March 4th, 2010
At least every week we receive a few recoveries where the drive will not spin up. The problem is a physical issue where the spindle motor that spins the hard drive’s platters is seized. The cost of recovering from such a situation is quite expensive, but it may be possible to avoid such a dilemma.
Manufactures design external enclosures that mount the drive either vertically or horizontally as shown in the picture below. Due to the high centre of gravity with the vertical units, they are extremely susceptible to being knocked over, which in turn may cause your hard drive’s spindle to seize. Avoid buying one of these vertically mounted external hard drive enclosure if at all possible.
Vertically mounted (SUV) Horizontally mounted (Porshe)
While it’s true hard drives are designed to be mounted either vertically or horizontally, they are not designed to withstand much shock while operating. Approximately 10 years ago when hard drives were still designed with standard ball bearings in their spindle motors, they rarely seized. But in the quest for better performance, drives began using fluid dynamic bearings. With FD bearings, the metal balls were replaced with a layer of liquid. While there is no doubt that these bearings were superior in performance, they do have the disadvantage that under shock situations the fluid dynamic bearings can catastrophically seize. And that is what we are seeing so much of today.
Tags: external hard drive enclosures, hard drive doesn't spin, seized spindle motor
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February 26th, 2010
This is a story I love to tell. It reveals much of the human psyche and I find it fascinating
Back in the 90’s when Data Recovery type services were first starting to mature I was working for one of the pioneers of the industry, Nick Majors. Nick was a man of unquestionable integrity and honesty. So it was no surprise that nothing perturbed him more at the time than the massive influx of companies that suddenly “claimed” to be experts in data recovery. From cases that were sent to us for a 2nd opinion and through our own secret shopper program, where we sent data recovery cases to these so called experts, it became obvious that there were a lot of unscrupulous and opportunistic villains infecting the data recovery business. They made their money by getting in as many jobs as they could, charging an evaluation fee for each one, and then recovering the 10-15% of the cases that were the easiest (skimming the cream off the top as we referred to it back then) . They would do the cases where no parts and little intelligence were required … basically the cases that could easily be handled by any commercially available recovery software. Those they couldn’t recover were declared unrecoverable and the client was told they were out of luck.
So it was decided that we had a responsibility to save the world’s data from all these crooks and make some money off it at the same time. With huge fanfare and press releases, we announced our FREE-FIX program. Basically, we would recover people’s data for free IF it was a simple problem that we could resolve in 15 minutes or less. This would include logical problems with the file system, deleted files, formatted drives and pcb problems for common drives we had in stock. The program was intended for consumer users and was available on single hard drives with Windows or MAC data only. If we were successful, the client only paid for the return shipping and the media to put the data on. If the case was not eligible for FREE-FIX, we would provide the client with a no obligation quote for further recovery attempts.
We thought if we took the high road and did the easy stuff for free, we would kill this growing segment of con artists as they would not be able to survive without the easy jobs. And of course we also hoped that many of the ineligible cases would be approved for escalation into more desirable expensive jobs. We really felt that we would gain such a good reputation from this program that it would pay us back a thousand times.
Boy, were we wrong !!!! Yes most of the owners of the cases that qualified for FREE-FIX loved us. But the other 85% of the people were absolutely outraged at us. We were suddenly bombarded with irate clients wanting to rip a strip off of us. Those that we tried to “up-sell” because theirs’ was not a simple/free recovery, largely declined as they felt we were using bait and switch tactics. Even some of the 100 or so people who qualified for FREE-FIX every month thought we must be making money off the return media and the shipping. Shortly after the 1st month, the FREE-FIX experiment was cancelled and quickly disappeared into the growing mist of the World Wide Web, never to be heard of again.
Tags: data recovery experts, Free Data Recovery, FREE-FIX, Nick Majors
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January 25th, 2010
If you’ve spent any time on the various data recovery websites you’ve no doubt come across lots of advice on what to do once you have a data loss situation. But I’ve always felt the best advice would be to avoid such an unpleasant experience in the 1st place. So after some interesting discussions with our data recovery technicians, we have created a list of useful tips and suggestions that may keep you from losing your data in the first place.
1. Start by choosing the safest storage device you can. Here are some specific recommendations that may help …
• Don’t buy the latest and greatest hard drive. Stick with a true and tested hard drive model that has been around a while. Not only will the bad models have been discontinued, but any bugs or known issues on seasoned models, will have been addressed. Search the web to discover problems other users may be having with a specific drive model.
• Don’t use an old hard drive. If your drive is older than 5 years consider replacing it. And no matter how old your drive is, if it starts acting up in any way, whether making a strange noise once in a while or whether read errors keep popping up, get rid of it, before it fails.
