Is it possible to swap hard drive platters

Once the platter s have been moved to a donor chassis with a working motor, we can proceed to reassemble the drive. If everything was done correctly and the original heads were not damaged or a compatible donor HSA was installed then the process of recovering the data can proceed.

As you can see, there is a lot of work involved and this is why making hard drive recovery costs affordable can be challenging. Why do spindle motors seize? Some older drives actually have ball bearings which can fail over time due to problems caused by friction. Normally not, you have to use the same brand, model and firmware. And being a Toshiba you will have to also transplant the BIOS with the firmware, since it is unique for each drive.

When a hard drive fails not seen in Windows this can be because of many different reasons. So jumping into 'platter swaps' is definitely not the way to go.

Most physical failures are due to read-write head damage and these heads need to be changed in a cleanroom environment. Swapping platters is always a last resort and is normally only done if the motor has failed. If the drive has multiple platters, any misalignment between the platters can make the drive unrecoverable, so this type of work needs to be done by a professional, but as I say, this is only a last resort.

And by the way, swapping platters between different make is definitely not possible. How have you come to the conclusion that it needs a platter swap? Most Toshibas that i did get on the last weeks did suffer from fall G-Sense error rate is high and do have bad blocks that in turn causes damage to the G-List and makes LBAs not accessible at all.

Swaping platters in a do-it-yourself way on a case like this is just what you need to never see your data again even if later you decide to send the drive to a pro The acute technical risk is that multiple platters will become out of sync if even one of the platters rotates a fraction of one degree different makes have different tolerances.

But as long as the platters had clear space in a perfect circle all the way around, a cylindrical gripper could get you most of the way there. Today, as more and more data is densely squeezed into the platter surfaces and internal tolerances become ever finer, the gap around the edge has become very narrow. In addition, hard drive manufacturers have introduced acoustic bafflers — in the form of plastic spacers between each of the platters. These remove any possibility of the old-school cylindrical grippers working.

The current Holy Grail in the data recovery industry is a tool to enable Platter Swaps in a reliable and low-risk manner. There have been a few attempts over the last 18 months, but no commercial solution has yet proven its ability.

This is not an environment for the faint-hearted. As mentioned earlier, we have developed our own proprietary tools and methods. We do Platter Swaps. Every Day. Members Current visitors New profile posts Search profile posts. Log in Register. Search titles only. Search Advanced search…. New posts. Search forums. Log in. Install the app. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.

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