A LaCie hard drive making a single beep each second is a stalled motor (not a verdict) and a LaCie Rugged that got knocked off the tailgate is just normal work here. Inside each LaCie case is a standard Toshiba or Seagate mechanism. That is what gets taken out and worked on.
One LaCie drive is £300 + VAT. There will be one written price after a free diagnostic; on logical work, you only pay if we recover your data. For mechanical repair there is 50% upfront.
LaCie kit is bought by people who move their gear around, and moving gear around is how it wears out. These six account for most of the LaCie hard drive failures that get brought onto the bench.
That is the spindle motor trying to start, stalling, and then going round again. Seized bearings or a head stack stuck to the platter cause nearly all of it, and neither one is an electrical problem. A different lead will not free either of them.
The orange bumpers protect the corners of the case but do nothing at all for the mechanics. If you put one down hard while the disks are spinning, the heads touch the surface, and every time you switch it on afterwards, they drag a little further.
USB bridge cards, sockets and mains power circuits all fail considerably earlier than the disk itself. Many times a d2 or Porsche Design that is silent with no lights on is nothing more than this; when you pull the disk, it can usually still be read perfectly well.
Some recent LaCie and Seagate portable units place their USB bridge chip directly onto the drive's own circuit board rather than using a separate card. This means there is no "naked" SATA disk to remove and plug into another system as part of a DIY fix, therefore the drive will have to be read through the interface it was originally built with.
The two-disk desktop units can be set up as either RAID 0 or RAID 1. With RAID 0, when one of the two disks fails then that is the end of the volume, because half a stripe rebuilds into nothing. It does not matter how they were set up, just send both of them in.
The drive makes what looks like normal spinning and the lights look right, but when you try to open your drive it wants to initialise the volume instead. That is a damaged file system on otherwise good hardware. This is logical work and this is the one type here where you only pay if we recover your data.
A LaCie hard drive beeping is without a doubt the most unambiguous noise you will hear in this trade. The platter stack has to reach full speed within a couple of seconds, and the beeps are generated by the spindle motor attempting exactly that. It then stalls, and attempts again about a second later. There are two mechanical reasons why most of these occur. Either the bearings on the spindle have seized, which can happen with a hard drive sitting unused in a drawer for a year or taking a hit, or the head stack has "landed" on the platter surface and stuck there, which is typically what occurs when a portable is dropped while running.
Neither of those is electronics, and here's what needs to be said clearly and directly. A different lead, a rear USB port, a powered hub or just a larger power supply can't unstick a head, nor will they free a seized bearing. Any additional attempt simply asks a stuck mechanism to pull even harder on itself. What does work is a head-swap bench. The shell is removed, the head stack is lifted clear with all the proper tools, and either the mechanism is freed or the platters are moved to a good working donor body; then the drive is imaged at sector level so your files come off the copy rather than the patient.
Silence is a separate symptom and worth keeping apart from the beep. If a mains powered d2 or 2big shows no light, makes no noise and will not produce a single beep, then the disks behind it are likely still intact and it is often simply the power supply.
Once a LaCie fails to appear on a computer, there are generally only two possible points of failure, and the free diagnostic separates these two for you. The first is the enclosure itself (the USB bridge board, the socket, or the power circuits on a desktop unit), as the disk itself is healthy; that makes it logical work at the cheaper end of the scale. The second is the physical disk mechanism: heads, motors, firmware or a growing area of bad sectors; each of these would require the head-swap bench, donor parts, and many hours.
The first case is usually straightforward because a LaCie enclosure contains a completely normal hard drive. Seagate has owned the LaCie brand for years, so what you see in the aluminium shell is a standard Seagate or Toshiba mechanism, which is worked on in exactly the same manner as every other drive of that model. There is one honest exception, already mentioned above: where the bridge is built onto the drive's own board, no amount of unscrewing produces a plain SATA disk.
Nearly everyone searching for LaCie hard drive repair or typing "repair LaCie external hard drive" into a search engine wants the contents and not the container. These are two completely separate jobs and it is fair to say so. Nothing leaves this bench mended. The donor heads, the donor motor base and a matched board running the original firmware are only used to make the mechanism readable until all of the data can be copied off it. What comes back to you is your data on new media; the original has usually done its last day of work, and it does not need to do another.
The Rugged is the orange bumpered portable that is taken out on site, carried in camera bags and gets dropped. It arrives in our lab damaged more often than any other product the brand makes. The SSD versions of the Rugged have nothing turning inside and fail like all solid state products do, quietly and all at once. The Porsche Design models are the aluminium enclosures with the brushed finish on them. Those include the desktop model and the mobile version of the same design. Most of these units arrive at our lab with a faulty bridge board and a healthy disk. The d2 is the desktop unit with a single hard drive. This is a heavy and quiet device and it typically will not show a failure until after several years of use. The 2big contains two hard drives, and can be set up either way, which matters a lot: as RAID 0 the loss of one disk takes the whole volume, and as RAID 1 the second disk still decides how much can be recovered. Therefore, both drives are sent to us together in either case. The older Blade and slim mobile drives are 2.5-inch disks in a thin shell and click for the same ordinary reasons any 2.5-inch disk clicks.
Photographers, video editors, architects along with lots of other people with one shelf of family history reach this bench through LaCie, sending drives in to us from places like Norwich, Wymondham, Cromer and the coast. Take the power off; pack the drive whole (cable and power supply included); and once you have your quote, post it tracked and insured to our Cambridge location. We complete the free diagnostic 2 working days after it arrives; then we give you 1 single written figure; and a full recovery takes 2-4 working days at the very fastest. For more, see external drive recovery and hard drive recovery; the county picture is on the Norfolk page; and every band is set out on the data recovery cost page.
Pull the power, box the drive with its cable and power supply, and let the diagnostic find the fault. Finding out costs nothing.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.