New WD hard drive data recovery – January 2020

Another new year and another range of new hard drives based on new technologies. As you would have noticed, as times move forward, hard drives are able to store more data in a thinner and lighter device. Gone are the days when a 500GB external hard drive was the biggest you could find, in all its weighty and chunky glory. Walk into a shop now and you can buy 2.5″ hard drives all the way up to 5TB in capacity, with the smaller ones like 1TB and 2TB drives having only 1 or 2 platters, making them amazingly light and thin.

With all of this greatness comes complexity when it comes to recovering them. When Seagate brought out their new range (called Rosewood) it took the data recovery industry a while before we could reverse engineer these new drives so that we could come up with solutions on how to work with them. The firmware that makes them work was locked down by the manufacturer, but we found a way around this. Now WD has done the same thing. We do have ways around this though, and we always keep on top of technology here at Southbit in our Cape Town laboratory.

Below is a typical drive that you will see when you open up the plastic case of a WD 2TB Elements or Passport.

Probably not quite what you were expecting. Drives no longer have top covers that you can unscrew, the PCBs are tiny and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things are going on. In order to work with these new WD hard drives, we need SATA PCBs that are unlocked as any you can find will be locked down by the manufacturer. Pair this up with the latest updated version of our hardware and software recovery tools and we are able to work with these drives and recover the data. Below are examples of special, unlocked SATA PCBs that allow us to do what we do.

If you are in need of data recovery from any WD hard drive, new or old, pop in at our Cape Town lab and we’d be happy to help you out.