I have a HDD 4tb Toshiba drive I had in a Raid 1 NAS device (NSA320) that failed in the raid and I replaced it and rebuilt the raid and life was good.
I have finally moved to a better custom TrueNas scale setup with 2x 8tb HDD in a Raid 1 with weekly encrypted backups to online cloud. I have 2 4tb Toshiba HDDs that match closely with the dead hdd.
I want to try to recover data from it mainly because I want the experience… Let me explain. The drive clicks, yes you can hear the disks spin up to speed and then you hear clicking as it’s trying to read.
I want to know if I can start off trying to swap the circuit board to rule that out without much issue? I have true HEPA filter air purifiers and I can rotate and angle them to have a positive pure air pressure if I need to open it up and swap out the arms.
Is it worth trying? Anything I should know or think about in my decision to try this?
You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:
- Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
- Take it out.
- Boot it up.
- If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.
This only works for specific mechanical failures, and I’d say about 25% of the time. It works because metal shrinks when cold, and this can sort of let a drive limp along for a short period of time to get small amounts of data off.
Drive clicking is the drive arm malfunctioning, and I wouldn’t expect the freezer trick to do much if it’s a messed up actuator or something. You already know the drive is bad though, so why not.
I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.
It never worked.
Yeah… That probably because either the drive thought it was falling and triggered the HDD falling mechanism (often found on 2.5" hdd) which would move the arms off the disks to prevent them from hitting it and damaging the platters to unrecoverable states.
Or if done on 3.5" without this feature built into it, could just damage the platters.
Would probably be less risky to open it up and unstick the arms yourself.
Clicking drives can also sometimes be recovered wirh this method.
I think the clicking in that specific case comes from the fact that the drive sends the arm / heads to the parking position immediately when the rpm of the platter doesn’t match expectations, because rpm is critical for keeping the distance between head an platter.
Meaning the heads are ok, but clicking because a seized up bearing or motor doesn’t spin properly.
Be aware though, it is theoretically possible that ice crystals can form from air humidity condensating, which can cause the head to crash into the platter which makes the data definitely unrecoverable.
