Seagate have been manufacturing hard drives since 1978, have been the first to implement many hard drive technologies (15,000rpm, SSD/HDD hybrid) and are the largest hard drive manufacturer in the world. Seagate has recently (2011) acquired the hard disk division of Samsung and did the same with Maxtor in 2006.

Seagate manufacture a wide array of hard drive products such as desktop hard drives, laptop hard drives, server and NAS hard drives, and many more for different requirements. The typical range of Seagate hard drives that the public is exposed to are the desktop and laptop hard drives, namely the Barracuda and Momentus ranges. However, the range has now expanded and some new products have been introduced:

Barracuda: The longest running product in their lineup. Capacity of up to 10TB in a standard hard drive format with spinning disks. They are suited to basic desktops, laptops and external hard drives.

Firecuda: A combination of spinning disk hard drive and SSD, producing a hybrid drive. The most commonly stored data is cached on the SSD, giving fast access time. A good middle ground when an SSD it too expensive or doesn’t offer enough storage. Capacities up to 2TB

Ironwolf: Designed for NAS usage, so built for reliability and scalability with up to 10TB in capacity.

Skyhawk: A surveilance hard drive, similar to the WD Purple range. Available up to 10TB.

Seagate is well known for the notorious bug in their Barracuda 7200.11 drives, of which millions failed worldwide. Seagate hard drives are also prone to motor spindle failure when subjected to harsh physical force, more so than other brands of hard drive. This type of failure is one of the most demanding data recovery procedures, especially if the drive has more than one platter. Their Barracuda range with model numbers containing a DM are also prone to catastrophic failures, especially the earlier modes. If you’d like to see how we recover data from a dropped 4TB Seagate Barracuda you can have a look at one of our successful jobs as an example.

Hard drive data recovery relating to Seagate hard drives includes:

• Logical data recovery involving repair of the file system stored on the hard drive, damaged by virus attacks, user error or hardware failure.
• Electrical data recovery involving repair or replacement of the main electrical components (PCB), damaged by static, bad power or surges, or user damage.
• Physical data recovery involving repair or replacement of the mechanical components within the hard drive internals. This includes replacement of the head stack assembly (HSA), motor spindle, or any other parts requiring repair or replacement. Damage to these components is often by wear and tear, manufacturing defects or user damage such as a drop or fall.