Through HGST (a subsidiary) Hitachi put a huge number of disk drives into use: desktop Deskstars, laptop Travelstars, enterprise Ultrastars and numerous others as OEM components within another company’s hardware. Additionally Hitachi is one of the most unusual redemption stories in storage. When one of these drives fails, this is typically where the failure occurred and how to bring it back from the dead.
A Hitachi that spins but does not show up is usually due to some sort of firmware error, recoverable with the proper tools. A disk that clicks can’t be saved by downloading software; this would need to be done in a lab setting.
With HGST, Hitachi developed three primary families of products: Deskstar for desktop computers, Travelstar for laptops, and Ultrastar for servers and Network Attached Storage (NAS). In addition they are very popular among OEM customers so when your external or laptop hard drive does fail and wears a totally different label on the outside, there is a good chance that there will be a Hitachi mechanism inside. Regardless of the brand label, the function of recovering your data is identical, which means you have regular spinning-disk functions at play. The data loss typically falls under one of four categories: mechanical, electronic, firmware and logical. (HGST was acquired by Western Digital during the 2010s.)
If you were to take one “Hitachi-only” thing with you, it would be: many Hitachis (labelled dead) will get up and run after a firmware fix. This greatly increases your chances at recovering the information.
The history of Hitachi is worth an entire paragraph due in part to where their recent success has taken them. At the beginning of the 2000s, Hitachi acquired IBM’s disk division and therefore inherited the “Deskstar 75GXP”, which would go down as one of the most unreliable products ever created. Customers nicknamed it the “Deathstar” because it had such poor quality and reliability. From this point forward, however, the hard drives manufactured by Hitachi and HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) produced after this acquisition have gone on to be ranked first class in terms of reliability by independent tests, as some of the longest-lived disks the industry has measured. This represents a dramatic turn-around from when their previous models were failing left and right.
It doesn’t give complete immunity. It is possible for a hard drive to be the most reliable in its class and then just decide to fail. When that happens, we use the exact same procedures as for any other drive.
These four failure types represent the majority of what we are seeing. With a service-area or firmware fault, the drive spins, but your operating system can’t find it. There isn’t even physical damage to the drive, and it can typically be repaired using specialised repair equipment, not a screwdriver. Head failures, head crashes, seized spindles and spreading bad sectors are physical failures, the ones that click, buzz or crawl. All these can typically be fixed by replacing matching donor parts on the bench.
Travelstar laptop disks also have their share of drop damage. The rules that apply to every type of hard drive apply twice as much for Travelstars; if you hear a new or unusual noise coming from a Hitachi (it was quiet before), you need to turn it off immediately before the heads wander and scratch onto the surface of the disk.
The biggest problem with Hitachi recovery software is people search “Hitachi recovery software” or they get here because their Hitachi recovery isn’t working, whether from an external unit or just a bare disk in a USB dock, and it’s usually due to someone misunderstanding what this software does. This type of software solves problems with “logical” loss on a working drive (like deleting files or messing up the format or scrambling a partition). But it will do nothing about physical loss of a faulty Hitachi; if it spins up under a scan, it’s wasting time damaging something that didn’t have to be damaged.
The net result: if the recovery software cannot locate the Hitachi disk drive at all, this should not be viewed as a reason to use a different recovery application; it will show that there is some type of hardware failure with the disk drive and it needs to go on the bench. Not going further than that would likely be one of the best things you could do for the data.
We use the best tool available for each fault (repairing service areas to awaken drives that are non-detectable by computers, swapping out bad heads or motors on the bench for mechanical problems, rebuilding corrupted file systems) and we always image the drive before attempting to recover any data, so when we run the recovery against the image and not the failing source drive, we spin it up as little as necessary.
At that exact time (when you know the recovery software has failed to see the disk drive), Hitachi’s firmware issues will actually help you. A “non-functional” Hitachi disk drive is typically one of the more recoverable types of failures simply because the obstacle to recovery is usually a bad piece of code, not a mechanical part. The job of the diagnostic is to determine whether you are dealing with either of those conditions prior to making a commitment to working on the disk drive.
The most common Hitachi related questions we get asked.
Usually, yes. If a Hitachi starts spinning up, but will never show up to the computer, it is almost always its service area or firmware that is at issue; the mechanicals are good, but there is some sort of error in the internal programming of the drive that prevents it from telling the computer who it is. There are specialist tools that repair this coding without having to open the drive. And then you add in “clicking”, and now you’ve got to worry about the head(s), which can also be repaired on the bench. Regardless, the data is normally still safely located on the platter(s).
Because a program can only fix logical errors on a healthy hard drive; programs can’t fix bad hardware. Therefore, when a Hitachi starts making noise (and/or becomes silent), or does not show up as detected by the computer, it means the heads, firmware, or motor of the hard drive have suffered some kind of failure that cannot be reached through software; further, running software scans on a failing drive will only accelerate the failure of said drive. Therefore, when a drive fails physically, we use lab equipment to diagnose, repair and replace parts, not another download. If the software can’t see the drive, that’s your signal to stop.
Hitachi’s modern hard drives are as reliable as anything else in history, a far cry from the unreliable IBM Deskstars of yore. Still, reliability is no promise; when a Hitachi fails, it can be recovered using the usual methods: firmware repair to awaken a non-detected drive, parts replaced from a donor drive on the workbench (mechanical failures), and image recovery. Even if a Hitachi drive fails, there is usually a good chance that it will also be recoverable.
Firmware, heads or logical, and no, a download won’t fix a physical problem. Once you have a quote from us, send it in or bring it by our Newcastle location for a free diagnosis and we will provide you with an honest assessment of what you can recover from the disk drive.