Shattered platter from dropped HDD

How many of us give a second thought to the sensitivity of storage devices which hold our personal and important data?
After all there is way too much stuff in life to consider such light weight matters right? Well not really and here is why.

Wouldn’t we be upset if the hard drive that held our wedding or holiday snaps for instance fell on the floor? No problem, I will just pick it up and plug it back in again and continue using it, oh, it’s now making a strange clicking noise and is not accessible by my computer, surely such a small knock would not cause this to happen.

This hard disk came into our lab, it has taken a rather nasty fall, and as a consequence has completely shattered the top platter, the bottom platter has stayed intact, platters hold the user & SA data for most brands of HDD, and in this case the substrate is made of glass, hence the completely shattered result.

Due to the technological structure of the HDD, any potential recovery of this disk would be at the extreme end of very advanced engineering, and at best if one platter could be accessed a full recovery would be impossible due to the write through technology and destruction of the top platter, leaving ‘gaps’ in data set recovered.