Crash Scene Photos

A hard drive head crash is ugly.

Most crashes happen after a spinning drive is dropped or jarred. The heads crash into the platters and self-destruct, damaging the magnetic coating on the platters— and with it your data. The damage may be confined to a small area, or it may effect almost the entire platter surface. Even a relatively small scratch in a critical place on the drive (known as the service area) can make the drive unrecoverable.

The following photographs show the dramatic results of crash inside of a 3.5 inch Seagate® drive. Although we do not know the drive's history, it appears that this one lost significant altitude in a hurry:

Platter Damage

This particular drive had three heads and two platters. Not much is left of the delicate head assembly:

Head Assembly Damage

Hard drives have an internal "air conditioning" system that contains an air filter to remove particles and other contaminants. A normal filter is shown on the right. The dirty filter on the left is from the crashed drive; it is completely overloaded with particles from the media. This is what is meant by "your data is in the filter."

A crash of this magnitude contaminates the entire drive. If one head fails dramatically, the particles created can cause other heads to crash and result in the complete destruction of the drive. The best defense is to back up your back-ups!

Contaminated Air Filter

The photo below shows a ring of damage in a laptop (mobile) drive.

Damaged Laptop Drive

Media damage presents formidable challenges to the prospect of data recovery. When platter damage occurs, the heads are always destroyed. Replacement heads must be prevented from traveling over the damaged areas, or they will also self-destruct.

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