Hit 500 dead drives this week, honest number that surprised me

So I keep a tally of every dead drive that comes through my shop, just a little notebook thing. This week I crossed 500. I started counting back in 2019 when I moved to Austin. Five hundred drives that people thought were lost forever. That number hit me harder than I expected. Most folks don't realize how many are fixable with a simple PCB swap or a frozen platter trick. But the real shocker was that 140 of those 500 were just bad cables or loose connections. People tossed working drives because a SATA cable was flaky. Has anyone else kept a count like that and found the failure causes break down way different than they guessed?

2 comments

2 Comments

tylerpark7d ago

Wait, 140 out of 500 were just cables? That's wild, feels like half the "dead" drives I see are just people not checking the obvious stuff first.

the_emery6d ago

honestly the amount of times i've fixed a "dead" drive with just a different cable is insane. people always go straight to the data recovery software when i'm over here like, did you try wiggling the connector? ive had drives that wouldnt even show up in bios that worked fine after i swapped out a janky sata cable. and its not always the cable itself either, sometimes its the port on the motherboard or the power connector not seating right. real talk, i always keep a couple spare cables and a cheap usb dock around just for testing before i assume the worst. saves a ton of headaches and money.