Symptoms
Common Causes of Failure for Seagate Drives
Symptoms
Common Causes of Failure
Symptoms
Common Causes of Failure
The most common problem we come across with external hard drives is that the user has dropped the device onto a hard surface. This can cause a number of problems such as a head-crash, (especially if the drive was switched on at the time of the fall) or the resulting shock damage can cause the ball-bearings in the spindle motor to displace and fail. Dropping an external hard drive that is switched on, at the time of the fall, can incur serious damage.
USB Flash drives or USB sticks have become an extremely common form of portable data storage. Although, there are no moving parts inside them they are still liable to data loss.
Symptoms
USB stick/ flash drive plugged into Windows-based computer and gives user message "drive not formatted" or simply "not formatted".
USB stick plugged into computer but drive is not recognised at all.
Data has suddenly disappeared from the drive for no apparent reason.
Common Causes of Failure
Physical damage is extremely common in this type of media. The data is stored on a flash memory chip, this chip is then paced on a small circuit board and the board is usually connected to the actual USB connector by very delicate soldering. When this soldered connection breaks, the drive usually becomes invisible to a computer.
The user removes the USB stick from a computer system when the drive is being written to (e.g. during the transfer of data from PC to USB drive) resulting in corruption of the data. (Some USB drive manufacturers use a built-in LED indication light in their drives to warn the user that data transfer is taking place)
Component failure is another reason for failure of USB flash drives. Many users assume they did something wrong to cause the failure of their flash drive when in fact the drive may just have failed because of a poor quality component inside the device.