• Buy the lightest hard drive you can! Huh? Preferably one with a single disk. Sounds strange you say? Less mass requires less power = less heat & less stress combined with less parts = less crashes. When a drive manufacture requires 4 disks to keep up with the competition until their latest technical innovations reach the marketplace, you know they’re likely stretching the design limitations.
• Consider using a laptop drive in your desktop. Laptop drives by design are meant to take more physical abuse and are designed to be light in weight, low in power needs and quiet in operation.
• If you’re using an SSD or Solid State Drive, ensure you always backup. SSD drives use extremely complicated and always proprietary methods of distributing the data across multiple memory chips. The point is, if your SSD becomes damaged, recovering your data may be very very very expensive … if it is even possible. I also wonder how an SSD will stand up to a power surge. If a hard drive gets a power surge the electronics get fried but the physically stored data remains intact. In an SSD, fried electronics could very well be your critical data disappearing into the cosmos.
2. Then maintain and protect your storage device or hard drive with these suggestions
• Connect your computer to a UPS or surge suppressor. This simple device can prevent electrical surge damage to your drive as well as preventing damage to any open files or the file system itself should your power source be interrupted.
• Ensure your system has adequate ventilation. One of the most common causes of drive failure is overheating, so make sure your computer’s fans work or even consider adding an additional one.
• Use an antivirus program and keep updated with the latest virus definitions.
• Be gentle! A hard drive is a delicate device. Be sure it has a chance to stop spinning before attempting to move your desktop or laptop computer. And be extremely careful not to knock over any external hard drives you may have attached. Every week we see damaged external drives where the external case was merely tipped over while it was running.
3. And finally protect your data just in case bad things happen!
• Backup the important stuff! Yeah, yeah … we all know this and yet few of us do it, me included. If it’s important to you, prove it and back it up.
• Defrag often! If the data is contiguous (all stored sequentially together) there are ways to rip off data files even if the drive’s file system or “index of file locations” is totally missing. Be sure to use you computers defragmentation utility on a regular basis.
• Don’t encrypt your data, unless absolutely necessary. Even if you never forget the password, a failing hard drive combined with encryption means the odds of getting your data back are slim. If you must use encryption, use it only on individual files that must be guarded at no cost.
While very few of us can be 100% diligent in safeguarding our data at all times, hopefully a few of these tips will lower the chances of you losing data. But if all else fails and you find yourself in a data loss predicament, please give us a call.
Tags: avoiding data recovery, data loss prevention, tips to prevent data loss
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January 6th, 2010
The beginning of a blog …
As this will be my 1st ever blog and my 1st entry, let me start by introducing myself and then providing a brief overview of what this blog will be about.
My name is David Foster and I’m in charge of the Memofix Data Recovery Lab. I’ve been in the data recovery business for over 20 years. In the late 1980s I started a company that repaired hard drives. But within 7 years as hard drives were becoming disposable items, we sold the business and I thought my hard learned skills may never be put to use again. But of course the real value was now in the data which was only accessible if the drive could be resurrected and I soon started as a data recovery technician at a small data recovery company in Toronto. These were the early days of data recovery companies and we “wrote the book” on data recovery in many ways. With an initial team of 10 employees this company grew very quickly and was soon considered the most technically capable data recovery company in the world. Along the way I became the VP of Lab Operations and we opened 7 fully functional data recovery labs including labs in Canada, the U.S. and the Netherlands. As all good things do, it came to an end and the company was bought by a large hard drive manufacturer.
About a year ago I found my way to a warm new home here at Memofix and have gotten myself nicely settled in. Memofix is a fantastic storage centric company managed by real people with real integrity and I have been tasked to revamp the data recovery division into a real force. Memofix has been doing data recovery for quite some time now, but has largely provided it as a service to their existing client base as a result of client requests. But now we are launching a new phase of data recovery services aimed at all of Canada. Our goal is to provide superior data recovery services at reasonable prices with outstanding customer service for all types of media and operating systems. I am extremely excited to be able to take my vision of what a superb quality service offering should be and mold Memofix Data Recovery Services into just such an elite service.
Over the next months and years you will see some big changes at Memofix and many you won’t. I’m sure I will use this blog to boast about many of them. But besides the opportunity to promote Memofix, I really hope to use this blog to educate folks in all areas of data recovery. I hope to explain some of the techniques we use, discuss operating systems and hard drives, give advise on do it yourself techniques, maybe gossip a little about industry players, just about anything to do with computers and data and storage and of course hard drives. Perhaps you have a topic or question you would like answered. My email is davidf@memofix.com and I welcome your comments, suggestions or questions.
Tags: data recovery blog, David Foster, gta data recovery, toronto data recovery
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