I had a Cavalry brand 400gb external hard drive that fell and stopped working several years ago. I was unable to find a person who could possibly fix it locally and was afraid it would get lost or damaged if I mailed it off somewhere so I kept it stored in a fireproof/waterproof safe in my home. I recently found a data recovery service with a local address so I dropped it off and within an hour I was told that the bearings were seized up but that the "platter" looked to be undamaged and he suspected the data would be recoverable. He stated he had to order replacement bearings and would let me know in about a week or so how things were going. It took several weeks for him to receive the replacement bearings, but by then he had said he was running through it and had come across several bad sectors and recovery wasn't looking good but he would call when he finished the next day... a week later I called him for an update and he told me none of the data was recoverable bc the platter was too degraded. I was confused as he had initially told me that the platter looked fine, but was now telling me the platter was degraded and gave an analogy about the silver metal part coming off a cd as it gets old. I was confused (I am not tech saavy) but took it as a loss and told him I would pick my items up. Fast forward to today. I picked it up, it was no longer in the case which, ok, he had to take it out to take apart to fix, but the hard drive he gave me says "Seagate" on it. I asked him why it said Seagate when I gave him a Cavalry drive and he said the the Cavalry brand was only for the external casing but that the inside drive was actually Seagate and that it was normal.... so I guess I have a few questions. Does any of what that man said make any sense?? How can I tell if this drive is actually my drive? I never removed if from the external casing so I never noted serial number and it looks nothing like it did when I dropped it off so visually I have no identifiers. Would the serial number give me any clues to verify if it could be correct product? Would a Cavalry brand EHD actually have a Seagate drive inside?