Data Recovery Blog » Misc

WD Caviar Black -FAST 1TB

straywasp — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:48:00 +0000

Finally. A 7200rpm drive with 1TB of storage from Western Digital. (Didn’t we already have one of those?) Anyway, they are touting this as the fastest 3.5″ SATA drive on the market. It does have a 32MB cache and a 5 year warranty so it may be a good choice for those wishing to up their storage capacity. I am starting to warm to Western Digital as their recent offerings seem to be stylish, fast and stable. (And I have one in my iMac that i would hate to have a failure!)

Identity Fraud

admin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:48:00 +0000

What happens to your hard drive once it is replaced under warranty?
This is the question we are being asked by our customers once we have recovered data from their hard drive. Is there a process in place which is used by resellers or drive manufacturers, that ensures your data does not fall into the wrong hands?
Watch this space for further information……..

New Website

straywasp — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:41:00 +0000

Our new website is under testing and will be going live soon. Watch this space…

Disk Warrior versus Data Recovery

admin — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:04:07 +0000

Disk warrior has long been a favoured utility used by mac support companies and enthuiseasts 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 Diak Warrior to attempt to gain access to their data.
In some cases the particular hard drive being examined was too severerly 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 utlity 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 Alsofts 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.

Hitachi Talks of 4TB Drives

straywasp — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:15:00 +0000

Hitachi has apparently just started talking of their latest breakthrough in ridiculously HUGE capacity hard drives. These 4TB 3.5″ drives feature read/write heads that are 2,000 times smaller than a human hair. They also go on to mention that the same techology would allow a 1TB 2.5″ drive.

Americans Start Stockpiling Hard Drives

straywasp — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:32:00 +0000

It would appear that the ITC has launched a patent investigation concerning five manufacturers that could mean higher costs and supply difficulties in the states. The patents owned by a Californian couple cover the use of ceramic bonding tips on the internal wiring of the drives. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard and Dell are all in the frame for importing the drives into America. In my opinion it looks like the patent only covers a very obvious progression in the manufacturing process which would likely have been reached independently. We should see how this pans out in the next few weeks.

Magnetic Wobbles Main Cause of Unstable Disks

straywasp — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:41:00 +0000

ITPro.co.uk reported yesterday that a new study has revealed some interesting information about why some hard drives fail. The main cause of drive failures is apparently a magnetic effect which causes the areas on the disc platters to change their polarity. This was previously thought to be the case but the new study goes into much more detail, even suggesting that the material used by manufacturers may have its part to play. This change in polarity then jumps to neighbouring tracks causing widespread data corruption. Known as magnetic avalanche, the process could be better described as magnetic wildfire or magnetic exlosion due to the fast and devastating effect it can have on our data. I wonder if this problem could be what is wrecking so many Seagate Momentus 2.5″ drives?

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/120196/magnetic-wobbles-cause-disk-failure.html (Link now Broken, Provided for reference)

Seagate Squeezes 250GB On One Platter

straywasp — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 08:16:00 +0000

Seagate have announced “industry’s first 250GB-per-disc, 3.5-inch disc drive.” They call this the second-generation of perpendicular magnetic recording technology. The new Barracuda 7200.10 which apparently has 180GB of storage capacity per square inch, also sports the speedy SATA 3Gb/s interface to get all that storage into your life extra fast.

Read The Press Release

ST96812AS Head Crash

straywasp — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:16:00 +0000

See the gouge near the middle of the disk.

Yet another attempted data recovery was thwarted today by the dreaded head crash. We have seen possible head problems with these drives and were not surprised when the drive didn’t come ready and identify. This particular drive, an ST96812AS from a MacBook Pro was giving off some interesting sound effects to say the least. Expecting the usual failed read/write head we took it into the cleanroom and removed the cover. This drive had clearly had a head crash. Not only was a large area of magnetic media forcefully gouged off by a stray head but there was also a faint scrape towards the outer edge. We have seen this minor damage on these drives before and still been able to recover some data, although the read/write heads don’t tend to last very long. Data recovery after a head crash like this one is impossible and will be a waste of donor parts and spare drives.