There are many attractive external enclosures available; however, most contain “ordinary” internal hard disk drives, and an exterior protective rubber bumper which will do much less to protect the drive than its users assume when they carry it into a construction environment.
Surveyors, photographers, videographers and others who perform their jobs outside are all fans of the LaCie Rugged. It’s promoted as being extremely durable. It has some durability compared to an unboxed drive; it is not as durable as people perceive.
The bumper will spread the impact and protect the enclosure. However, there is no bumper (or any other device) that can prevent all movement of the head(s) relative to the platter as the entire unit comes to a complete stop in a millisecond.
If you drop your Rugged when it is switched off, most of the time it is fine, as the heads will still be on the edge of the disk in a parking ramp; if you drop your Rugged when it is on (spinning) this is called a “head crash,” which may cause damage to the heads, scratch the disk platters, and have debris circulating inside. This is just as likely to happen with any 2.5in device that was turned on when you dropped it.
There’s a nice box around it. Case file here.
It’s worth saying that clearly since video files are typically the most difficult file types to restore from a damaged file system. Photographs are generally very small, and they sit in an uninterrupted sequence of blocks, therefore photographs can easily be extracted directly from the raw data. On the other hand, a 40 minute 4K video file is massive, and virtually all the time, these files will be broken up into many fragments spread across the disk. The process of finding the beginning of the file is relatively easy, but determining how large each piece is, or even where the next piece is, is a much more complicated task.
We are able to restore it, but sometimes you will only get “most of it,” depending on how bad your drive has been hurt. Sooner rather than later would be the best time to know this.
All recovery work costs £300 plus VAT per unit. There is no charge for the diagnostic, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Get a quote from us, then drop off your drive at our Quayside reception or send it in and see if we have found anything (at no cost). The written quote will be based on the fixed bands before we start working.