Causes of External Hard Drive Failure
Typical causes of an external hard drive failure include inadequate cooling or ventilation, manufacture defects, physical impacts, and improperly removing the external hard drive. Of these the most common failure we see at Data Recovery San Antonio, with external hard drives, is being dropped.
If you dropped your external hard drive, and now cannot access the drive, chances are high that the drive has sustained internal physical damage requiring clean room work. External hard drive recovery in this situation may be more costly, but there is high probability of success. However, chances of success are somewhat lower when the external hard drive was dropped while it was on. This can result in the read/write heads crashing into the platters causing scoring that renders the data completely unrecoverable.
Important
If you dropped your external hard drive and now you can’t access it, STOP, turn it off and do not turn the power back on. Turning it on and off in hopes it will start reading will only make your situation worse and may even cause your external hard drive to become unrecoverable

