It has come to our attention from the sheer volume of this particular drive received for recovery that they have a critical manufacturing flaw.
The faulty drives are all Seagate 2.5″ drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. They are also all SATA interface. No other drives seem (at this stage) to be affected.
We are receiving quantities of these drives for recovery, and nearly all display the same cause of failure. The read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives practically unrecoverable.
Should you have one of these drives in your system, we believe the problem is serious enough to warrant copying all your data off the drive and replacing it with an alternative drive, or a retail-version Seagate drive.
We at Retrodata believe that any sizeable manufacturer would by this stage be aware of such a problem and issue a product recall notice, or an offer to have the drive exchanged for a suitable alternative at their own expense.