Hitachi Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery

There are many laptop manufacturers who use Hitachi notebook hard disk drives. You can find them in Dell and Sony's to name just a couple. As you are probably aware, Hitachi purchased IBM's hard disk drive division in 2002. I remember the date well since it was on my birthday June 4th. Hitachi kept the 2 primary hard disk lines going: Travelstar and Deskstar.

With the takeover, quality of the hard drives didn't fall off, in fact the drives actually got better! Take for instance the Deskstar. This drive was commonly referred to as the Deathstar drive in the computer repair industry. Now it is one of the better drives. Since Hitachi maintained, if not increased, IBM's market share of hard disk sales, DTI sees a lot of Hitachi hard drives sent in for data recovery. This isn't a statement against Hitachi or the quality of their drives. ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL! If you are interested in the reason for the failures read my wife's post Why Hard Drives Fail .
OK the sales portion of the post is over so lets start talking about specific hard disk recovery issues we run into with Hitachi laptop or notebook drives. The most common Hitachi laptop hard drive is the Travelstar.

Here is a collection of model numbers with current faults we are seeing although this is not gospel and diagnostic procedures need to be run before accurate fault prognoses can be found