More Western Digital (WD) drives sit on Glasgow's desks than those from any other brand: My Passport and Elements external drives; My Book desktop drive; WD Blue internal drives that go into half the laptops in the city. Below are the actual faults each product line develops, common WD failure points/traps, and what real data recovery looks like.
WD's portable duo suffer as all portables do: they don't survive travel. Dropping the device while it is spinning causes heads to crash onto platters. The resulting noise of "click-click-click" will be familiar to most recovery engineers, or the drive will spin up but remain in silence. This is mechanical damage with mechanical repair solutions: fitting matched donor heads and gently performing a hardware level imaging procedure (lastly addressing weak areas).
WD-specific wrinkle: most modern WD My Passport drives have a soldered USB port directly attached to the drive's own printed circuit board (PCB) rather than an ordinary SATA connector hiding inside. This same PCB typically has hardware encryption whether or not you ever set up a password on it. There are two consequences of this. First, if your USB port breaks it will need to be repaired at the board level as opposed to being replaced with a new cable. Secondly, because the hardware is encrypted the data on the platters will still remain gibberish without that specific board and its secrets. Therefore the naive fix of "just swap out the PCB from another unit" will only produce perfectly readable nonsense. Send us the whole unit untouched. The original board, or its ROM contents moved to a donor, is the key to your data.
Routinely: in the read-once sense, for example, when a portable fails due to an electrical problem (dead bridge), we can swap the old with donor parts; when it has a mechanical problem (stuck head) then we can free it or replace it; likewise, when the problem lies within the software (firmware) we can rebuild the firmware, which enables us to image the entire hard drive. Repaired for continued use is a very different promise, one nobody honest makes about a failed portable; further explanation of this is found in our guide to repairing or recovering your hard drive. Don't attempt to open the case: all encryption resides there.
My Book models are generally mains powered but they add two additional paths to fail of their own. The small bridge circuitry that converts SATA to USB will die more often than the drive itself. This is a pretty positive result, because if we are able to successfully recover/extract images from past the bad bridge, then the drive will be good. Unfortunately, most of these models also have the bridge board contain the primary interface to the external world for the actual encryption, so if you remove the drive from a dead-looking My Book (i.e., "shucking") and discard the enclosure, you may also have discarded the means by which you can decrypt your data. The rule remains the same as the one used for portable drives: bring every piece of hardware that came in the box to the workbench together.
WD internal drives fail traditionally, as a function of time, temperature, and increasing numbers of failed sectors until the machine hangs at boot, and are recovered similarly: by imaging gently using hardware which does not retry a weak sector into oblivion, and rebuilding from the copy. The modern challenge for WD recovery is shingled recording (SMR), the method used in a large number of recent Blue and portable models, where data is written in an overlapping track structure. This makes recovering a damaged SMR model extremely difficult due to the very low rate at which these models can image compared to non-SMR based models, and also because these models are very unforgiving of consumer applications that hammer them with retries. A failing SMR model will have a limited number of "good" hours remaining. These should be spent on creating a correct image of the device rather than running scans.
Another modern trend: the "white-label" WD (drives removed from external enclosures or sold without branding) being installed inside network-attached storage (NAS) units and desktop computer systems across the city. White-label WD drives recover identically to those purchased with branding. However, their origin may imply a loss of warranty and, more importantly, no help from the enclosure they came out of. As such, attempt to keep the components in question together so our bench can determine how each component communicates.
If treated in time (i.e., powered down immediately after an error, click of death or the drive vanishing), WD recoveries are successful with the majority of failures including encrypted drives. The fixed £300 + VAT single-drive band will cover every failure above, from head-swaps to board-level repair to the patient imaging that SMR requires. It is rare for a WD job to fail due to the original failure; usually it is what happens next, i.e., swapping out the PCB based upon a suggestion made on a forum, discarding the case, letting a "free" recovery tool scan a failing disk overnight, etc. If you avoid these mistakes then the odds are yours.
A summary of the other half of the external hard drive market, and how their types of failures typically differ from WD's. See it →
Send everything untouched: unit, case, cabling. We provide a no charge diagnosis at our bench, and once diagnosed, give you a firm written quote from the relevant fixed bands. On standard jobs, you only pay if we can recover your data. WD data recovery in Glasgow, done as the hardware demands.