this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Need to find a hard drive for parts to try to recover data. Does anyone know if there is a way to determine what heads are in a Seagate hard drive (2017)? Is there a certain number on the label that would tell what heads are in it? Thanks in advance !!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you actually had the equipment and know-how to assemble a hard drive from spare parts, you wouldn't be asking this question.

If you are just diving into this thinking you can figure it out yourself, STOP. You can't. All you will do is further damage the data. Send it to a professional service.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

While I appreciate your response it sounds a bit snide, which I’m sure you don’t intend to sound like. I did send the drive to a highly recommended data recovery service. They were able to recover some of the data before it crashed. They told me one way to try to recover the rest of the data was to find a donor drive where the p/n, sn, fw, site and dom matches as closely as possible. They said to feel free to search for a drive if I wanted, I found a drive that matches with a dom that was reasonably close but when they opened the drive the read / write heads part number and version was different. I was curious if anyone new if any of the part numbers on the outside of the drive would indicate what read / write heads were in the drive. I have found more drives with closer a dom but didn’t want to just start throwing money at it hoping it would have the correct heads. I did contact seagate and from the information I gave them the other drives I found seem to match what I’m looking for. But again, I was just hoping there was a more definitive indication of the heads installed in a particular drive.