A clicking Seagate BarraCuda. 98% of a family's memories, back.

An external Seagate BarraCuda — 3 terabytes, clicking, and no longer detected by Windows — arrived at our Belfast laboratory. On it: photos, music and family memories the owner wanted back, not written off.

Clicking is one of the clearest warnings a hard drive gives. It almost always means the read/write heads have failed mechanically — and every further power-on risks scoring the platter surface underneath, turning a recoverable fault into an unrecoverable one.

Diagnosis confirmed head failure. The BarraCuda's original read/write heads could no longer track the platters cleanly, producing the clicking and preventing Windows from mounting the drive. The platters themselves were undamaged — a mechanical fault, not a lost-data one.

The fix for genuine head failure is a head replacement: swapping the failed heads for a matched set from a donor drive of the same model. It has to be done under cleanroom conditions — any airborne particle that reaches an open platter can cause the kind of damage the original fault didn't.

The recovery reached about 98% of the data on the drive — roughly 1.8TB of photos, music and family memories, off a drive Windows could no longer even see. Turnaround was around four days from drop-off.

The total cost was £420 + VAT, which included a replacement drive for the recovered data, paid on-site by card.

Head replacements like this one are genuinely difficult work, and a good outcome is never something we can promise before diagnosis — platter wear ahead of head failure, and how closely a donor drive matches, both affect what comes back. This case went well. Not every one does.

Our advice stands regardless of outcome: back up, and test the backup regularly. A hard drive is a mechanical part, and it will fail eventually. Recovery is possible more often than not — but it is never guaranteed, and it is never the cheaper option.