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Tag: Seagate

  • Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM & ST1000DM Problems

    Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM & ST1000DM Problems
    Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM & ST1000DM Problems

    This year we have seen a fair number of these particular model hard drives with internal media damage caused by a head crash. These are 3.5″ hard drives from external cases such as Seagate Freeagent Go-Flex and Seagate Expansion Desktop. They are also used as internal hard drives in PCs running Windows 7 & 8 also used in Apple iMac’s running OSX.

    It has been difficult to confirm whether the media damage seen has been caused by an impact such as a dropped drive or from general electronic failure. What we do know is that as soon as you hear one of these hard drives start to click, then if you have not already got a backup in place, backup your data immediately.

    On an Apple Mac running OSX the first sign of a problem is usually a spinning beach ball resulting in slow access. On a PC running Windows 7 & 8, the signs of a hard drive problem are once again slow access and lack of movement from the mouse icon.

    If you have a problem with a Seagate hard drive, have a look at our Seagate Data Recovery Services. If we catch it early enough we should be able to recover the data!

     

  • Seagate ST1000LM024 Samsung HN-M101MBB

    These notebook size drives must be popular at the moment as we have started to see a fair few of them come into us. Last month we saw three of them alone with no spin failures. When opened in our clean room we have found that the internal mechanical heads have prevented the motor and discs from spinning as a result of the heads sitting on the disc media. In normal operation the heads should never touch the discs but fly above them carrying out the reading and writing. When the drive is not in use or idle the heads will locate on a parking ramp at the side of the discs. If power to the hard drive is lost while it is reading or writing then this will cause the heads to drop onto the discs and not onto the parking ramp. Once reworked in our internal clean room they were all recovered successfully.

    A common cause of this, is the unplugging of the USB cable incorrectly.

  • What To Do With A Dropped Hard Drive

    If there is data on the drive that you cannot afford to lose, then do not try to fix the drive yourself. I would also suggest that you do not even try to power it back on after it has been dropped, as this is what usually causes the most damage. Whether your drive is an external desktop drive or a small portable one, they all work in the same way. Broadly speaking the inside of a hard drive is a bit like a record player with a mechanical moving needle reading the vinyl record. I can remember the times when playing old vinyl records, once you got scratches on them they never really worked the same again.

    So I recommend not to panic, decide on what the value of the lost data is to you. Sometimes it may not be money value but a sentimental one. Once you have decided, then carry out some research online and look at data recovery company reviews. From our experience with dropped drives, the amount of work involved in overcoming the problem would not be covered by the low initial cost that some data recovery companies advertise and therefore the cost would soon escalate.

    There is always hope of recovering data from a dropped drive but as you have read, it depends on your actions as to the eventual outcome.

  • Seagate SSHD ST500LM000 Recovery

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    This hard drive is one of the new Hybrid drives that also uses flash memory for quicker access. It recognises frequently accessed data and stores this in the flash memory for faster read performance.

    We have received these hard drives for recovery before and have had good success with rework ranging from firmware fixes to internal repair.

    We received one of these hard drives just recently which had very limited access. It would show all of the hard drives details including Make, Model, Serial Number and Firmware, but it would not allow access to the user data.

    Further diagnosis revealed a problem with the firmware. Even with our specialist hardware we could not overcome the problem. This drive has been designated for R&D, to try and understand this problem, and create a solution for it in the future.

    If you have a failed Seagate drive, you may be interested in our Seagate Data Recovery Services.

    Seagate SSHD ST500LM000 Recovery
    Seagate SSHD ST500LM000 Recovery
  • PGP Whole Disk Encryption

    PGP Whole Disk Encryption

    PGP WDE is an encryption tool that uses a boot loader installed on an internal hard drive. This utility launches before Windows and prompts the user to input their password. Without the password you cannot gain access to the data.

    This utility is widely used by IBM personnel and is now part of IBM’s  process that has to be adhered to by end users. Prior to this utility IBM hard drives were restricted access by a low level ATA hard drive password setup  by the internal IBM IT department.  As computer systems advanced and maybe as a result of a reduced IBM IT department,  IBM adopted the user friendly PGP encryption process.

