Donor drive match checker

A donor drive is a working hard drive that our engineers take parts from to repair yours. When a drive clicks, won’t spin or has a burnt circuit board, we can often recover the data by fitting replacement heads, a replacement PCB or, in rare cases, moving the platters into a donor’s chassis.

The parts must match exactly. Read/write heads are tuned to the platters and firmware of one specific model, family and firmware revision, so a donor that only looks the same can fail to read the data, or scratch the platters and destroy it. Use the checker below to compare your drive’s label with a possible donor before you buy one.

Please don’t try a transplant yourself

Opening a hard drive outside a clean room lets dust onto the platters, and one particle can cause a head crash that makes the data unrecoverable. A matching donor is only half the job: head swaps also need the right tools, adaptive data and firmware work. If your drive holds data you need, ask one of our engineers before you open it or buy parts.

Talk to an engineer

The initial inspection is free, and you get a fixed, no-obligation quote before any recovery work starts. Call the lab on 020 7064 4996, get a quote online or book your recovery.