Form factor first
Every kind of external drive, and how each one fails. The box tells us as much as the badge does.
An external hard drive is a hard disk in a box with a USB board in front of it, and the box decides a surprising amount: whether the drive can come out, whether it has a SATA port of its own, whether the board encrypts everything it writes, and what happens to the heads when it falls off a desk. Pick yours below. A single external drive of any kind is £300 + VAT once the free look is done, with the figure in writing before anything chargeable starts, and on most jobs no data means no bill.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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Inside the box, or built for a purpose.
Rather begin with the symptom →Inside the box
Portable 2.5-inchThe bus-powered drive in a bag or a pocket, and the commonest job on the bench: dropped, clicking, or suddenly asking to be formatted→Desktop 3.5-inchMains-powered, on a desk for years: My Book, Expansion, d2, Backup Plus Hub. Power supplies and bridges fail before the drive does→Native USB drivesWD Elements, My Passport and Seagate's slim drives have the USB socket on the drive's own board, with no SATA port to fall back on→Hardware-encryptedMy Passport, My Book and easystore encrypt every sector on their own board whether or not you set a password. The board is the key→SMR portable drivesShingled recording packs more into a 2.5-inch drive and makes a failed one slower and harder to read. Most portables since 2016→Built for a purpose
Rugged and shockproofLaCie Rugged, Transcend StoreJet, ADATA HD710 and Silicon Power Armor. The bumper protects the case; the heads are another matter→Games console drivesSeagate Game Drive, WD_BLACK P10 and D10, and any drive an Xbox or PlayStation formatted for itself→Time Machine and Time CapsuleThe Mac backup that stopped mounting, and the Time Capsule that stopped altogether→Desktop RAID and ThunderboltLaCie 2big, WD My Book Duo, G-RAID, Promise Pegasus: two or more drives that have to be read as a set→Enclosures, caddies and docksA bare drive in somebody else's box, where the box is usually the fault→Legacy FireWire and eSATADrives from before USB 3, often with data nobody has looked at in a decade→Why the box matters more than the badge.
Nearly every external drive sold in Britain has a Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba hard disk inside it, whatever the name on the case. What differs is the box: a portable takes its power from the USB lead and lives in a bag, where it gets dropped; a desktop drive has a mains adapter that fails before the drive does; a WD My Passport has its USB socket soldered to the drive's own circuit board, with an encryption chip on the same board that scrambles every sector whether you asked for it or not.
That decides the route in. A drive in a plain enclosure comes out and is read on its own SATA connector. A native-USB drive is read through its USB board, or through a matching donor board with the original's ROM moved across. An encrypted WD drive is read through its own board or not at all, which is why the one thing never to do with a dead My Passport is throw the case away. A two-bay desktop RAID is two drives that only mean something together.
So the first question we ask is not what make it is but what kind of box it lives in. The second is what it is doing: a click, a beep, a request to format. The badge comes third. There is more on that on the manufacturers page, and a plain account of what goes on inside the drive on What is inside an external drive.
The questions that come up first.
How do I tell which kind I have?
If it runs from the USB lead alone, it is a portable 2.5-inch drive. If it needs a mains adapter, it is a desktop 3.5-inch drive. The model number on the label tells us the rest: whether the drive is native USB, whether it encrypts, and whether it is one of the shingled drives. Photograph the label and send it with the form.
Does the kind change the price?
Not for a single drive. Portable, desktop, native USB, encrypted or rugged, one external drive is £300 + VAT after the free look. The price moves only when there are two or more drives in a set, from £500 + VAT, or when it is a larger array, from £1,250 + VAT.
Should I take the drive out of its case first?
No. Send the whole unit as it is. On WD My Passport, My Book and easystore drives the case's board holds the encryption key, and on every drive the board tells us something about what failed. Send desktop drives with their mains adapter.
Do you take the whole computer?
No need. Only the external drive travels, in its case, with its lead. Mobile phones are not handled.
Not sure which one you have?
Photograph the label and send it with the form. The model number is enough to tell, and the first look is free whichever kind it turns out to be.