23rd May 2015, 8:41 AM
I took it he was just looking to find out if he could get the disc working again.
If data recovery is your thing, the cheapest solution would be to buy an identical make/model of that exact same hard drive and swap the controller boards. However, that assumes that the controller board is the only thing wrong. I can't promise that's the case, and also the act of switching those boards around is risky. Modern hard drives are calibrated to microscopic precision, and if it gets thrown off it'll never work right again. There's a possibility this already happened and the disc surface has been scratched.
Be aware of all of this before you go searching out any such recovery tools.
Ultimately, the safest solution is a RAID setup using a number of possible backup options (you lose storage space, but gain redundancy). Failing that, an external backup drive is always an option.
I'll be frank, I'm not taking my own advice here. Setting up such solutions costs money I'd rather be spending on something else. My solution has, instead, been to upgrade my hard drives every 3 years or so after researching what's the most reliable brand on the market. I almost got into some trouble after going a bit too long between upgrades, but I was able to get the drive started just long enough to transfer the partition to a new drive (and then extend said partition, as generally my new drives are also upgrades). Actually, these days magnetic hard drive density has slowed down quite a bit. This isn't too surprising. Magnetic storage was starting to reach theoretical limits, and 3 TB seems about as high as they're willing to go for individual drives. Further, flash memory has really taken off. That's been getting denser and denser at incredible rates, and in the next 5 years I expect it to overtake magnetic storage in both density and cost per gig. In other words, all the hard drive manufacturers are pooring all their research into flash now, not magnetic storage. The only annoying thing is that 3 TB drives aren't dropping in price as time goes on. It's a bit frustrating in that sense (though not nearly as frustrating as Microsoft selling a 500GB XBox 360 Hard Drive for $110).
If data recovery is your thing, the cheapest solution would be to buy an identical make/model of that exact same hard drive and swap the controller boards. However, that assumes that the controller board is the only thing wrong. I can't promise that's the case, and also the act of switching those boards around is risky. Modern hard drives are calibrated to microscopic precision, and if it gets thrown off it'll never work right again. There's a possibility this already happened and the disc surface has been scratched.
Be aware of all of this before you go searching out any such recovery tools.
Ultimately, the safest solution is a RAID setup using a number of possible backup options (you lose storage space, but gain redundancy). Failing that, an external backup drive is always an option.
I'll be frank, I'm not taking my own advice here. Setting up such solutions costs money I'd rather be spending on something else. My solution has, instead, been to upgrade my hard drives every 3 years or so after researching what's the most reliable brand on the market. I almost got into some trouble after going a bit too long between upgrades, but I was able to get the drive started just long enough to transfer the partition to a new drive (and then extend said partition, as generally my new drives are also upgrades). Actually, these days magnetic hard drive density has slowed down quite a bit. This isn't too surprising. Magnetic storage was starting to reach theoretical limits, and 3 TB seems about as high as they're willing to go for individual drives. Further, flash memory has really taken off. That's been getting denser and denser at incredible rates, and in the next 5 years I expect it to overtake magnetic storage in both density and cost per gig. In other words, all the hard drive manufacturers are pooring all their research into flash now, not magnetic storage. The only annoying thing is that 3 TB drives aren't dropping in price as time goes on. It's a bit frustrating in that sense (though not nearly as frustrating as Microsoft selling a 500GB XBox 360 Hard Drive for $110).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)