A film and television editor in Ealing keeps finished projects on 10TB archive drives, one per year. A trolley went over a threshold strip, the top drive slid off, and it hit the floor from about waist height. It still lights up. It makes a very small noise, once, at start-up. No machine sees it. He had read that helium-sealed drives cannot be opened, and rang to ask whether that was true before writing off a year of work.
| Media | A 10TB helium-sealed external archive drive that took an impact after falling from a trolley. Its indicator lights, it makes one faint noise on start-up and no computer detects it. |
| What was reported | 10TB external drive, helium sealed, took a physical impact, now makes a tiny noise at start-up, light comes on but the PC will not see it, a year of finished projects on it, recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Mechanical, from the impact. The head stack was knocked out of true and stalls immediately, which is the faint noise, and the drive never reaches the point of identifying itself. The helium seal is a manufacturing feature, not a barrier to recovery. |
| On the bench | Not run further, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply with the noise and the stall point recorded, opened in clean air under laminar flow with the sealed enclosure breached as routine, the head stack and all surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in one continuous pass, the volume parsed in R-Studio and project files validated by opening them. |
Helium sealing changes the manufacture, not the recovery. Filling a drive with helium lets a maker fit more platters closer together, because a lighter gas means less turbulence. It also means the case is welded rather than screwed. Opening one is routine bench work; what it costs is the drive's future as a working device, which was already gone.
A quiet drive is not a healthy drive. People expect a failed drive to be loud, and helium drives are quiet by design even when they are dying. One faint noise at start-up and then silence is a stack that has attempted a single move and stopped, which is exactly what a knocked head assembly does.
Waist height onto a hard floor is a serious impact at these tolerances. More platters, packed closer, on longer arms, is a design optimised for capacity rather than for surviving being dropped. High-capacity archive drives are not more fragile through poor manufacture; they simply have more of everything inside to be knocked out of line.
One drive per year is a filing system, not a backup. This was said gently and it needs saying: an archive that exists in a single copy is one trolley away from not existing. The recovery worked. The next one might not.
It was not run again. A single profiled start recorded the noise and located the stall, and the current signature matched a head stack that moves once and stops. The drive was then opened in clean air under laminar flow, the welded seal breached as a matter of routine.
Inside, the stack showed the deflection an impact produces. All surfaces were inspected under magnification and were unmarked. Matched donor heads were fitted and alignment set, and because an opened helium drive works in ordinary air rather than in its designed atmosphere, the imaging was done as one continuous pass on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA rather than in stages. R-Studio read the volume from the image and project files were opened to prove them.
The full year of finished projects came back and went home on two drives rather than one, at his request. He has changed how the archive is kept.
A single drive is £300 + VAT, capacity and gas notwithstanding. The drive had to be opened, which is mechanical work outside the guarantee, so 50% was payable before the seal was breached and the balance once the projects had been checked.
Do not keep starting it. A high-capacity archive drive that has been dropped makes a very quiet failure noise, and it is easy to convince yourself that nothing much has happened and try again, which is the most expensive form of optimism in this trade. Ignore anything you read about helium drives being unrecoverable: they are opened in clean air like any other drive, and the seal is a manufacturing choice rather than a lock. What is true is that an opened helium drive has to be imaged in one go, which makes the state of the surfaces more important than usual. That is decided by whether anybody kept running it after the fall.
These files are written up from genuine enquiries taken from households and businesses in Bracknell, across Berkshire and Surrey and into London, with names, firms and anything else identifying stripped out. Each one sets down how the fault was reasoned through, the method it actually needed and the equipment it was worked on. One of them is a job that was turned away, which belongs here as much as the rest of them.
A drive that announces itself to the port but never appears has a mechanism stuck short of ready
A fall damages heads mechanically whether the drive was running or not, and the clicking is the proof
Clicking gets worse with use, and the fortnight between the first noise and the last is spent, not free
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.