Hard drives made by Hitachi and HGST have earned a reputation for being reliable, but like everything else that uses moving parts they will wear out, and over time a few common ways that problems show up on the bench are identifiable: a clicking noise from a failing head, a slow and gradual stalling of age-related bad sectors, and occasionally some type of firmware error that conceals an otherwise healthy hard drive. Identifying whether it's one of these or something different, and knowing what not to do next, is often the difference between recovering a hard drive with minimal difficulty and recovering it with significant difficulty.
Whatever the problem with the unit, each time you turn a failing Hitachi back on, you risk an easy recovery becoming very difficult.
Some of the toughest drives that were ever made came out of Hitachi (later known as HGST, after being purchased by Western Digital), which produced many of the top-of-the-line drives available; these include the 3.5″ Deskstar for desktop machines, the 2.5″ Travelstar for laptops, and the enterprise-level Ultrastar series. We see Hitachi drives from across Edinburgh and Scotland inside plenty of external enclosures and older Macs and PCs. The recovery process works the same way no matter what the original name or logo was: identify the fault, image the drive, then rebuild your files from the copy.
Older people who worked with computers at the beginning of this century remember the early-2000s Deskstar 75GXP (nicknamed the ‘Deathstar’) because it was known for being unreliable due to an unfortunate number of failures. However, Hitachi moved past those problems. The company built some of the most reliable hard drives available after that time. Every mechanical hard drive has a limited lifespan, and a Hitachi that has been used by a computer system for ten years will eventually display signs of ageing as bearings, heads and sectors wear down. Age-related failure is the most common reason a Hitachi lands on our bench.
Three problems show up most often. Mechanical failure: a clicking or beeping hard drive where the read/write head has worn down or the drive's motor is failing; this type of problem occurs mainly in older Travelstar and Deskstar drives. The second is bad sectors: a slower-than-usual, stalling hard drive because it’s getting old and its surfaces are deteriorating. Finally, there are the occasional firmware or translator faults: in some cases, these faults will cause an otherwise healthy hard drive to fail to be detected properly, or to report an incorrect capacity. Each issue needs to be addressed in a unique way, but if you hear your drive clicking, power it off now.
People often search for "Hitachi recovery software," or find that their Hitachi hard drive recovery is not working when their Hitachi drive will no longer respond, whether that's an external Hitachi or even just a bare drive in a USB caddy. The honest truth here is that recovery software only works on a drive that is logically healthy. That said, it may be able to undelete or rebuild a corrupted file system. However, there is nothing you can do with recovery software to fix issues such as worn-out heads, a seized motor or faulty firmware. Using recovery software on a failing drive merely keeps the power flowing to the failed components of the disk, causing further damage. Therefore, if your drive is making a clicking noise and/or cannot be detected by your computer, then this problem is one of hardware, not software.
On our bench at the lab, Hitachi recovery is done in exactly the same way every time: first, we identify exactly what's wrong with the disk, and then (if it has good enough mechanicals to allow for an image of each sector) we take a sector-by-sector image of the disk prior to accessing your data. If heads are bad, we do a head swap with matching donor heads first. Files are then rebuilt from the images rather than from the failing drive. This is why most clicking Hitachis that get shut down quickly can be done as routine jobs.
Hitachi clicking, undetected, or slowing to a crawl? Shut it off and walk away: the diagnostics are free, the quote is fixed and in writing, and honest advice on 0131 202 0491 won't cost you anything either.