Rugged · Rugged Mini · d2 · 2big · Porsche Design
A failed LaCie is recovered here for £300 + VAT for a single-drive unit, and from £500 + VAT for a two-bay 2big or Rugged RAID. Seagate has controlled LaCie since 2012, and inside nearly every LaCie is a Seagate drive; in the Rugged Mini and Porsche Design portables it is the same thin 2.5-inch family that tends to beep after a fall. The rubber saves the case. Whatever the heads went through, they went through. On the desktop units the power supply and the bridge board fail before the drive does, and on the RAID units one drive's failure takes the volume with it until that drive is imaged. 3–4 days at the bench.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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| Family | Models | Drive inside, and how it connects |
|---|---|---|
| Rugged Mini, Porsche Design Mobile | Portables | Seagate Rosewood 2.5-inch, separate USB board |
| Rugged USB-C, Rugged Thunderbolt, Mobile Drive | Portables | Seagate 2.5-inch, USB-C or Thunderbolt bridge |
| Rugged RAID, RAID Pro, RAID Shuttle | Two-drive portables | Two Seagate 2.5-inch drives, RAID 0 or 1 |
| d2 Professional, 1big, Porsche Design Desktop | Desktop | Seagate 3.5-inch, separate board, mains |
| 2big, 5big, 6big, 12big | Multi-bay | Seagate 3.5-inch drives behind a hardware RAID controller |
| What you see | The usual reason | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| RAID light amber or red | A degraded or failed member | Do not rebuild; image first |
| Private-Public asks for a password | An encrypted partition | The password is required |
| Beeping, no spin | Heads stuck to the platter, common on the thin 2.5-inch drives | Heads lifted and replaced; read once |
| Shown at 0 bytes, or a tiny capacity | The drive has locked and is not loading its firmware | Firmware work from the terminal; usually a good outcome |
| USB device not recognised | The bridge, or a drive that is not starting | Board work, or the drive itself |
| SeaTools says the drive is not responding | Stop testing | Send it |
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.
Every external drive is two things: the drive, and the USB board that talks to it. The board is checked first, because a failed bridge, a snapped socket or a dead regulator is the whole fault on a good share of jobs, and because on WD's encrypted drives the board holds the key. Where the drive itself has stopped, it comes out of its case onto the bench.
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.
One of the two 4TB Seagates had failed at the heads; the other was fine. The failed drive had its heads replaced on the clean bench and was imaged head by head; the healthy one end to end. The stripe was reassembled from the two images with the block size read out of the LaCie's own metadata, and the volume mounted whole.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseSeagate's lookup accepts LaCie serial numbers, so check. If the plan is valid and you can wait up to thirty business days, it is already paid for.
Seagate, in nearly every model since Seagate took control of LaCie in 2012.
No. We do not break encryption. Recover what is outside the encrypted partition; the rest is out of reach.
One job, two drives. Both are imaged and the set is rebuilt from the images. A two-drive set starts at £500 + VAT.
£300 + VAT for a single-drive LaCie after the free look; from £500 + VAT for two-bay units; from £1,250 + VAT for 5big and larger.
Every member imaged before anything is put back together. The first look is free, and the figure is in writing before any chargeable work.