Sabrent · Orico · StarTech · Inateck · UGREEN · ICY BOX
A great many external drives were never sold as external drives: they are a laptop or desktop hard disk somebody fitted into a USB caddy, or sits in a dock on a desk. Sabrent, Orico, StarTech, Inateck, UGREEN and ICY BOX make most of the boxes, around ASMedia, JMicron, Realtek and VIA bridge chips, and those bridges and their power stages fail long before the drives inside them do. The drive inside is an ordinary SATA drive, and the only complication is the one the box adds: an older bridge that hid the drive's real size, or a box that quietly wrote a partition table of its own. One drive out of an enclosure is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Light on, drive spinning, not detected | Bridge chip failed | Drive read directly on SATA |
| No light on a mains box | Power supply | Send the supply; the drive is usually fine |
| Drive shows as 746GB instead of 3TB | Old bridge without 4K/large-drive support | The drive is fine; read outside the box |
| Asks to initialise when moved between box and PC | The box used 4K sector emulation or its own translation | Imaged through the original box, or translated on the image |
| Clicking inside the box | Drive heads | Head work; the box is beside the point |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel is opened, and an engineer settles what has actually failed before anything else happens. A drive that clicks or beeps is not powered again; one that spins is read on our own imaging equipment, never in a computer that will retry and time out and retry. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
A drive in a third-party box comes out of it first, and is read on its own SATA connector on our equipment. The box is tested separately, because the two usual faults, a dead bridge and a dead supply, leave the drive untouched.
Stuck or failed heads are replaced with a matched set from a donor, seized spindles freed, and firmware faults corrected in the drive's service area from the terminal. The drive is not repaired to be used again; it is made to read once, in a single careful pass, and that pass is planned before it begins.
Nothing is worked on live. The whole drive is imaged once, head by head and weak areas last, with reads timed to what the platters can stand, and the file system is put back together on the image. Encrypted volumes are unlocked there too, with the original board's key or the password you supply, and never on the original.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
An old caddy, a newer drive, and a Windows prompt to initialise a disk that looked mostly empty. The owner said no, which was the whole job. Out of the box, on SATA, the drive read its full 3TB with the partition intact and every file in place. It went back on a modern enclosure, and the old caddy went in the bin.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseUsually not. Bridges and power supplies fail long before the drives inside them. The drive comes out and is read directly on the bench.
No. An older bridge cannot address a drive over 2.2TB and shows it short. Outside that box the drive reads its full size with everything in place.
No. Some boxes wrote the drive with their own sector translation, and it reads correctly only through that box or once the translation is undone. Send the drive and the box.
£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing.
3–4 days at the bench after the free look; a dead-bridge job is usually at the shorter end.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive unplugged.