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Clicking Hard Drive is the most daring data loss issue

A good working hard drive does not make any excessive noise, and definitely never clicks. The clicking sound comes from the erratically moving heads, the most sophisticated mechanical device inside the drive that works like a rocker-arm with tiny reading-writing heads delicately attached to the arm. The arm is moving the heads over spinning disks and supposed to be positioned exactly at the addressed cylinder (the data-ring on each side of the data disk).

Before we dive into the technical reasons you should never run the clicking disks, let us take a second to explain the process of clicking phenomenon. When the heads are damaged, or the surface has a little scratch on the requested cylinder, the positioning software loses the control over situation and sends the heads back and forward in desperate attempts to catch the data stream from that cylinder. And when it fails to succeed, it sends a command to make an abrupt jerk.

This jerking behavior is intrinsic to the hard drive design and intended to shake off the little particles of dust from the head. Although the internal environment of hard drive is supposed to be clean air - yet, mishaps happen. Sudden touch of head with the disk, wear and tear as well as other factors may contribute to occasional striking out little pieces of magnetic disk’s layers. When amount of dust is not exceeding the permissible value, the dust residue can be successfully shacked of the heads and super-fine air-filtration system inside the drive is able to pull dust particulates out of HDD air.

Different HDD models behave differently in clicking mode. Some of them won't stop clicking till turn your files to dust by scratching the disks all over. Other will make few clicks in attempts to catch the data stream or shake off the dust of the head, and then stop the motor, giving the better chance for specialists to recover data.

The bottom line of our story about clicking drives: To prevent further degradation of data layer on the disks you should stop the drive, shut the power off the computer and remove the battery for laptops. Do not allow anyone except data recovery specialist access or test the clicking hard drive. In data recovery service form make a note that your drive is clicking and must go directly to clean room for internal inspection and repair.

Watch a live example of clicking Seagate hard drive. This drive was already successfully recovered, and we made this video before recycle the drive, with no harm to user data.

Clicking Seagate HDD


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Data R US provides the effective and reliable data recovery support for Hard Drives and all units with HDD, SSD, or RAID - such as computers, external drives, NAS.

Few Successful Recoveries in North America

Here, you can read some of the comments from Data-R-US customers: small, large business companies or people living near your home.

QuikPro Equipment Services, Edmonton, Alberta:

This hard drive was already in other data recovery company in Ottawa; they tried rewriting the modules, even using new controller hot-swap but were unsuccessful. Only one head was able to be activated. Thank you for another successfully recovered job. You guys ARE incredible!

Ferris TX USA

Drive DOESN'T SPIN
I received the spare drive with recovered data and randomly checked many files. So far no problems with recovered data were detected. Please keep in the lab my original drive in case I find some corrupt files for extra recovery attempts if needed. Best Regards to best recovery Team!

National Tropical Botanical Garden
Kalaheo, Hawaii United States:

Unable to access the drive. Drive was working fine until the USB cable was accidentally removed while it was writing data to the disk. When you plug the cable in now it powers up but does not appear to have a FAT on it anymore. It asked you to format the disk. The recovery attempts include: - Tried hooking it up via a different disk controller. - Tried mounting using a Linux Mount command. - Tried a raw disk dump using DD Thank you for the data recovery operation you performed on my external hard drive. Thank you for the prompt and excellent service.
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