Data Recovery Blog
A selection of our articles, written by us and not Ai generated. These are generally details of some of the recoveries we’ve completed, or other associated info.
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Intel® Optane™ H10 Data Recovery
Intel Optane has been around for a while, and can improve SSD performance by combining “Optane Memory” (fast storage) and a standard SSD. For servers this requires plugging in independent Optane devices. The H10 SSD however comes as a single standard form factor m.2 SSD. The two devices are created by internally splitting the PCIe lanes and providing two separate SSDs over the same connector: one small and fast, the other larger and relatively slower. This allows the host computer to create a lop-sided RAID or cache, where the benefits of both devices are seamlessly blended together to create a…
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Recovery From Water Damaged Fishing Boat – Plotter GPS Olex Chart Computer
We recently heard from a local fisherman that had been unfortunate to have his boat take on water whilst moored during a storm. Due to a series of unfortunate events, the only record of his fishing pots out at sea were stored on the ship computers. These computers were not only submerged in seawater, but also diesel from the engines. Our first step was to carefully extract the storage drives from the computers. One contained a 128GB InnoDisk EverGreen SSD, and the other a Toshiba Hard Drive. We decontaminated the surfaces of the drives, to make them easier to deal…
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Don’t Use AI to Write a Data Recovery Enquiry
We’ve seen a few clear cases now where somebody has made an enquiry for data recovery with us using an AI1 tool. I’m not calling this out to be mean, I just really don’t understand the point. To give the benefit of the doubt, it appears that the tool was probably used to flesh out the enquiry for some reason. Maybe to make it seem more professional? Unfortunately, it made up details that are wrong, and added zero benefit to the enquiry. It’s true that most people needing data recovery don’t necessarily have a huge amount of diagnostic tools available,…
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Beware “New” Disks on Amazon
If you search for external hard drives on Amazon, you’ll see a vast selection of disks, with little more than price as a differentiator. Some of those are from established manufacturers, but others have curious names and very little reputation. What’s concerning is that we’ve found recertified (AKA, Used) drives being sold inside some of these supposedly new drives. If you put an old motor in a new car, is it still a new car? You might think buying used drives is OK, but recertified drives are usually marked in some way, and come with a lower cost. Then it’s…
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You Can’t Win Them All
We often get called Saviours or Magicians. But sometimes the magic wand just doesn’t work. This unfortunate drive had serious media damage on both discs and both surfaces. You can see the scratches are so deep they’re down to inner glass layer. The drive in question is Seagate Ultra Slim Portable. The damage maybe not be as bad as some we have seen in the past, but it’s still bad enough to prevent recovery. Click here to see more about Media Damage and other types of Failures.
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Fake Drives: 2025 Update
There are an awful lot of fake storage drives available to buy online. These are not just cheap or low quality devices, but they are actively designed to trick you. They are fakes. Scams. We just had another one sent to us to store customer data, so here’s our latest public announcement post. Looks legit? Not only do the fakes appear to be normal at first glance, they are hacked to appear as the advertised capacity to your computer. They come in all shapes and sizes to mimic real devices. And we just can’t resist opening them up to see…
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Helium Hard Drives – Data Recovery Challenges
A Bit of Background A helium hard drive is a mechanical hard disk drive with an internal enclosure filled with helium gas instead of oxygen. The enclosure is then hermetically sealed to slow the escape of gas. Helium creates a unique low density environment where the internal hardware can operate more efficiently resulting in less turbulence compared to air. With less rigidity in platter thickness required, this allows manufacturers to increase hard drive capacity by adding more slimmer platters into the same amount of space. The Data Recovery Challenges Less turbulence means less resistance so ideally opening a helium hard…
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Big or Small Old or New
Since we started offering our specialist data recovery services back in 1998 (😱) storage device capacity and speed has increased almost exponentially. New disks at the time were 6-30GB, but many disks we saw were much older and lower capacity. Now it’s common to see 8TB+ disks and even 100TB. Also physical storage device size has reduced to a mere 2.5″ form factor for a 100TB SSD or 6TB mechanical hard drive, and even smaller for “blade” SSD’s. Keeping up with changing technology is crucial in being able to offer data recovery for the latest storage devices. We do still…
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Yamaha AW2816 Audio Workstation Data Recovery
We recently had an interesting case to recover. Although the disk was just a normal 20GB IBM Travelstar from circa 2001, the contents were not so common. This disk was from a Yamaha Audio Workstation; A combination of a multi track recorder and mixer etc. It’s a lovely big lump of kit, with motorised faders and a graphical display. Sounds Like Trouble Problems started when the user was in the middle of an operation saving something, and the device stalled. After a hard-reboot, the disk was reportedly unreadable. Nightmare. There is no capability on-board to self repair a damaged disk,…
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LaCie External SSD Recovery
The first battle when attempting to recover one of these LaCie SSDs is getting into the thing! Fortunately LaCie have used this design before for external hard drives, so we’ve already figured it out. It’s not for the faint of heart though. You need to carefully, and delicately slip a strong bare Stanley blade into the seam on the back of the device. This is just thin enough to slide in without damaging the Aluminium, but strong enough to not snap. Warning, do not try this at home! There’s a knack to it, and you could easily slice off something…