It appears that Seagate are offering an unusual free data recovery service to customers affected by a recent firmware bug. The bug which affects certain 7200.11 drives, DiamondMax 22 and Barracuda ES.2 drives, makes the disks inaccessible when the host system is powered on.
To put it in a nutshell, this could be the future for storage technology. The memristor has been the missing link from back when resistors, inductors and capacitors were originally created. What has now changed is the use of nano technology which has allowed the creation of the fourth electronic component; the memristor.
1. Stop using the drive. Any mechanical faults can be worsened by using a failing hard disk drive.
Checking file system on C:The type of file system is NTFSOne of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue.To skip disk checking, press any key within 7 second(s).
Toshiba have recently announced the new GSX series of hard disk drives. With 200GB per platter these 5400rpm drives should see the light of day by the end of the year. There are other notable features such as the new acoustic technology which aims to silence seek operations.
In addition to increasing areal density to 308 gigabits-per-square-inch, the 400GB MK4058GSX incorporates acoustic techniques that make the 5,400 RPM HDD nearly inaudible during seek operations.
Disk warrior has long been a favoured utility used by mac support companies and enthusiasts to analyse and repair Macintosh volumes. It is favoured mainly for it’s simplicity and many features including data recovery.
As a data recovery company we have received many mac hard drives from clients who had previously used Disk Warrior to attempt to gain access to their data.
In some cases the particular hard drive being examined was too severely damaged for Disk Warrior to be of any use. In other cases Disk Warrior was used but the data left afterwards was corrupt and not accessible.
This article is to hopefully make people aware of the downside to using a powerful utility such as this, especially when your lost data is critical to you.
The problem is not so much the utility itself, but the lack of a users understanding of how powerful this utility is. This is a quote used on Alsoft’s website that can be misleading.
“ Simply click the rebuild button and Disk Warrior goes to work ”
In any data loss situation writing to the hard drive that has your lost data is something that should never be carried out, as it is this writing process that can do more damage that good. Disk Warrior uses this process when rebuilding mac volume structures and in cases when it gets it wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic for the end user. It often results in the rebuilt data left behind being damaged and not accessible.
We recommend that you read the documentation that comes with the utility carefully and fully understand it’s capabilities.
It seems the backlash may have already begun. As we expected the current batch of SSDs are no match for the long perfected hard drives. Reports of customers returning solid state laptops are apparently hitting the 10-20% mark. I would like to think that a new revolutionary data storage medium gets into the market place before SSDs really take hold. I have an SSD in my EEE pc which is fine but I can’t help thinking a 30GB 1.8″ drive would have been far more versatile. Let’s see what developments appear in round 2. Will the SSDs fight back? (I think not…)