A donor drive is a working hard drive that our engineers take parts from to repair yours. When a drive clicks, won’t spin or has a burnt circuit board, the data can often be recovered by fitting replacement heads, a replacement PCB or, in rare cases, moving the platters into a donor’s chassis.
The parts have to match exactly. Read/write heads are calibrated to the platters and firmware of one specific model, family and firmware revision, so a donor that only looks the same can fail to read anything, or scratch the platters and destroy the data. Use the checker below to compare your drive’s label with a possible donor.
Don’t attempt a transplant yourself
Opening a hard drive outside a cleanroom lets dust onto the platters, and a single particle can cause a head crash that makes the data unrecoverable. A matching donor is only part of the job: head swaps also need the right tools, adaptive data and firmware work. If the drive holds data you need, talk to one of our engineers before you open it or buy parts.
Start your recovery
Book online for a job number and shipping instructions, or call and talk to an engineer. We evaluate the drive and give you a fixed quote before any recovery work starts.