WD Red WD30EFAX data recovery
Getting the files back from a Western Digital WD Red (WD30EFAX), the 3 TB 3.5-inch desktop hard drive. Desktop PCs, iMacs, NAS boxes and external desktop drives.
- 3 TB
- 3.5-inch desktop hard drive
- SATA
- 2019–2020
Known on this model. Uses shingled (SMR) recording. Rebuilding a RAID or NAS with these drives can take days and fail part-way, which is when we often see them.
What is it doing?
The noise or behaviour tells us a lot about what has failed. Tell us when you book.
| What it is doing | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Clicking or ticking | Heads failing to read. Stop powering it on; each start can scratch the platters. |
| Buzzing, no spin | Stuck heads or a seized motor. Needs the clean-air cabinet. |
| Not detected, no noise | Electronics board, firmware or power. Often the data is untouched. |
| Slow, freezing, bad sectors | Weak heads or damaged surface. Copy it now, before it gets worse. |
| Deleted, formatted or a RAW partition | Logical recovery from the healthy drive, from £99 + VAT. |
How we recover it
- Free first consultation: we tell you what has failed and the price before any recovery work starts.
- The drive is copied sector by sector first. Nothing is ever written to your original drive.
- Clicking, buzzing and stuck drives are opened in our clean-air cabinet; donor parts are matched by model number, firmware and production details.
- Your files come back on a new external drive, or copied to your new computer.
- Everything is kept confidential. Our working copies are deleted once you confirm you have everything.
Before you send it
- Don’t keep switching it on to see if it works: every start can make the damage worse.
- Don’t open it, tap it or put it in the freezer.
- Don’t run CHKDSK, Disk Utility First Aid or recovery software on a failing drive.
- Don’t format it when Windows or the NAS asks you to.
| Service | Price + VAT |
|---|---|
| Initial consultationFinds out whether the fault is physical or logical and the best way to recover it. | Free |
| Deleted files on a standard hard driveUp to two hours of work. | £99 |
| Clean room diagnosticFor clicking, buzzing or silent hard drives. | £79 |
| Physical recovery on a single driveLabour, plus a donor drive if one is needed. | £450 |
| External drive for your recovered filesPrice follows the market at the time. | £150 (1TB) to £250 (4TB) |
If a donor drive is needed we send you a link to buy it, or buy it for you at cost plus 30%, plus any import charges and VAT.
What will it cost?
Pick the closest match. The consultation is free, and the price is agreed before any recovery work starts.
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