5 Best Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery Tools for Mac and Windows

Western Digital hard drives, like any drive, are not impervious to data loss. If your drive becomes corrupted, your Western Digital drive turns into a prison for your data, preventing you from accessing or backing up your files.

In such cases, Western Digital data recovery tools come to the rescue. This article will present you with the most effective data recovery tools you can use to easily recover your data from a Western Digital drive. As a bonus, we’ll also cover a few methods for Western Digital drive repair.

What’s Special About Western Digital Hard Drives?

Western Digital, also known as WD, is a leading storage media manufacturer. With an impressive range of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and flash-based storage, you’ll find Western Digital products in any technology store.

The company also has a rich history in the technology market. In 2009, it was the first to release a 2 TB internal hard disk drive, as well as the world’s first 3 TB internal hard disk drive that same year. More recently, in 2020, it released the WD Black SN850 which was considered one of the fastest consumer SSDs on the market.

Not unlike other hard drive brands, Western Digital categorizes its products based on implementation:

Western Digital continues to push boundaries. It recently unveiled its new OptiNAND™ technology, which integrates hard drive and solid-state drive technology to give you more storage and faster performance without being considered a hybrid. This new development is estimated to hold up to 50TB of capacity.

Best Western Digital Data Recovery Tools

Whether your Western Digital has suffered from data loss due to a malware attack, corruption, or accidental deletion, Western Digital recovery software is able to scan your drive for data and retrieve it for you. Take a look at some of the best Western Digital hard drive recovery tools on the market.

1. Disk Drill (Windows, Mac)

We recommend Disk Drill as the best Western Digital recovery tool in terms of price, efficiency, and usability. Its streamlined user interface allows you to select your drive, scan it, then recover your data in just a few clicks. It allows you to preview the files before recovery and indicates what files have the best chance of recovery. Whether you’re recovering a single file or performing recovery on a formatted drive, we recommend Disk Drill as one of the top Western Digital data recovery tools.

Price: $89 – $499

2. R-Studio (Windows, Mac, Linux)

R-Studio is Western Digital data recovery software that contains many advanced features. In addition to typical file recovery, it supports disk imaging, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, and file previews. If you have the correct license, you can even recover data over the network, which is something many other tools just don’t support. While all this is great, the user interface is super technical and difficult to navigate if you don’t know what you’re doing, making it seem like this tool is geared towards data recovery professionals rather than your average computer user.

Price: $49.99 – $899

3. DMDE (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Despite its intimidating interface, DMDE is a data recovery tool that’s packed with lots of useful features that complement recovery. Additional features include the ability to create disk images, a RAID constructor, and a partition manager to undelete partitions. In use, it gives you a lot of information about your drive and provides a generous amount of options to tailor your scan. It’s affordable and worth a try if you’re prepared to invest time in understanding how to use the program.

Price: $20 – $95

4. EaseUS (Windows, Mac)

EaseUS is another recovery tool that’s among the best Western Digital tools for Windows and Mac. It offers quick scan times and good recoverability of over 1000 file types. It supports the scanning of HDDs and SSDs. It also helps with recovery from SSDs by allowing you to easily toggle TRIM on and off from within the application. You can also recover files from a WD external hard drive, given that it’s readable in Disk Management.

Price: $69.95 – $149.95

5. GetDataBack (Windows)

GetDataBack is a Windows data recovery tool that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux file systems. Purchasing the reasonably priced license also provides you with free lifetime upgrades so you don’t need to buy a new license for each version released. You have the option of choosing one of four scan types, each being more thorough than the last at the cost of longer scan times. While the user interface appears outdated and leaves a lot to be desired, it’s functional and straightforward.

Price: $79

How to Repair Western Digital Hard Drives for Free

While a hard drive that fails repeatedly raises red flags, a hard drive failing once doesn’t confirm its demise. Instead of discarding it, repairing a Western Digital hard drive allows you to get more use out of it. These same methods can be applied if you need to fix a Western Digital external hard drive.

Mac: Repair Using Disk Utility

Apple’s Disk Utility tool includes a First Aid feature that can act as Western Digital hard drive repair software. This tool has the ability to find and repair issues with your Mac drive. In particular, it looks for issues relating to the formatting and directory structure of your drive.

This same process will work for WD external hard drive repair, as you only need to select your external WD hard drive from the list instead.

Windows: Repair Using CheckDisk

CheckDisk (CHKDSK) is a file system repair utility that’s built-in to Windows. It can be used for Western Digital hard drive repair by scanning its file system and marking bad sectors that shouldn’t be used.

CheckDisk remains one of the best Western Digital repair tools for quickly fixing minor to severe logical issues on Windows.

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