Emergency
Water damaged external hard drive
If your external hard drive is got wet, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
A portable external is a normal drive inside a plastic shell with a USB bridge board. The bridge fails far more often than the drive does, which is why a dead external is better news than a dead internal.
Corrosion on the circuit board
Progressive, and it continues while the device sits waiting. This is why a water job is genuinely time-sensitive in a way most other failures are not.
Short circuit from powering it on wet
Often the actual killer rather than the water itself. Components survive immersion and then fail on power-up.
Sealed platters, untouchedbetter news
A hard drive's platter chamber is sealed. Water frequently reaches only the exterior and the PCB, leaving the recorded surface completely intact.
Storage chip physically intactbetter news
On a phone or SSD the memory is a sealed package. It commonly survives when the board around it does not, which is what makes chip-level recovery possible.
Try this before you pay anyone
There is one thing to do, and several popular things not to
- Take it off power. If it is a phone, take it off the charger and do not press the power button to check.
- If it is still wet, keep it that way rather than letting it dry with residue in place, because a device that dries with contamination on the board corrodes underneath it. Get it to someone quickly instead.
- Note what the liquid was. Salt water, pool water, and anything sugary are substantially more aggressive than clean tap water, and it changes how the board has to be treated.
Skip the rice. It cannot reach the inside of a sealed device, it does nothing for corrosion already underway, and it costs the days that decide a water job. A hair dryer drives moisture further in and can lift components. Neither of these is a small mistake. They are the two that most often turn a recoverable water job into an unrecoverable one.
How recoverable this is
Better than most people expect, and it degrades with every day of delay. On hard drives the platter chamber is sealed, so the recorded surface is often perfectly intact and the work is on everything around it. On phones and SSDs the memory package frequently survives a board that does not. What consistently makes the difference is elapsed time and whether it was powered on while wet.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How long since it got wet, and whether it has been powered since
- What the liquid was: salt, pool and sugary liquids are far more aggressive
- Whether corrosion has reached the storage itself or is confined to the surrounding board
- For phones, whether the encryption keys survived alongside the memory
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $449
Failing or degraded drive (imaging required)
Bad sectors, slow reads, drops out under load. Imaged region by region on hardware built for unstable media, worst areas left until last.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Not quite your situation?
Pick the device and what it is doing, and this gives you the same answer for that combination instead.