I got up this morning to discover the 500GB HDD in my desktop machine no longer spins. No warning, no bad sectors, no SMART errors, yesterday it was working flawlessly and today it doesn't so much as click and the BIOS doesn't detect it anymore.

I haven't fully assessed the loss yet, but it was primarily a backup drive so I think most of the stuff on it is also stored elsewhere, hence it's unlikely to be worth sending it off to some data recovery company.

I am not sure, but I think the drive itself may still be under warranty, in which case it'll be going back to Seagate as soon as I've determined that I can't/don't need to get any data off it.

so a couple of questions:

anything I can try to get it spinning long enough to copy the data off?

If it turns out it's not under warranty after all, who's good for hard drives at the moment? I've always gone Seagate in the past because of their good noise and reliability, but is that still the best choice? I'm much more concerned with reliability than speed these days and this will be primarily a backup drive.



praise the lord I copied the JPGs of my honeymoon photos onto a USB stick for my wife yesterday, or I'd be frantically trying to undelete photos off camera cards at this point! Let this be a lesson to any who have not yet learned it the hard way: Backups are your friends.

If your bios isn't detecting anything then I expect it's the board not the drive itself, hence no clicking etc.

You can usually buy boards online, but make sure you get the exact same serial number board not just a board from the same drive.

I've done it a couple of times and has then worked fine for ages after.. worth a check of ask someone who is selling the same drive on eBay what the serial number is, some list the serial numbers in their ad, otherwise there are several sites that hoard the boards for this reason..

Depends on how much you value the contents obviously

2) Get a mirrored NAS box tbh.

Be aware that the majority use a Linux format, if the whole unit dies, you need to be able to recover EX3 or EX4, regardless of if the drivers were mirrored.  I've never treated RAID as a backup, just a form of redundancy.  I've always had a hard time getting people to understand the difference between the two concepts and why it's not a backup.

If your bios isn't detecting anything then I expect it's the board not the drive itself, hence no clicking etc.

You can usually buy boards online, but make sure you get the exact same serial number board not just a board from the same drive.

I've done it a couple of times and has then worked fine for ages after.. worth a check of ask someone who is selling the same drive on eBay what the serial number is, some list the serial numbers in their ad, otherwise there are several sites that hoard the boards for this reason..

Depends on how much you value the contents obviously

QFE

It's more than likely this or your motherboard sata controller has gone wonky.

If it's not being detected, that's not a failed platter issue, that's a I can't talk to the chips on the board issue.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk 2

If you are looking for a server with RAID have a look at the HP Microservers, with cashback they were about £130 with a 250GB HD...

You can then multi-purpose that beast then if you want to.. or just put Un-Raid on it and run as a dedicated NAS only

http://www.tekforums.net/guides-projects/hp-proliant-microserver-purchase-upgrade-setup-guide/

I wouldn't bother with one of the proprietary mirrored boxes, you pay over the odds for them and as pointed out it can be a real PITA getting the data restored, you're much better off having a dedicated system or setup your own internal RAID (and keep multiple redundant copies on top of either).

Some don't send the drives back for repair, their data is so sensitive they get destroyed instead. If it contains any sensitive data you might want to think of that.

Take the drive out of the case and listen to see if it spins up. The drive controller is the most likely culprit.