Bearing Damage

If your hard drive doesn't rev up anymore, it could possibly due to bearing damage. In this case the only thing that helps is the professional change of the bearing during a data rescue..

Expert knowledge of hard drive bearing damages

Attingo has more than 25 years of experience, professional competence and know-how, special technology and tools in order to temporary recondition hard drives with bearing damages.

Amongst other things:

• Expertly opening the hard drive in a cleanroom laboratory
• Cautious extraction of the platter stack of the HDA
• Diasassembling of the platter stack into its separate parts
• Possible swap of a defective hard drive motor
• Newly alignment and adjustment of the ferromagnetic disc
• Prevention of heavy imbalances and vibrations in order to prevent consequential damages

Causes for bearing damage of a hard drive

• Fall or heavy vibrations of a external hard drives or internal hard drives
• Fatigue of material (stuck spindle ball bearing)

The spindle ball bearing deadlocked, the discs cannot move or rotate anymore

Your next steps after data loss

• Do not power on the affected hard drive in order to prevent consequential damages and maximize the chances of a successful recovery of the hard rive.

• Tell us the exact modelnumber and name, as well as the capacity of your hard drive.

• We advise you on our diagnosis services and the process of the data rescue. If you need an express data rescue our staff is here for you all around the clock.

• Take a look at our packaging tips so your hard drive arrives in our laboratories safely.

General information about defective spindle bearings

Older hard drive models - especially SCSI hard drives - have a ball bearing, new models have liquid bearings, which are significantly more quiet and run with fewer vibrations. The discs are positioned on a wave, called spindle, assembled one above the other. Dependent on the capacity and type of the hard drive the number of discs and write/read heads varies. Readjustement of the discs and data recovery are therefore very laborious. 

The write/read heads are floating just a few nanometer over the sensitive magnetic discs on an air cushion. For comparision: fine dust particles have a size of 10 micrometers, which is a few times bigger than the fine air cushion inside the hard drive. The tiniest imbalances may cause the write/read heads to impact on the data carrier surface. In succession the magnetic layer gets damaged fatally. A data rescue is often no longer possible after that.