Seagate is one of the most common disk manufacturers. It has been installed on more home computers and workstations in Scotland than just about every other manufacturer. Seagates are commonly used as desktop drives (Barracuda) and as portable devices carried in bags (Expansion & Backup Plus). Here is an honest picture from this bench of how they fail, by age, and what recovery looks like for each.
When you ask someone in this business about Seagate, one thing always comes up: the "busy" problem with the Barracuda 7200.11 generation, whose firmware could log itself into a stuck state so the drive would freeze at power-on, or report its capacity as zero. These were perfectly good platters and heads; just a disk that refused to answer. And they are still being pulled out of attics and old computer cases, usually carrying the family archives nobody moved.
Recovery is pure firmware surgery: terminal level access to the service area of the drive, offending log removed or module fixed, and image created when the drive wakes. One of the lasting lessons of this era (and all Seagates since) is: a drive that spins but won’t identify is often firmware, and firmware is fixable, by equipment only, never by software running on your computer.
The modern portables from Seagate and slim Barracudas have a lot of storage in extremely small packages (a few mm) and thus pay for it in fragility. The head assembly of these latest thin generation drives is much closer to the platter with a lot less mechanical room between them. A slight tap that an old model would be able to handle could now cause damage to the heads or position them improperly. The symptoms will all seem like mechanical issues: click when it comes on, a repeating beep as the motor strains, or the sweeping heads trying to find something but unable to locate anything.
These are mechanical recovery jobs. They require the use of matching donor parts, one very careful imaging process, and reading the weakest areas on the drive last. There is one requirement to keep the success rate high: do not power the drive once you hear it start making noise. Each time you give it another shot and try again, you risk having the heads touch what may be your only copy of your files.
More often than most users think, Seagate's externals fail due to the enclosure. The USB bridge board within an Expansion or Backup Plus goes dead silently (no clicks from the drive, lights out), yet the hard drive itself has never been healthier; in addition, some models of these enclosures also translate sectors or encrypt via that bridge. Therefore, it's not uncommon for those who decide to "shuck" the hard drive and test it by itself to get an unreadable hard drive with a worried user. Send the entire unit in as-is: if it was simply the bridge that went bad, then this is probably going to be one of the better diagnoses on the external bench.
The same applies for desktop Expansions and their mains power supplies. A faulty or incorrect supply will mimic a non-functional hard disk (i.e., appears as "dead") and is found frequently when running the free diagnostic.
In the Seagate product line the maths follows a consistent trend: firmware/bridge faults will normally recover nearly all of the data; mechanically failing disks caught at the first click will recover much of their data; disks which continue to run while producing symptoms will lose data relative to the level of optimism. Each job (Barracuda, IronWolf out of a NAS, Expansion from a storage bin, etc.) begins with the free diagnostic and a written, pre-agreed price of £300 + VAT within the one-drive category. The majority of jobs do not incur any fee unless your files are successfully recovered. Once you receive a quotation, the next step is either to drop off your device at Tay House or send by insured postal delivery from any part of the United Kingdom.
Samsung EVO SSDs and T-series portable devices can fail in very different ways compared to a spinning Seagate. Read about Samsung hard disk recovery →
Frozen at boot-up, clicking, beeping or simply being silent: each is a known Seagate symptom along with a known recovery path. As above, our service includes free diagnostics, a price fixed in writing at £300 + VAT, and either walk-in or insured post, once you have a quotation.