Three makers, a dozen labels
Drive families, and the boxes they come out of. The label decides the firmware. The mechanics decide the job.
Three companies make nearly every drive in every server: Seagate, Western Digital with the HGST families it bought, and Toshiba. Dell, HPE and Lenovo buy from them, load their own firmware and print their own part numbers; NetApp, EMC and Sun format them with extra bytes in every sector; Synology and QNAP fill their bays with the NAS versions; and the solid-state members come from Micron, Samsung, Intel, Kioxia and SanDisk under the same labels. The family decides the mechanics, the firmware and the dated faults; the host decides the messages, the carrier and what the warranty engineer takes away. Find yours below. One member drive imaged is £300 + VAT, a set of two to four is £500 + VAT upwards, and larger sets, 15K SAS sets and storage shelves start at £1,250 + VAT, with the figure in writing after the free look.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668
Which label means which drive.
A to Z, every family and host with a page.
Not on the list? Tell us the model string →Why the family matters less than what was done to the set.
Two things decide how a member-drive job turns out, and the family is neither of them. The first is what has actually failed: heads, a service area, a controller in an SSD, a firmware clock, a backplane the drives share. The second is what was done between the failure and the parcel: a rebuild started onto survivors bought on the same day as the drive that died, a foreign configuration cleared to tidy the screen, a drive initialised because a host could not read its sector size, a PSID revert on a locked drive, a firmware update pushed onto SSDs that had just died of firmware, a failed drive handed to the warranty courier before anyone asked what was on it.
The pages here are organised by family and host because that is what is on the label, and written around the mechanics underneath, the firmware on top, and the dated faults that hit that family's owners, with sources, because that is what the bench needs and what the forums get wrong. Each says which of the vendor's own remedies is safe and which is not: Dell's Clear, HPE's replace-under-warranty on a degraded set, the forum's sg_format, the PSID on the label.
None of the makers runs a recovery laboratory for server drives. Seagate's Rescue plan is an in-lab service that takes up to thirty business days and is not available everywhere; Dell withdrew its data recovery service in 2022 and it only ever covered client PCs; HPE, WD and Toshiba offer none. What Dell and HPE do offer is drive retention on a support contract, so that the failed drive stays with you, and that is the thing to have, because the recovery is done here.
The questions that come up first.
My drive is not listed. Can you still recover it?
Yes. If it came out of a server, a RAID set or a shelf, it is a Seagate, a WD or a Toshiba underneath, or one of five flash makers, and it is on this list in every way that matters. Tell us the model string.
Does the family change the price?
No; the number of drives does. One member is £300 + VAT, two to four are £500 + VAT upwards, and larger sets, 15K SAS sets and storage shelves start at £1,250 + VAT.
Does Dell or HPE recover data from their drives?
Not as a service we could find. Both offer drive retention contracts so the failed drive stays with you; the recovery is done here.
Should I use the vendor's own repair first?
Only if every other drive in the set is healthy and you have a backup. On a set with a second weak drive, the rebuild reads the sectors that finish it. The free look here costs nothing and says which you have.
Not on the list?
Tell us the model string on the label. If it came out of a server, it is on the list in every way that matters, and the first look is free.