A dead USB bridge sitting in front of a perfectly healthy disk is the cheap, common and happy version of this job. A dropped drive with its heads resting on the platters is not. From the outside the two are indistinguishable, which is why nothing gets quoted until somebody has taken the unit apart and worked out which one turned up.
£300 + VAT for any single external drive, portable or mains powered, WD, Seagate, Toshiba, LaCie or Samsung. The diagnostic that works out whether the bridge or the disk failed is free and closes 2 working days after arrival.
An external drive is two machines sharing a shell: a small USB bridge and an ordinary disk behind it. Which of the pair has failed decides the price, the method and the odds, and separating them is the first job on the bench.
The cheapest and by far the most common of these. The light comes on, the drive spins, and no letter ever appears. Nothing is wrong with the platters, only with the small board translating USB into something the disk understands. On older designs the disk is simply read directly instead.
A leg caught in the cable, a laptop bag dropped on a connected drive, and the socket tears its pads off the board. This is soldering and track repair, and it is the moment a caddy swap stops being an option. Board level work, so 50% upfront and outside no fix, no fee.
Portable drives get used on trains, kitchen worktops and passenger seats, which is where they fall from. A drop while the platters are spinning puts the heads onto the surface. It clicks or beeps afterwards, and it needs the clean bench rather than a different cable.
Desk-sized units run on 12V and portable ones on 5V, and the barrel plugs are cheerfully interchangeable. Twelve volts into a five volt unit takes out the protection parts, sometimes on both the bridge and the drive board. It is repairable and it is chip level work.
Windows sees a disk of the right size and offers to format it. That is a damaged file table, not a damaged disk, and it is nearly always the result of an unplug during a write or a drive dropping the link mid-copy. Decline the format. It is logical work under no fix, no fee.
The clicking cousin of a power problem: an under-fed USB port, a failing motor, or a bridge losing the link and resetting. Every cycle is another start-stop on a drive that may already be marginal, which is why the useful thing to do is unplug it rather than try one more port.
For years the standard advice was fair enough: an external drive is a normal disk plus a bridge board, so take the disk out, drop it into a dock, and read it directly. Two developments in the last several years have made that advice wrong often enough to be dangerous.
The first is that the bridge stopped being a separate board. On most current WD My Passport units, and on a good number of Elements drives, the USB connector is soldered onto the disk controller board itself. There is no SATA connector anywhere on the drive, so there is nothing to plug a dock into. When that board dies, the fix is a compatible donor board with the original calibration chip transferred across, which is bench work with a soldering iron rather than a five minute swap.
The second is encryption you never asked for. WD bridges encrypt in hardware by default, whether or not anybody ever set a password, and the key material is bound to the bridge itself. Pull the disk out, connect it directly, and you get a volume of noise. Nothing has been damaged; the disk is simply being read without the component that scrambles and unscrambles it. Samsung portable SSDs behave the same way. It is also why buying an identical empty enclosure and swapping the disk in usually fails, since the replacement carries different key material.
The brand on the front is the least useful thing printed on the unit. The model and serial on the underside tell the bench what it is dealing with, whether the bridge is separate or integrated, and whether encryption is in play. WD Elements, My Passport and My Book, Seagate Expansion, Backup Plus and One Touch, Toshiba Canvio, LaCie Rugged and the Samsung T-series all turn up here every week, and they all behave differently once opened. A photograph of the label is worth more than a paragraph of description over the phone.
Desk-sized units are worth five minutes of checking before anybody assumes the worst. A 3.5 inch drive in a mains powered case depends entirely on its adapter, and those adapters fail far more often than the drives they feed. The symptoms are a perfect impression of a dead drive: no light, no spin, no letter, nothing. Borrow or buy the correct adapter for that exact model, matching both the voltage and the polarity marked on the case, and a fair number of these come straight back to life. Guessing at a supply from the drawer is how the wrong voltage gets applied, which turns a five minute test into a chip level repair.
Portable drives have their own version of the same problem. They draw everything they need from the USB port, and a port that is busy, a long thin cable or an unpowered hub can leave a drive with just enough power to start and not enough to keep going. That produces the spin up, stall, spin up again pattern people describe on the phone. Use the cable that came with it, go straight into a socket on the back of a desktop or directly into a laptop, and take the hub out of the picture entirely. If it behaves the same way on a second machine with a known good cable, the problem is inside the case.
The replug loop is the big one. Trying a fourth port, then the other laptop, then a friend hub, feels like diagnosis and is really just repeated stress on a drive that has already told you it is unwell. Tapping it, shaking it and the freezer trick belong to the same family. So does clicking yes when Windows offers to format, and pointing repair software at a unit that is failing to enumerate. If the drive is not appearing reliably, unplug it and leave it unplugged.
The bench establishes which half has failed before anything invasive happens. Where the bridge is a separate board and the disk is sound, the disk is read directly and the job is often over quickly. Where the bridge is integrated, or where hardware encryption means the bridge is the only thing that can make sense of the data, the electronics are repaired or a donor is prepared so that the original key material survives. Where the mechanism itself has gone, the unit goes to the clean bench and is treated like any other head or motor fault.
Whichever route it takes, the imaging comes first and the file system work happens on the copy. Nothing is written to your drive at any point, which is why a job that partly succeeds can be picked up again later rather than being a one-shot gamble.
Any single external drive is £300 + VAT, portable or mains powered, since the price follows the number of drives rather than the badge on the case. USB pen drives and memory cards are £250 + VAT. Multi-disk enclosures and NAS boxes start at £500 + VAT because each disk earns its own image. The diagnostic that tells you which half of the unit failed is free and closes two working days after arrival, and the written figure follows it.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. A dead bridge with a healthy disk behind it is electronics, so it carries the 50% upfront term, as does a snapped-off USB socket or a drop. A RAW volume or a damaged file table on a working unit is logical and carries the guarantee. You are told which of those you have before you commit to anything.
Post the unit whole and sealed, exactly as it is. Do not open it, do not shuck it, and do not send the mains adapter or the USB lead, because the bridge inside may be the only thing on earth that can decrypt what is on the platters. If it is a portable drive, a padded envelope with the drive wrapped so it cannot move is enough. If it is a desk unit, use a box with room for padding on every side.
The bench is at Guildford Business Park, about 40 minutes from Bracknell on the A322 and the A3, and reception takes drop-offs during office hours if you would rather hand it over. Tracked post gets it there next working day from anywhere in Berkshire, Surrey or London, which covers most of the drives that arrive here: from the industrial units and offices along the A329M, from Wokingham, Crowthorne and Reading, from Windsor and Ascot, and from people who work in town and only unpack the problem on a Saturday morning.
Stop replugging it, leave the enclosure sealed, and send it whole. Which half broke is the first thing we tell you.
Post is how almost every job here starts. A tracked, insured parcel is far gentler on a struggling drive than a car boot and a day of errands, and something handed to Royal Mail in Bracknell today is normally booked in at the Guildford bench tomorrow.
If the storage is still bolted into a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a server or a CCTV box, unbolt it. The bare drive is what the bench needs, and no machines are dismantled at this end. Any repair shop will pull one out in a few minutes if you would rather not. The exception, and it is a hard one, is storage soldered directly to the logic board — Apple Silicon Macs, a few very thin Windows laptops, most tablets. If it does not come out, there is nothing that can be posted.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Write Guildford Data Recovery on the label. Driving it down from Bracknell is roughly 40 minutes on the A322 and the A3; posting it costs you an envelope and a day. Either way you get a call once it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days later.
Not sure what should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it ask the questions.