Friday night Pharaoh (Seagate 7200.12 500GB)
To finish the week. Work replacing the failed head assembly in a Seagate 500GB ST3500418AS. This is a Barracuda 7200.12. The engineering name is called Pharaoh. This was the last series of Seagate HDD where the head-assembly parked on the platter when powered off. Consequently head-assembly removal is much more challenging. Using the best tools available (from HDDSurgery) makes the work much more straight forward and significantly improves the success rates as the heads never make contact with the active area of the platter.
The donor heads responded well, and the disk is currently imaging. It should complete within the next 2 hours. Currently there looks to be a 99.9% successful recovery of the owner’s photograph archive which dates back to 2007. It should be a happy weekend for the customer.