    We regulary receive these hard drives from IBM, and we find that the major problem is related to the PGP boot sequence. PGP does not like a hard drive that is suffering from bad sectors, especially within the partition table. It results in the user being unable to load their access code on startup, or in some cases the code is accepted but does not boot correctly due to bad sectors further along.

    We have a lot of experience recovering data from PGP whole disk encrypted hard drives and as a result our data recovery process has a very high success rate.

  • Apple iMac 1TB Seagate Hard Drive Recall

    Apple have recently announced a recall program for all iMacs with internal 1TB Seagate Hard Drives. These hard drives fail unexpectedly with no prior warning. We noted the failure of these hard drives in a post back in 2009. You can check whether your iMac has an internal 1TB Seagate Hard Drive by entering your iMac Serial Number at this link.

    This recall program has now ended. If you have one of these hard drives that has failed you may be interested in our Mac Data Recovery Services.

  • ST373454LC Unusual RAID drives

    ST373454LC Unusual RAID Drive
    ST373454LC Unusual RAID Drive

    We have recently recovered a RAID 5 array which consisted of three of these ST373454LC SCSI hard drives. These are solid, weighty drives, which don’t give off a great deal of vibration, despite spinning at 15,000 rpm; 3 times faster than most laptop hard drives!

    Upon opening one of the drives for cleanroom rework we discovered why these drives  spin so quietly. In the picture below you can see that although the drives are standard 3.5″ form factor, they actually have 2.5″ disk platters. These smaller disks create less drag, and therefore can spin faster without stability problems.

    Inside a ST373454LC Hard Drive
    Inside a ST373454LC Hard Drive

    These drives are not alone in mixing up the form factors. The popular WD Raptor drives also use a similar design.

    Downside?

    Of course the biggest downside to using smaller disks is the lower storage capacity. Typically SCSI hard drives are much lower capacity than their SATA counterparts, so this trade-off is acceptable for the speed and reliability increases. The relatively low capacity is further mitigated when the drives are used in RAID arrays.

  • Bigger Hard Drives of the Future

    The Register has today posted two articles about the ongoing battle to expand hard drive capacities.

    First is an actual device for sale, a 2TB Western Digital portable drive. This drive has a fancy new case and USB3 connection. It contains backup software and also the option to encrypt the data with a password. I wonder if it encrypts the data by default like some of their previous portables. (A bad thing!)

    Second is a futuristic announcement from Seagate about their new HAMR technology. This new tech uses a laser to heat part of the disk before magnetising it. This apparently allows for much higher densities, theoretically paving the way for 60TB hard drives. There doesn’t appear to be any products using this technology at the moment.

    60TB drives will be fantastic for backups, but horrible to backup without a new, faster form of connection. These would take almost forever (exaggeration) to fill up by SATA.

    This news helps prove that hard drives are far from dead. It will take a long time until SSDs can cope with such massive capacities, at a similar cost to these beasts.

  • Seagate Full Disk Encryption FDE

    Seagate FDE hard drives encrypt the data automatically as it is read and written to the drive. As you save data to the drive it is encrypted immediately and can only be accessed when you input your user name and password. The drive will then be temporarily unlocked and allow the operating system to boot. Once the drive is powered off, it will be automatically locked again.

    We have received several of these drives from customers who cannot access their data due to a hard drive failure. You may still be asked for the password, but the laptop will then fail to boot. This can be as a result of bad sectors or electronic problems. We can overcome virtually any type of failure and can return your data back to you decrypted and fully accessible on a new hard drive.

    See our Seagate Data Recovery Services for more info.

  • USB Powered Portable Hard Drives Failing To Spin

    We see a lot of portable hard drives that don’t spin up when plugged into a USB port. All brands of hard drive can be effected including Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate. The problem can be caused by power loss or sometimes due to mis-plugging of the USB lead. This causes the internal read heads to sit on the disc instead of parking on the ramp at the side.

    The only way to overcome this problem is by taking the hard drive into our clean room to replace the damaged heads with good ones. This allows us to copy the data from the drive and store it on our server.

    The repaired hard drives are not suitable to be reused after this sort of work as they will not work correctly, or fail after a very short time.