Dropped External Portable Drive Recovery

Dropped my external hard drive yesterday (Western digital 1TB P/N:WDBMWV0020BBK-05) and now it will not connect to pc. It just sits making a ticking sound for a couple of minutes, then shuts off completely. My hobby is in photography and It contains a number of photographs that I have been working on for the past few months.

I dropped a passport WD USB 3.0 2tb portable drive . It was powered on but unplugged as it fell 1m onto the floor. Afterwards it still read the folders (800gb of data) but was much much slower at going through the sub folders and then opening small word documents. PowerPoints opened too slowly to be useful to me. As it was under warranty I took it back to Curry's know-how dept for their £80 data recovery. I also sent off a new USB drive to copy the data too. After 2 weeks I have been told their software could not recover the data as is a mechanical issue and they need to do an advanced recovery where they open the drive to repair parts. This would cost me some £200 odd pounds but would be free if they failed to recover the data. I've read your website and now I'm concerned the data that was barely accessable may have been damaged by them. I'm waiting for the drive to be returned to check it. Have you any advice? Contact by email would be preferable as I teach.

I have a 'Transcend StoreJet' Harddrive and have dropped it. It's one of those portable hard drives that plug into the USB port on a computer. Since then It doesn't work, I have tried new cables but it still isn't working. I have a lot of work on it so need to get the work off it.

Portable hard drives such as the ever popular WD Passports are usually the recipients of some rough treatment. They are built to withstand knocks and bumps, but a fall from a significant height is going to cause serious problems to the hard drive. This problem is common to all portable hard drives, including the Transcend Store Jet and other external hard drives. At the heart of the problem is the mechanical nature of these hard drives. When one of these drives is operating a mechanical arm known as an 'actuator arm' moves across the surface of the hard drive reading and writing data to the hard disk. A significant knock or bump during the operation of the hard drive results in damage to either the actuator arm, the disk, or both. This then causes the hard drive to make a ticking sound, as the drive tries to pass a self test procedure before passing control to the computer. This testing procedure will never succeed as the hard drive is now damaged to a significant extent. Retrieving the data from a dropped external or portable hard drive often relies heavily on experts  who should be able to repair and restore the information from a damaged hard drive. Rather than meddle with a dropped hard drive I recommend you use one of these expert companies and give yourself at least a fighting chance of getting your data back.