Off the desk in the middle of a backup, out of the bag at the bus stop, knee-height onto tile: drops are the most democratic form of a hard drive's demise. Everything depends on whether or not the drive was spinning when it hit the ground. The people at our bench see this type of thing every single day, and the free diagnostic tells you exactly what the drop damaged.
The two types of drops, then: powered up and spinning, which is the "bad" type. In this case, the heads are literally flying nanometres over the top of the platter surfaces, so an impact can slam them against the surface. In this instance, you have head damage at minimum, and surface damage at worst. Then there's the classic post-drop click. Or, you'll have powered down your drive before the drop. That makes things less damaging. Heads park themselves away from the platters during a shutdown. Your typical casualty in this type of failure is a spindle bearing: that means the drive won't turn, and may hum slightly. Sometimes you get no damage at all. In both cases, the basic truth is identical: a dropped drive gets one careful inspection; you don't spend a week trying to recover it again, because a mildly damaged head that would have been recovered with patience and care instead was blown apart by impatiently trying to recover the data for the ninth time.
Impact damage doesn't have to be vertical. Your laptop may close over an earbud when you drop it into a bag, or get sat on; the board may crack while your drive still functions. USB sticks can bend right where they plug in while the memory inside remains intact. MicroSD cards break but can still be read using a direct connection. External drives may even survive being dropped, but the USB port breaks. One thing is consistent in all of these examples: the storage media is much harder than the piping, and very often, recovery means repairing the piping just enough to image the data off the media. Whatever happened to your drive, before you send anything in, please contact us and we'll give you a quote, either via phone or with our online quote form. Once you receive your quote, simply ship the unit as-is, including any loose parts (for a laptop or PC, we don't want anything other than the drive). Then we'll do a free diagnostic that will tell you how likely it is to recover from whatever damaged your drive.
Back it up immediately. The post-drop drive you are using may have suffered marginal damage to the hardware, and its internal calibration is only good for as long as the drive will keep running. Make a copy of your irreplaceable items first, before backing up anything else. If the drive falters during the copy process, stop immediately. Get a quote either via phone or our online quote form. Bring it in to us; no appointment needed. We are open Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5:30pm. A partial backup and an image made carefully of your data is better than trying to finish out a dying drive.
Often, yes: parked heads will forgive a great deal. However, 'unplugged' falls could also cause damage to spindle bearings or break solder joints, so if it doesn’t spin, won’t mount, or sounds off, treat it as damaged. The free diagnostic has the power to settle whether it’s broken or not without having to make an educated gamble with your money.
It really does matter, and this is the rule that applies for all of them: immobilised (not moving) in some type of padding, snugly boxed and no rattling. A failed drive will survive a normal trip fine; however, what it can’t stand is being jostled around inside a big box. Two minutes of bubble wrap will protect every one of the elements that the success of the recovery depends on.