helium st16000NE00 - Needs cleanroom pitts or rossman

[Alandata Recovery]

Hi

I have a customer with a st16000ne helium

It doesnt come ready and sounds not terrible.

He wants to send it to Pitts or rossman

Pitts

99 eval

upto 3500 recovered.

Rossman

1100 non-refundable plus donor

2500-5000 

5000 includes platter cleaning if needed.

So with pitts if they open and its destroyed then I assume its just the 99

If they have to try heads then that should be another $400? maybe for parts.

If there is no data then is the total around $500  ?

Anybody have any feedback on helium recovery ?

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[Desert Data Recovery]

Rossman has had success with helium. I wouldn't touch Pitts with the proverbial bargepole.....

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[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

I would suggest HDDSurgery in Serbia, if overseas shipping is an option. They have their own in-house procedures and solutions for Seagate He drives. There are several announcements at HDD Guru, including this one:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?p=308467#p308467

[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

Two years ago he was still turning away helium jobs. I wonder how many he has done since then? When did his situation change?

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/comments/1d2ac5g/could_really_use_some_help_with_partition_recovery/

https://groups.google.com/g/datarecoverycertification/c/sWyBJBk8Hbg

[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

I was reading his blog on the subject:

https://rossmanngroup.com/services/helium-drive-data-recovery

There are several areas that are wrong, and one seems very odd. Here he seems to be saying that each head in a headstack can have a different SMART flying hours count:

240
Head Flying Hours

Exos reports total head flying hours and uses the value internally to schedule surface scans; mismatch between this and Power-On Hours is normal.

HC5xx logs internal flying hours; advanced PC-3000 HGST CCB diagnostic queries are used when investigating localised head wear.

MG08 and MG09 report a single aggregate flying-hours raw value; the firmware does not expose per-head breakdowns through standard SMART.

Here he seems to be saying that flying hours counts the time that the active head is in servo lock. The first instance is what happens when you transplant a set of heads from an air drive into a helium HDA. The second instance describes the result of transplanting a helium HSA into an air drive. AISI, if a head is not locked on servo, then it clicks and the drive spins down. Or am I missing something? ISTM that these may be an AI hallucinations.

Erratic increments. Aerodynamic lift on the slider air-bearing surface shifts as air displaces helium, so the time-in-position counters become noisy.

Either frozen or absent updates after the failure event, since the head stack is no longer producing valid position telemetry.

On Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 7:52:07 AM UTC+10 Tim - Desert Data Recovery wrote:

[Alandata Recovery]

The customer wasn't fond of sending it out of state. He decided to send it to Rossman in Texas after reading more about pits. 

So it will be interesting to see the result. 

I called to talk to Rossman to get some clarification and the guy I talked to didn't seem to know much. He didn't know the the website said there was an $1,100 non-refundable plus parts. He had trouble finding the helium section of the pricing. I wanted to find out if there was a charge just to open the drive. I wanted to find out if they open it and it's a pile of dust then is it no charge or what? If they open it and it needs heads is there a non-refundable at that point to cover heads? He didn't really know in the manager wasn't there but seems that there's no charge to open that if they don't do anything but if they're going to try heads then it's a 50% of the probable 2500-5000 charge and they refund it minus the parts if it's not recoverable. 

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[compos mentis]

It's not a good look. It doesn't appear that they've done too many of
these jobs.

Their blog is full of errors, too. Louis Rossmann puts his name to them,
but It seems that they are mostly written by AI. I'm not against this
approach, except that the content needs to be vetted by someone who
understands the subject.

Also, I don't understand why they need to use 99.999% helium. Balloon
grade is 97.5%, and SMART attribute 22 (helium level) has a threshold of
25. This suggests that Seagate warrants that the drive is still
serviceable after a significant amount of helium has leaked out. I also
recall HDDSurgery saying that Seagate's helium drives can operate in an
air environment.

[RecuperoDati299]

@ RecuperoDati299 we have a fee for opening the He drives

so far we received an amount of them but they all were USB WD or few Seagates used in external boxes

all (all) of them dropped and all of them with multiple matte brushed heads'sliders

🤦🏻‍♂️

R.

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[compos mentis]

Are there any helium drives with native WD firmware, or are they all using HGST firmware? I ask this because Rossmann's blog states that they use DCM to select suitable donors. DCM is exclusively a WD thing, AFAIK.

[wayne horner]

I noticed the blog article saying that spinning the drive up with air could make the heads crash into the platters.

This doesnt make sense

air is much denser

the heads would fly higher

less likely to crash

also would have trouble picking up the data

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[compos mentis]

I noticed that, too. In fact it's mentioned elsewhere in the same
article. Alternatively, the air flow would be more turbulent in an air
environment, so perhaps that's a reason to be wary of head crashes.

[Brian Cometa]

Digilab

[Alandata Recovery]

Digilab looks good but there's no indication of pricing. 

Artem follows this forum I wonder what he thinks

Alandata Data Recovery -  (949)287-3282  

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[compos mentis]

I recall that he said that he tried to run some helium drive in air, but
it suffered a head crash. That's contrary to HDDSurgery's experience. He
also said that some models won't spin up if they can't detect helium.

[Brian Cometa]

I think ~$1900. But you should ask him directly.