Seized motor bearings to hard drives and disks can occur for a variety of reasons;
1. Dropped media particularly while the hard drive is spinning or powered on.
2. Heat related issues; the bearings are coated in a magnetic lubricant which can dry up
Indications of a seized hard drive motor bearing will be a buzzing noise heard from the disk when powered up, if you have heard this noise then power down your disk immediately and contact our lab, this noise will be caused directly from the motor as it tries to spin up but fails due to the seized condition of the bearings.
Seized bearings are a very serious failure to deal with and require specialist tools, knowledge and engineers in the clean room to perform data recovery.
The platters which contain the user are directly connected through the shaft to the bearings and so it is not possible to simply change the bearings as some clients may think, the solution is what is called as a platter swap or exchange, this procedure involves taking removing the good platters to a working base with good bearings, this procedure is extremely difficult to achieve.
Platter swapping is difficult because each platter and there may be up to 8 in some SCSI drives are rotationally aligned to within microns, if this position is lost the procedure will fail completely, so tools and equipment ensure that the alignment is preserved during the technique of platter swapping.
High BPI Bits per Inch and areal densities also play an important part in platter swapping as the track widths are becoming finer there is no margin for error.
No ‘magic machines' exist for this type of data recovery work as some customers believe, the comments are ‘can't you just remove the parts and read them in a machine?', no is the short answer, the reason for this is that all hard disks are manufactured uniquely and are custom tuned to themselves only, the HSA, firmware and even the spindle are calibrated to itself only, so when platter swapping for seized bearing failure a correct donor is required that matches the characteristics of the patient hard drive as closely as possible or the procedure will fail.
If the hard drive was dropped then the HSA also may require replacement as it may have come into contact with the disk surface and caused a head crash thus damaging the HSA, so additional to the platter exchange a HSA exchange will also be required.
It has been noted that some clients open the damaged hard drive up after they have dropped it or following a heat related bearing seizure, you are advised not to open and drive or disk as this will cause greater damage to the surface of the platters, our lab has a dedicated clean room with all the ESD equipment to handle internal and complex hard drive issues.