Professional Recovery for Portable Hard Drives, SSDs, and Backup Drives.
Recovering Data from Western Digital, Seagate, LaCie, Samsung, and more.
Expert Solutions for Failed External Storage
External drives are portable, but they are also fragile. Whether your drive has been dropped, splashed with liquid, or has simply stopped appearing on your computer, we provide professional external drive recovery from our specialised Portsmouth lab.
Common Symptoms We Resolve:
- The “Click of Death”: Repeated clicking or grinding sounds.
- Not Recognised: Drive spins up but doesn’t appear in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder.
- Format Errors: Prompting you to “Format the disk in drive E: before you can use it.” Note – Don’t format it!
- Slow Performance: Files taking hours to copy or causing your computer to freeze.
- Physical Damage: Dropped drives, broken USB connectors, or water damage.
We Support All Major External Drive Brands
We have extensive experience with the unique firmware and hardware architectures of every major manufacturer:
| Manufacturer / Brand | Common Models Supported |
| Western Digital | My Passport, Elements, My Book, G-Drive |
| Seagate | Expansion, Backup Plus, One Touch, IronWolf |
| LaCie | Rugged, d2, Mobile Drive, Porsche Design |
| Samsung | T5/T7 Portable SSDs, M3 Portable |
| Toshiba | Canvio Basics, Advance, Ready |
Pro Tip: If your drive is clicking, unplug it immediately. Continued power to a failing drive can cause “media damage,” where the heads scratch the data off the platters, making recovery impossible.
Our External Drive Recovery Capabilities
1. Mechanical Repair
If your drive has failed physically, we perform delicate surgery to replace read/write heads or seized spindle motors. We maintain an extensive library of “donor” parts to ensure a fast turnaround.
2. Firmware & Controller Repair
Many modern external drives (especially Western Digital and Samsung) use built-in encryption or proprietary USB connectors. We use industry standard tools to work with these controllers and access the data directly.
3. SSD & Flash Recovery
External SSDs don’t click, they simply die. We specialise in electronic repair and controller emulation to retrieve data from dead SanDisk, Samsung, and Crucial portable SSDs.
Why Choose Our Portsmouth Lab?
- 25+ Years Experience: We’ve seen every type of failure imaginable since 1998.
- Local Expertise, National Reach: Drop your drive off in Portsmouth or send to us by Royal Mail or courier.
- Data Privacy: Your files are handled with 100% confidentiality. Check our data protection status on the contact page.
- Transparent Pricing: See our price list.
Get Your Free Estimate
Don’t let a hardware failure be the end of your photos or business files. Our No Recovery, No Fee policy means you have nothing to lose.
Tips for using external hard drives safely:
- Always unplug the cable by pulling near the connector. Don’t pull the cable as this can put strain on the connector or even detach it completely.
- Don’t balance the drive on its side, or where it can fall off anything. Even the force from a drive falling from its side to its front can cause a total head crash which is not recoverable (even for us).
- Tuck cables out the way, preferably behind the computer where they cannot be tripped over.
- Make backup copies of the data on the drive. You never want a single copy of any data, as disk failure often happens without any warning.