RDD / Every kind of member drive / Helium and SMR members

HUH728080ALE600 · ST12000NM0007 · MG08ACA16TE · WD40EFAX · HC650 · SMR

Helium and SMR members. Sealed drives that must not be opened, and shingled drives that must not be rebuilt.

Two kinds of drive changed the bench in the last decade. Helium drives, from HGST's He6 in 2013 through every Exos X, Ultrastar HC5xx and Toshiba MG07 onwards, are welded shut with helium inside so that more platters can spin closer together; open one in air and the heads that flew on helium do not fly on air, so a head swap means imaging immediately afterwards and never reassembling for use. Shingled drives, WD's Red EFAX and Ultrastar HC6xx among others, overlap their tracks and keep a map of where each block really is; they stall on the random writes of a rebuild, and when the map fails the drive looks blank with the data still on it. Both are recoverable, on different benches with different rules. One helium or SMR member imaged is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

Power down. Label every slot before a drive comes out. Do not rebuild while a second drive is flagged. Do not clear or import a foreign configuration. Do not initialise, reformat or PSID-revert anything. A rebuild reads every sector of every surviving member, and on a set whose drives were bought together it is where the second failure is found. Nothing on the drives gets worse while the server is off.

Helium and SMR symptoms, and what each means.

Not listed? Describe it on the form →

Helium drive clickingFailed heads inside a sealed case. Power down; do not open it.Do not delay

Helium drive opened at homeThe heads will not fly on air. Send it as it is; the odds have changed.Do not delay

Helium level warning in SMARTThe seal is leaking. Image it now.Do not delay

SMR drive shows blank or wrong capacityTranslator fault. The data is there; the map is not.Do not delay

Rebuild stalled on an EFAX driveShingled writes cannot keep up. Power down; do not restart.Do not delay

Fleet of He8 drives failing one after anotherSeven-year-old helium drives. Image the weak ones first.Do not delay

Packing it and posting it: power the server or shelf down, write the slot number on each drive with a marker before it comes out of its carrier, and keep it in the carrier. Send every member from the set where the set is the job, or the one failed member where the set is healthy and you want it imaged for the rebuild. Each drive travels in an anti-static bag inside its own padding, in a box with nothing able to move. Send the controller only if we ask for it. Insure the parcel for what the data is worth rather than the price of the drives, and use a tracked service. The posting address is not printed anywhere on this site; it arrives by email in reply to the form, with a booking sheet to print; the sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Or hand the sealed parcel in at the nearest of ten drop-off points, your name on the outside and the sheet inside; say where you are on the form and it comes by email. We pay the postage home either way. The whole of it is written up on the guide to packing and posting.

Where it lives, and what fails.

Why heliumHelium is a seventh the density of air, so platters spin with less turbulence and heads fly lower; a helium drive fits nine or ten platters where an air drive fits five. The case is laser-welded, and once opened it is open.

Head swaps on helium drivesWhen a head stack must be replaced, the drive is opened in clean air, the donor fitted, and the drive imaged immediately, because heads designed for helium fly badly in air and not for long. Some benches refill; ours images fast and once.

Ageing fleetsBackblaze's He8 fleet, the HUH728080ALE600, reached an annual failure rate above 10 per cent at about seven and a half years old in late 2025. Helium drives bought in 2016 and 2017 are reaching that age everywhere.

Shingled recordingSMR overlaps tracks like roof tiles to fit more data; writing one track disturbs the next, so the drive stages writes and keeps a translator mapping logical blocks to their real place. Random writes, which a rebuild is made of, pile up in the staging area until the drive stalls or times out. A failed translator leaves a drive that reads as blank.

Model strings, and what they tell us.

Describe yours to us →

Model string	What it is	What it means on the bench
HUH728080ALE600	HGST He8 8TB, 2015	Fleets failing at seven years; heads
ST12000NM0007	Exos X12, 2017–2019 fleets	Helium; end-of-life failure pattern
MG08ACA16TE	Toshiba MG08 16TB, nine platters	Helium; large head stacks
WD40EFAX	WD Red 4TB, drive-managed SMR	Translator faults; slow rebuilds
WUH721816ALE6L4	Ultrastar HC550 16TB	Helium; SATA 512e

From the parcel arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo rebuilds, no imports, no resets

The drive on its own bench

A helium drive that clicks goes to the clean bench and is opened once, for a matched head stack, with the imager ready before the lid comes off. An SMR drive is checked for its translator first; a failed translator is repaired in the service area before any sector is asked for.

Read at its native interfaceFailing heads to the clean bench

Imaged once, at its native sector size

Every drive is imaged sector by sector, head by head where it needs it, with the bad areas last. Drives with 520- or 528-byte sectors are imaged as they are and the extra bytes stripped from the image, never the drive. Self-encrypting drives are unlocked on the imager with the key you supply. From then on the originals are not touched again.

Head by head, weak areas lastNative sector size preserved

The image, and the set

Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.

One member: a sector-identical image on fresh mediaA set: reassembled in software from the images

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job3–4 days at the bench

What arrives most often

Never open a helium drive at home. A lid off in a kitchen is a set of heads that will never fly again, and the odds drop from good to poor in a second.
A helium level warning is a deadline. Image the drive before the level falls further.
An SMR drive that reads blank has usually lost its map, not its data. The translator is rebuilt on the bench and the data is where it was.
Do not restart a stalled rebuild on a shingled member. It stalled because the drive could not keep up; a second attempt piles more writes onto a staging area that is already full.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · RDD-2026-0555JOB LOGGED ✓

An HUH728080ALE600 out of an eight-drive TrueNAS RAIDZ2, clicking, with a second He8 showing a helium level warning

The clicking drive was opened once on the clean bench, a matched head stack fitted, and the drive imaged immediately on the SATA imager before the heads could suffer in air. The second drive was imaged before its helium fell further. Both images went back on fresh drives, and the pool resilvered from members that answered every read.

100% of both members recovered5 days here, and back by post

Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

Power down at the first click or warning
Label the slots and send the weak drives
Tell us the model string; it says helium or air
Say whether the drive is EFAX or another SMR model

What sets us back

Opening a helium drive to look
Restarting a stalled rebuild on an SMR member
Waiting on a helium level warning
Buying shingled replacements for a RAID

Questions answered before you commit.

Can a helium drive be recovered if the heads have failed?

Yes. It is opened once on the clean bench, a matched head stack fitted, and imaged immediately, because the heads fly badly in air. It is not reassembled for use.

My SMR drive shows as blank. Is the data gone?

Usually not. The translator that maps blocks to their real place has failed; it is rebuilt on the bench and the data is where it was.

Why did my rebuild stall on the WD Red?

Because it is shingled. Random writes pile up in the drive's staging area until it stalls. Power down and image it; do not restart.

What does it cost?

£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; sets from £500 + VAT.

How long does it take?

3–4 days at the bench for one drive; 5–10 days at the bench for a set.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

WD / HGST Ultrastar →Seagate Exos →WD Red →RAID drive clicking →

Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.

0800 6890668

Price my job Packing and posting

Every kind of member drive

Manufacturers

Whatever it is saying now

What it costs, and what follows