Hitachi Hard Drives

Hitachi and IBM DeskStar hard disks have an alarming reputation for serious mechanical failure – the most notorious is known as the “DeskStar Click of Death”.

The Click-of-Death is characterized by a regular scratching noise punctuated by a click sound from the drive. Click of Death problems are among the most onerous to recover data from and we strongly recommend that you speak to one of our recovery specialists as soon as you suspect that your drive may be about to fail.

The most common cause of the failure is the drive’s Giant Magneto Resistive read / write heads in relation to the data stored on the hard media. This causes internal contamination which leads to the ‘Click of Death’ sound.

IBM was a pioneer of hard disk technology (it invented the first HDD half a century ago that weighed a nearly a ton) and a prolific supplier of quality to the storage market for years. Alas, in recent times, the technology giant suffered considerable damage to its reputation for quality. In 2003, after controversy and legal action relating to the mass failure of its DeskStar range of drives, IBM’s disk manufacturing division was sold to Hitachi and renamed Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST).

Since then, reliability is reported to have improved. Nevertheless, we still see those DeskStar drives coming in often.


Hitachi Notebook and Portable Drives

Our experience with Hitachi’s storage technology leads us to note that the most common problems reported with TravelStar drives are:

  • Sudden hard disk failure
  • Inaccessible hard drive, but still physically functioning
  • BIOS recognizes the drive, but drive fail error appears
  • Deterioration of performance
  • Distinctive whining sound
  • Sound of the motor attempt to spin up, fail, and then retry again

Hitachi has done extremely well in the mobile market since it delivered the first TravelStar drives in 1991. Their products quickly established a reputation for performance and low power consumption. Most importantly they have generally been dependable. Hitachi’s HiVERT technology as applied to Travelstar range of products, decreases power consumption to a level that provides a cooler operating environment for HiVERT-enabled hard disk drives, thereby enabling a longer lifespan for the unit.

When Travelstar hard disk drives crash, it’s normally because the disk heads have failed. In such situations we send the unit straight to a clean environment for our engineers to remove the platters from the drive and employ a specialised device built to read data from them. We then copy the firmware micro-code from the system board to access the essential information required find lost information. Once the micro-code is extracted, we use it to access your lost data. It’s a process that we’ve refined over the years to a point where we offer a much higher than average success rate for data recovery.

If you are having problems with an IBM / Hitachi drive we recommend you call us without delay. These models are more prone to sudden death than other makes so the sooner you call our technical team, the better your chances of recovering valuable data.

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