Seagate Hard Drive Data Recovery – All Models, Old and New

Seagate is the world’s largest hard drive manufacturer, and its drives turn up in everything from home PCs and PlayStations to 30TB-plus data-centre arrays. When a Seagate drive fails – whether it is clicking, not spinning, not detected or showing the wrong capacity – Data Retrieval Ltd can recover the data in our London lab.

We work on every current Seagate family, including the new HAMR-based Exos drives, as well as legacy Barracuda, Momentus and Maxtor-branded models that are still in service.

Seagate Drives We Recover

Range / family	Example models & notes
Barracuda & Barracuda Pro	Desktop and laptop drives, e.g. ST1000DM010, ST2000DM008, ST4000DM004, ST8000DM004, ST1000LM048, ST2000LM015 (Rosewood). Many current Barracuda models use SMR recording.
IronWolf & IronWolf Pro	NAS drives from 1TB up to 30TB, e.g. ST4000VN006, ST8000VN004, ST12000VN0008, ST24000NT002 and the 28–30TB IronWolf Pro range.
Exos X, Exos E & Exos M	Enterprise helium drives – Exos X16, X18, X20, X22, X24 and the HAMR-based Exos M (Mozaic 3+) 30TB and 36TB models. SAS and SATA.
SkyHawk & SkyHawk AI	Surveillance drives used in DVR/NVR systems, e.g. ST4000VX016, ST8000VE001.
FireCuda	FireCuda SSHD (ST1000LX015, ST2000LX001) and FireCuda NVMe SSDs such as the 520, 530 and 540.
External drives	One Touch, Expansion (desktop and portable), Ultra Touch, Backup Plus, Game Drive for PlayStation/Xbox, and LaCie models – see our LaCie page.
Legacy	Momentus, Momentus XT, Barracuda 7200.x (7200.11 BSY/LBA0 firmware fault), Constellation, Cheetah, Savvio and Maxtor DiamondMax/OneTouch.

Common Seagate Faults

• Clicking, buzzing or beeping – usually failed read/write heads or a stuck spindle
• Drive detected as 0GB, the wrong model or a firmware family name (e.g. “ST_M13FQBL”)
• Firmware translator or System Area corruption, including SMR media-cache problems
• PCB damage after a power surge or using the wrong power adapter
• Very slow reading and bad sectors on ageing Barracuda and Rosewood laptop drives
• External drives failing at the USB bridge, or disconnected and reconnected repeatedly
• Accidental formatting, deleted partitions and file system corruption (NTFS, exFAT, APFS, HFS+, ext4, XFS, Btrfs)

High-Capacity and HAMR Drives

Modern Seagate enterprise and NAS drives are helium-sealed and hold up to ten platters, and the Exos M range uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). These drives need model-specific donor parts and firmware handling, and they are almost always part of a RAID or NAS. If a drive from an array has failed, send all members – see RAID & server recovery and NAS recovery.

Before you send your device – five things to avoid

• Switch the device off and leave it off – every power cycle can make physical damage worse
• Do not run CHKDSK, Disk First Aid, fsck or recovery software on a drive that clicks, beeps or is slow
• Do not open the drive or swap the circuit board – modern boards hold drive-specific adaptive data
• Do not reinstall the operating system or initialise the disk when prompted
• Keep liquid-damaged devices unpowered and bring them in as quickly as possible

Frequently asked questions