While these drives have been in the industry for a considerable amount of time, they have always been a really big pain in the ass to work with. On average it takes double the time to recover data from a Spyglass 1 or 2 family drive, vs any other drive currently in the industry. While the recovery process is very similar to recovering any other regular spinning hard drive, there are some aspects to them that create challenges with no easy way out.
Original PCB
First and for the most, you need to have the original PCB. The drive uses CPU Key as part of the data encryption process, so the original PCB is required for data recovery. Because of self encryption, changing USB to SATA interface becomes a nightmare.
Donor Drives
Donor drives are always hit or miss, even if you find a drive that has been manufactured in the same factory and on the same day. This means that once you visit a data recovery center with a Spyglass drive, be prepared to invest in more than one donor hard drive.
Encryption
Recovering data from Spyglass drives with platter damage is impossible. This is due to encryption, requirement of having the original board and inability to turn off/disconnect individual heads from the head-map.
These are the main big 3, but there are always other problems these drives bring with pretty much every other case that we have in service. Slow, extremely slow copy process is another very common problem that we run into. Say the heads adapted and we finally do start the copy, in a lot of the cases, the speeds can run anywhere from 500-800kbps. Now imaging copying data from these drives that have 4TB of data. At this rate the 4TB will be copying in 508 Days, 9 Hours, and 32 Minutes, 38 Seconds – that is almost two years of non-stop copying.
To conclude this article, it is safe to say Spyglass drives are currently most of the hated drives in the data recovery industry. While they are possible to recovery if they do not sustain any platter damage, the recovery times can sometimes exceed expectations by 10x or even larger. If you have a mechanically failed Spyglass 1 4TB or Spyglass 2 5TB WD, be prepared to invest in more than one donor and be prepared to see a high quotation. While for a regular end user the data recovery seems straight forward and sometimes it is hard to justify the high prices for recovery, but there isn’t usually other way around.