Chosen Solution
I have a large western digital hard drive. While reinserting it into my case I tore a small part of the hermetic seal and could see into the axis and platters. How damaged is it? Can I save the drive? Can I safely turn it on for a couple hours to extract the data myself? Edit: I care about the data, but not enough to pay for professional recovery. I’m willing to risk losing it.
If you care about the data, send it to a data recovery shop. Whether the drive will last long enough is not important, you don’t want to find out with only one copy of the data.
Most likely than not you could pull data off of it fine but if you could afford it I would recommend a professional
