Hitachi-IBM Head Replacement Donor Guide

Although Hitachi drives were purchased by Western Digital, but there’re still many Hitachi and even IBM hard drives in the market. There’re many physical data recovery cases in our data recovery lab.

Hitachi-IBM Head Replacement Donor Guide

Same Model number;
Same MLC codes;
Same P/N number;
Manufacturing date/country may sometimes be considered too.

Always remember the head number and head structure need to match.

Please note: for 5450A7, 7250A7, 5410(1T) families, the heads can be picky, users need to match as more as possible.

To fix Hitachi/IBM physically damaged hard drives, users need to swap the PCB or need to open the hard drive in clean room and swap heads. To have high-success-rate of Hitachi/IBM physical data recovery success rate, the following factors are very important:

01: Professional head replacement tools;
02: Donor hard drive heads to replace the damaged original drive heads;
03: Professional physical data recovery skills: including firmware repair, head swap, pcb swap, platter swap, platter cleaning, heads’ cleaning, and motor unstuck skills. These skills require professional data recovery training courses or long time’s experience in handling different data recovery cases.

Users can buy the premium HDD Donor book here for all hdd donor guides with more tips and valuable experience.