A drive that has been in water is on a clock, and the clock runs fastest while it dries. Corrosion begins the moment air and the residue the water left meet the platters, and the two things people reach for first, a hairdryer and a bag of rice, both make the job harder.
Water damage is physical work: £300 + VAT for one drive, 50% taken up front. It sits outside no fix, no fee, because the platters have to be stripped and cleaned and donor parts are bought in. The diagnostic is still free.
What the water was matters as much as how much of it there was. Clean tap water, a river in flood and the salt off a coastal storm each leave a different problem on the same platters, and so does six months in a damp garage.
A glass of water across a desk goes straight through the vents in a plastic case and onto the board. Most of these arrive still wet and most of them recover, provided nobody powered one on to check. A shorted board is a separate and usually survivable fault; what matters is whether liquid reached the sealed chamber.
River and drain water carries silt, organic matter and whatever was on the floor, and it dries into a film that behaves like fine grinding paste. The Loddon and the Cut have both put water where it was not wanted in this part of Berkshire. Machines that stood in it need stripping, not drying.
Coastal storms, harbour work and the occasional holiday accident. Salt is the aggressive case: it attacks the head assembly and the exposed components on the board quickly, and it carries on working long after the drive looks dry. These are the jobs where posting it the same day genuinely changes the outcome.
Nothing was ever submerged. Condensation cycled through a cold metal box every night for a winter, and the drive comes down with a green bloom on the connector and bearings that have stiffened. Slow damage of this kind is often further advanced than a single soaking.
The fire was upstairs and the server cupboard took the water. Sprinkler water is dirty and it usually arrives with soot, which is abrasive in its own right. Racks and NAS boxes in that state are stripped disk by disk and the array is rebuilt from the images afterwards.
The worst version, and a common one. Somebody left it on a radiator or in a bowl of rice for two days and then plugged it in to see. Drying concentrates the minerals and residue rather than removing them, and powering up drags the heads through it. That is how a recoverable drive becomes a scrapped one.
The instruction sounds wrong and it is the right one. A drive that is wet is stable while it stays wet. As it dries, the water leaves behind everything it was carrying, and minerals, salts and silt settle onto surfaces machined to tolerances finer than a human hair. Heat from a hairdryer or a radiator speeds that up and bakes the residue in place. Rice achieves nothing useful whatsoever: it cannot draw moisture out of a sealed metal enclosure, and it adds starch dust to a machine that is already contaminated. Powering the drive is the single worst option available, because it spins platters coated in residue and flies the heads through it, turning a cleaning job into a scrapped disk.
Put the drive into a sealed plastic bag exactly as it is, wet if it is wet, and add a little of the water it came out of where the drive was submerged and has since half dried. Wrap the bag in something padded so nothing knocks against it, and get it into the post the same day if you possibly can. Write down what the water was, how long the drive was in it, and whether anybody has already tried to switch it on, because all three change what happens at the bench. Where the drive is inside a laptop, a NAS or a desktop, take it out and send the drive alone, and do not power the machine up to check that it still works.
With almost every other fault, a drive that is switched off is not getting any worse and there is time to think it over. Water is the exception. Corrosion advances hour by hour on the head assembly, on the connector pads and on the exposed parts of the board, and salt water advances faster still. A drive posted on the day it was flooded is usually a straightforward strip and clean. The same drive four weeks later can need the head stack replaced and the platters cleaned individually, and some areas may not read at all. Nothing else described on this site is as time-sensitive as this.
The drive is opened in filtered air and the state of the inside is recorded before anything else happens, because that is what decides the rest of the job. Water almost always reaches the sealed chamber through the breather filter, so the platters come out and are washed individually with laboratory solvents and deionised water, then dried in a way that leaves nothing behind on the surface. The head assembly is nearly always scrapped and replaced from a donor of the same model and firmware family, since heads that have been through water and dried are contaminated even when they look clean. The board is often replaced too, with the ROM moved across from the original, because the adaptive data held on it belongs to your drive and to no other. Then the platters go into a clean chassis and the disk is imaged.
Two things. The first is corrosion of the magnetic surface itself, which happens where water has sat against a platter for a long period and takes the data with it; those areas read as nothing, and no quantity of retries changes that. The second is whatever was attempted beforehand. Drives that were dried and run before arriving here often carry concentric scratches, and a scratch is permanent. This is why the same advice is repeated so often on this page. The difference between a same-day parcel and a fortnight of good intentions is frequently the difference between a full recovery and a partial one.
Flash storage has no moving parts and no fine mechanical clearances, so a USB stick or a memory card that has been through a washing machine often reads perfectly once it has been cleaned and dried properly on the bench. Where the controller itself has corroded, the memory chips are read directly and the data is reassembled from them. Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT. Phones and tablets are not something this lab takes in, whatever has happened to them.
Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, NVMe included, and arrays, NAS units and servers start at £500 + VAT, because every member disk is imaged in its own right before anything is reassembled. Water damage is mechanical work, which means 50% of the quoted figure is taken up front and the job falls outside the guarantee. The network wording does not vary: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Diagnosis is free whatever the water did, and it closes 2 working days after the drive arrives, never faster. Send it to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. From Bracknell that is about 40 minutes down the A322 and the A3 if you want to drive it in, and next working day by tracked post if you do not, with reception taking drop-offs in office hours. No part of this network collects from anywhere, and Bracknell has no counter of its own, so tracked post is how a wet drive normally travels. Ring 0800 689 0668 first if you are unsure how to pack it, or start with the free diagnostic.
Do not dry it and do not switch it on. Seal it, pack it so nothing moves, and let the free diagnostic say what is left.
Almost every drive on this bench arrived in a padded box. Tracked post is the gentlest way to move a disk that is already in trouble, and a parcel handed in around Bracknell is usually in Guildford the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
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The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.