Lacie rugged failure

the flying moose wrote in post #16733035
As for recovery, the places that I've looked into have said looking around $2000CAN and there is no guarantees they can recover anything.

That's on the on the high side. Some data recovery companies do not charge unless they are successful in recovering data.

The more reputable data recovery companies have a clean room and they'll replace whatever parts are needed to get the drive operational, or will pull the platters and put them in a working drive, then transfer the contents to a new or client supplied drive. Unless the platters are physically damaged the chances of recovery are pretty good.

The less reputable companies likely are using recovery software, in which case the prospect of data recovery goes down substantially.

Since we're on the subject...

I finally found a truly free data recovery software last week. I used it to recover one of my media drives that I'd accidentally erased (i.e., deleted the directory) a handful of months ago; when that happened I put it aside and figured I'd get to it at some point, since there was nothing critical on it (backups of older work, nothing major but still useful to me).
Most softs say they're free, until you actually try to use them... "Oh, you wanted more than one file? That'll be $80, please..." Bite me.

This one is called testdisk and it comes for a variety of OS's. On Mac, it runs in Terminal and if you're not hip to code it can be a little confusing. I'm not, and it took me a couple of tries before I figured out what I actually needed to do. Let it run overnight - all total, less than 24 hours for between 200 and 250 GB - and I got everything back that was vital.
Granted, it's not labelled as it was in the directory. No folders, etc. But format tags are obvious and I can go straight to .jpg and find what I'm looking for. It's going to take a while to put everything back, and original file names are lost, but that's ultimately ok.

gnome chompski wrote in post #16736847
well, I might have misunderstood the "rugged" name. While I did drop the HDD from a very short height, it was spinning at the time. After researching this, I realized my expectations were probably not practical. Im not sure anyone should expect an HDD to survive a drop while spinning.

Exactly .
A platter based HDD, when spinning, should not be moved at all, much less dropped .

Turned off, most HDDs have very decent shock protection, even without a case .

Im thinking about investing in a Drobi mini. I like how the HDD/SDD's pop in and out. You can also use an mSATA as a working drive, and either a SDD or HDD for back up redundancy.

I have decided to also keep the working files on my laptop, and just change the location when I am finished.