External Hard Drive Recovery: Causes of Portable Hard Drive Failures

If your external hard drive or portable USB hard drive has failed and taken your images and documents with it, it is a stressful situation. During tax season, when critical documents are needed, having a solution fast really matters. eProvided has provided hard drive recovery services for 27+ years, and our specialists recover lost data from external drives during tax season or any time you face data loss.

Recovering Photos and Data from Portable USB Hard Drives

It is tax time, your hard disk is broken and your files are missing. Portable hard drives with USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or 3.1 store the documents you need. Maybe you dropped the drive on the floor, or bumped it by accident. Some customers break the USB port right off their disk drives. External drive recovery specialists at eProvided recover files from damaged external hard drives in all of these cases.

Each of those accidents leaves a different kind of damage. A drop can crash the read heads onto the platters, a snapped port usually means a broken USB bridge board, and a spill can corrode both. From the outside the symptoms often look the same: the drive clicks, stays silent or asks to be formatted. That is why guessing is risky, and why the safest first move is to stop plugging the drive in and let a lab find out which part actually failed.

Portable USB Hard Drives and Hard Drive Failures

“My portable drive fell to the floor.” Suffering from a damaged portable hard drive? Your external storage drive probably holds your pictures, and portable USB disk drives face shock, weather issues and data recovery from salt water damage problems. One of the most common problems data recovery companies see is board damage. Portable hard drive bad circuits and failed NAND flash memory in portable SSDs are both common, and drives fail for many other reasons too.

Formatting Drives by Accident

If your portable USB drive is formatted by accident, or Disk 0 shows up as Disk 1 in Disk Management, the result is data loss and confusion. In that situation, avoid any further action that might overwrite data on the drive. Common mistakes follow a pattern: you target the wrong disk, then move files to the wrong location, then delete everything and overwrite the hard drive. Call a professional before the data disappears. Much external hard drive data loss is preventable.

Circuits Fail

Have a solid state drive inside an external enclosure? Plug it into your PC’s USB port and nothing happens? Knowing the cause of any drive failure is important to retrieving data and photos. Customers sometimes tinker with enclosures and open them improperly, and end users discover bad ports or broken connections. Both make the work harder for file recovery specialists.

The USB bridge board in the enclosure is a separate part from the drive itself. When only the bridge fails, the drive inside is often healthy, which is why the first step in the lab is to find out exactly which part broke. Opening the case yourself can tear the thin ribbon or snap the plastic clips, and powering a drive with a damaged bridge over and over can harm a healthy disk. If your enclosure stopped working after a drop or a power surge, set it aside and describe what happened when you request an evaluation; those details help us decide where to look first.

External Hard Drive Recovery Savings

When file recovery specialists examine failed drives, they often find that customers tried to fix the hard drive themselves. That is a bad idea. Lead solder is dangerous, and internal circuits become jumbled and harder to repair. eProvided is celebrating 27+ years of experience and analyzes broken USB drives and external hard drives under microscopes to discover exactly what is broken. That makes recovering lost files and images faster and keeps the cost down.

NAND Flash Memory Dumps and Portable SSDs

The evolution of portable storage has been remarkable. Portable devices once relied on traditional hard disk drives with spinning platters. Those platters are magnetically encoded surfaces, and data is read and written by a mechanical arm. Many of today’s portable drives use NAND flash memory instead, with no moving parts at all.

NAND flash is non-volatile: it keeps data even when the power is off. Inside each NAND chip are multiple banks that act as storage units, made of memory cells that hold data as electrical charges. With no moving components, these drives are faster and more durable, and they are efficient and reliable in daily use.

How a failed flash-based drive is recovered depends on the device:

• USB flash drives and memory cards — the data on the NAND is not locked to the controller. eProvided removes the NAND chips, connects them to special equipment and dumps the data banks to fast PCs. Storage devices hold 1–16 surface-mounted NAND chips. We then unscramble the dumps, analyze them and reassemble the data into files. This is our NAND flash chip-off recovery service.
• Portable SSDs — most modern portable and internal SSDs encrypt their NAND with a key held inside the controller. A chip read returns only ciphertext, so the honest path is repairing the original controller board so it can decrypt its own data again.

Traditional Drives and SSD Drives

Documents can be retrieved from SSDs and from drives with moving parts. SSDs suffer circuit and controller failures, while traditional hard drives suffer moving-part failures, and their platters can be damaged or scratched. eProvided recovers files from portable USB hard drives of both kinds, and also acts as the lab for other portable hard drive recovery companies. Working with the lab directly lowers your cost, so external hard drive recovery customers can save.

External Hard Drives: Extraction and Retrieval of Data Is the Same

Portable hard drives or external hard drives? Whichever you call it, these devices are all easy to move from one place to another, and the more you move a drive, the more likely it is to have a problem. Have corrupted or damaged documents? If you are facing data loss from a portable or external hard drive, read what to do when a drive fails, then let eProvided help with external drive data recovery.

Causes of Portable Hard Drive Failures

External USB disks are handy on vacation, and consumers take them near salt water or into high heat and humidity. Salt water corrodes circuits on printed circuit boards, and humidity raises your chances of file loss. Salt water and external USB drives do not mix. eProvided managed data recovery from salt water damage for NASA.

When you are on the go, have a plan before you move your hard drive. Keep it in a padded case, keep it dry, and keep a second copy of anything you cannot replace. Heat is a quieter threat: a drive left in a hot car or on a sunny windowsill can have its electronics pushed past their rated limits. If a drive has been wet, do not power it on to check it. Seal it in a plastic bag and send it for evaluation, because running current through a wet board spreads corrosion faster.

Free Evaluation: Simple Fix vs. Advanced Recovery

eProvided handles data loss from start to finish. We analyze portable USB drives for free under microscopes, and remove NAND chips where the device allows it, to find out what caused an external drive to fail. After the free evaluation, we agree on a solution and recover your images and documents.

More information about eProvided, the file recovery professionals.

Be a data recovery partner. If you own a file recovery or cell phone repair shop, join our partner program: call (866) 857-5950 or sign up here.

More Hard Drive Guides

• Hard drive recovery tips
• Does the freezer trick really work?
• How new hardware boosts drive capacity
• How to completely erase a hard drive
• Browse all data recovery services

What Our Customers Say

Rated 4.9 / 5 from 67 verified reviews on Trustpilot

Every one of these drives came in after a drop, a crash or a failed enclosure, and each case began with a free evaluation. To learn what happens once a drive reaches the lab, read how hard drive recovery really works.

Frequently Asked Questions

Recovery Services for Every Storage Device Class

External drives are only one storage class. eProvided recovers data from all of them: