes part of it away permanently. Where a drive sits behind hardware encryption we need the password, because the encryption is doing precisely what it was sold to do. Phones and tablets fall outside what the lab handles. When the answer is no, it reaches you by telephone and costs nothing.

A job out of the casebook.

PL · PLY-2026-0841LOGGED ✓

A Deskstar that reported the wrong size

It came from a surveying practice in Truro: a 1TB Deskstar out of a desktop, fine on the Friday and reporting 0GB by the Tuesday. It spun, it sounded right, and no machine would give its capacity. The fault lay in the service area rather than the mechanism — the drive was hanging before it finished announcing itself. The lid stayed on. Wired straight to the bench, its modules were read and put right one at a time until it declared its own size again. The first pass copied every sector. Three days from parcel to return.

100% imaged3 days start to finish

Before you seal the box.

Get these done

  • Send the drive with its case, lead and power supply
  • Read out the model number and MLC code from the label
  • Say what you heard: a tick, a beep, or silence
  • Tell us if the lid has already been off

What to avoid

  • Powering a ticking drive up to check again
  • Turning a surface scan loose on a weak disk
  • Flashing new firmware in the hope it helps
  • Fitting the board onto a different mechanism

Questions that come up most weeks.

My Hitachi drive is ticking. Is anything left on it?

Yes, nearly always. A tick is the heads failing to settle where they should — the arm parks, tries again, and parks again. The noise belongs to the mechanism and not to your files. What was recorded on the platters is recorded there still. The catch is that no reader gets at it while those heads are in place, and every extra spin-up sweeps the worn ones back across the coating. Turn it off, leave it off, and let the bench take the image.

Do the codes printed on the label actually matter?

A great deal. The model number fixes the family, the capacity, the form factor and the number of platters inside, which between them decide how long a copy will run. On a head job the MLC build code narrows the search for donor parts, because a stack has to come from the same model and a close production batch. Inside an external case the label is out of sight, so read us whatever the shell has printed on it; the rest can wait until the parcel lands.

Can you read an Ultrastar taken out of a server or array?

Usually, yes. An Ultrastar is a hard disk like any other, and a failed one gets repaired and copied in the ordinary way. What differs is the format. Enterprise drives are often laid down with sectors that are not 512 bytes — 4K native, or extra bytes per sector for the controller's own checks — and a desktop machine simply refuses them. We read them on their own terms and work from the image afterwards. If the disk was a member of an array, number the drives by bay before they travel.

What should I send, and where does it need to go?

Send the disk. An external can travel complete — shell, cable and any mains adapter with it. A drive taken from a desktop, a server or a NAS goes bare: antistatic bag first, padded box second, nothing resting against the board. Never send a NAS whole; pull the disks and number each one by its bay as it comes out. We take neither phones nor tablets. There is no collection, so send it fully insured and tracked to the Bristol intake lab, or drop it in.

Pages people open after this.

Disks inside a PC → What the noise means → The PC cannot see it → All the media we take →

A drive that stays switched off gets no worse.

The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.

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