Replacing Hard Drive Heads at home

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ycp

Member
Jun 22, 2014
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I have a co worker who is adamant on Repairing hard drives in house. Meaning opening them and replacing the heads. He learned this from youtube videos.

Also he wants to partition out the bad sectors to separate partitions so those hard drives with bad sectors can be used again.

I have doubts how successful this can be especially because we don't have a clean room.

What are the chances on how successful this can be?

Anyone ever try replacing the heads of a disk?
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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Just so that I understand, he wants to open and repair damaged hard drives and reuse these known bad hard drives that he fixed watching YouTube videos in a production environment.

I apologize if I sound rude but I'm having one of the worst days of my life today and reading this made me grin. Thanks for that.
 
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ycp

Member
Jun 22, 2014
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18
No he hasn't actually fixed them yet but he thinks after watching videos on youtube that its easily doable at home. With a high success rate.
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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Just the time and effort to open the HDD is not worth the $35-$50 for a used HGST. nice experiment if he thinks he can do it. I just won't be buying and HDD from him.

Chris
 
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pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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Many moons ago, in desperation I opened up an old 20MB MFM drive, and ran it inside a poly bag for about 2-3 days to recover data from it. It suffered from a sticking head/ arm, had to nudge it every now and then to get it going again, even back then Seagate dogged my life :)

Repairing drives is not something that can be performed successfully without both the right equipment and skills, which means serious investment and infrastructure commitments plus you'll also need a very good communication channel to the manufacturers. If you have that at your disposal though, it's doable, but you'll only make money doing it on a massive scale.
 

Unfadingpyro

New Member
Sep 17, 2016
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Several years ago I attempted changing the circuit board on a hard drive to try and recover data. I can't remember if I was successful or not.. But I'm 90% sure I was not.

If he wants to try it just to say he can, go for it. But i wouldn't trust any of those hard drives afterwards. Especially not for production use.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk
 

amalurk

Active Member
Dec 16, 2016
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If you are just going to toss the drives (as opposed to needing the data and taking it to a recovery specialist) why not let him have some fun?
 

mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
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does he work for free? if he's actually drawing a paycheck this can't possibly be cheaper than getting another drive, even setting aside the fact that they will never, ever work reliably.
 

Jax_the_Gnome

Active Member
Aug 14, 2014
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Portland
This made me laugh. The idea that he would be able to do this successfully is insane. Hardware for this 20 years ago was many hundreds of thousands of dollars.