Cheetah 15K.5 · 15K.7 · 10K.7 · Savvio 10K.3 · ST3300655LC · ST3146854LW · ST9300603SS
Seagate Cheetah and Savvio drive recovery. Fast, small and old, and still holding the only copy of something.
Seagate's Cheetah was the fast drive in every server for fifteen years, 3.5-inch, 10K and 15K, on 68-pin and 80-pin SCSI, then Fibre Channel, then early SAS; the Savvio put the same idea in a 2.5-inch case. They live on in PowerEdge 2850s and 2950s, ProLiant G4s and G5s, IBM xSeries and the occasional Clariion, in a cupboard, running something nobody dared migrate. They arrive seized after years off, clicking, or with a dead RAID card, and they need a terminated controller of their own generation and a donor from a market that closed a decade ago. One Cheetah or Savvio imaged is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing; a 15K set of five or more starts at £1,250 + VAT.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668
Models we see, family by family.
Which kind of drive is it →| Family | Model strings | Interface, capacity and notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cheetah SCSI | ST3146854LW, ST3300655LC, ST373455LW | 68-pin and 80-pin SCA · Ultra320 |
| Cheetah FC | ST3300655FC, ST3300007FC | 40-pin Fibre Channel |
| Cheetah SAS | ST3450856SS, ST3600057SS | Early SAS · 15K |
| Savvio | ST9300603SS, ST9146852SS, ST9300605SS | 2.5-inch · 10K and 15K SAS |
What tends to go wrong on a Cheetah.
Seagate Cheetah and Savvio symptoms, and how long each gives you.
Not listed? Describe it on the form →What the message means on a Cheetah.
Describe yours to us →| What you see | The usual reason | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Dead after years off | Seized bearings or tired electronics | Freed and imaged on the bench |
| Not seen on the bus | Termination, ID or cable | Terminated controller of its generation |
| Clicking | Failed heads on a donorless drive | Matched donor sought; imaged |
| RAID card dead | The set is on the drives | Imaged and reassembled without the card |
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.
The drive on its own bench
A member drive is read on the equipment its interface needs: a SAS imager for SAS and NL-SAS, a SATA imager for enterprise SATA, a terminated SCSI or Fibre Channel controller for the legacy drives, a PCIe adaptor for NVMe. It is never put back in a server, and never in a controller that will try to rebuild. Drives that answer at full speed are imaged; drives with weak or failed heads go to the clean bench, where matched donors are fitted and the service area repaired before a sector is read.
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.
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.
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.
From the bench
- Do not keep trying. A drive from 2006 that did not spin this morning needs the bench, and every attempt is a spin-up it cannot afford.
- The bench has the controllers, adaptors and terminators. Nothing in a desktop will connect.
- Send the set. The survivors are imaged while they still read.
What helps, and what harms.
Do this much first
- Power down and stop
- Label the slots and send every drive
- Send the RAID card if it is easy
- Tell us what generation the server is and what is on it
What sets us back
- Powering it on again to see
- Borrowing a SCSI card from another machine
- Letting a new controller initialise the drives
- Scrapping the server before the data is off
Questions answered before you commit.
Can you still recover Cheetah drives?
Yes, on terminated controllers of their own generation, with the adaptors their connectors need, and with donors where the bench has them.
The server's RAID card is dead. Are the drives readable?
Yes. The array's description is on the drives; they are imaged and reassembled in software without the card.
What does it cost?
£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; a 15K set of five or more from £1,250 + VAT.
How long does it take?
3–4 days at the bench for one drive that needs no donor; longer where one must be found.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
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.