The Adventure of My Defunct Hard Drive: Apple Wants Your Money or Your Life

[politicat]

44. He had click of death.

I've gotten lucky twice when I've had HDs fail with the click, and it turned out to be a blown power supply in an external drive instead of a read arm failure or a logic board blowout, but I've also had actual dead drives happen. In a laptop drive, diagnosing failure is tough at the best of times. If it's logic board, then it can be refurb'ed with a replacement logic board, but that takes a clean room. If it's a read arm bearing, then at least one platter is probably borked.

Software can sometimes recover data, but no guarantees. Thus, the high price.

(Note: LaCie external drives used to be gold standard, but their power supplies have turned to teh suck. On the hard drive side, we've lost two Toshibas, a Western Digital and a Samsung over the years. We've also replaced a number of friends' drives, of every brand. There is no good brand, there is only this brand.)