Hard Drive & SSD Brands We Recover

Almost certainly. The directory lists the brands we see most, but drives are built by a small number of manufacturers, so unlisted and OEM-branded drives use the same internals we work on daily. Send the label details or photos through the recovery form and we will identify it during assessment.

Only three companies still manufacture hard disk drives: Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. Most other hard drive brands, including LaCie, G-Technology, Buffalo, Verbatim and supermarket externals, are one of those three drives inside a branded case, and older names such as Maxtor, Samsung HDD and HGST were absorbed into them. SSDs are more varied: some brands make their own flash and controllers, while many buy both from suppliers, so two SSD brands can share identical internals.

Yes. Each manufacturer uses its own firmware architecture, service-area layout and head and platter designs, so donor parts must match the family, model and often the firmware revision, and firmware repair follows a different procedure for Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba drives. For SSDs the controller matters more than the brand on the label: recovery tools work at the controller level, and chip-off reads must rebuild that controller's wear-levelling map.

Not in a way you can rely on. Published failure statistics from large drive fleets show bigger differences between individual models and capacities than between brands, and every manufacturer has had models that failed early. Age, heat, knocks and how a drive is used matter more than the logo. We see every brand in the laboratory, so treat any drive holding the only copy of your data as already overdue for a backup.

No. The brand and a clear photo of the label are enough to open a case. We read the model, firmware revision and serial number from the drive itself during assessment, and those details decide which donor parts and procedures the job needs. If the label is missing or worn, the connector and the shape of the drive tell us most of what we need.

Look at the rear edge of the drive. Two long rows of exposed metal pins with a wide ribbon cable is PATA, also called IDE, common before 2007. Two small L-shaped sockets side by side is SATA, used by nearly every hard drive and 2.5-inch SSD since. They are not interchangeable and need different adapters and recovery hardware.

No. M.2 is the physical shape, a 22 mm wide board in lengths such as 2230, 2242 and 2280. An M.2 SSD can run either SATA or NVMe internally. Two notches in the gold edge connector usually mean M.2 SATA, a single notch usually means NVMe, and the label typically states which one it is.

SATA is the single-port interface in desktops, laptops and NAS drives. SAS is the dual-port, server-grade interface used in rack servers, SANs and enterprise RAID, with a differently keyed connector so a SAS drive cannot plug into a SATA port. Enterprise SAS drives can also use 520 or 528 byte sectors that consumer tools cannot read, which is one reason failed arrays belong in a laboratory.

No. Many external drives, including WD My Passport and various LaCie models, encrypt data on the enclosure's bridge board, so the bare disk reads as scrambled without it. Some Seagate externals build the USB bridge into the drive board itself. Send the complete unit with its case, cable and power supply.

It depends on the fault, not the brand. Diagnosis is free: we assess the drive, identify the failure and quote a fixed price before any recovery work begins, and our no data, no fee policy applies. A logical fault costs less than a cleanroom head swap, and we confirm which one you are facing before you commit to anything.