These days photographic images are huge and take up a large amount of hard disk space. So most serious photographers will store their images on a backup device such an one or more external hard drives.

Unfortunately these hard drives get knocked and dropped, and often the data on them becomes inaccessible. However, it’s nearly always possible for us to recover data from this type of situation.

This month we are promoting our services with an advertorial in Advanced Photographer magazine – we are also running a competition for a new 2TB external hard disk – all you need to do is submit one of your photographs to enter! Give it a go and good luck if you do

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/photography-competition/

You know how it is… Everything’s digital these days… Your computer is your own personal information store… You download music onto it, you download films onto it, you download photos from your camera onto it…

Then you notice that as time goes on your machine starts running slower and slower… Sure it’s getting old but it shouldn’t be this slow should it…?

You ask your friends and get a few suggestions about what you could do to speed the machine up again but no-one really tells you a definitive way forward… All the time it’s getting slower and slowerrrrr…

So you put your machine in the car and take it to a local PC shop – after all they’re a shop!.. these guys are professionals!… Of course they know what they’re doing !!

Good chance is that they don’t.

They can sell you a new machine, recommend a graphics card, and sort out some compatible ink cartridges for you, but don’t be so sure they’ll know what to do when your machine is running slowly…..

Most often they’ll recommend they format your drive and re-install the operating system…. Sound familiar?… It happens every day in PC shops up and down the country… The action can be summarised as: “Well something’s obviously wrong, we don’t know what but a system re-install will probably sort it out”

…And in the process your data will be lost.

We see machines like this every month… where the actions of a PC shop have made what was a simple job, far more complicated.

To avoid finding yourself in a situation like this, speak to us first, as sorting a simple problem is far easier than sorting a complex one.

Ok, see the photo above? That’s what a hard disk looks like if you take the lid off, except it shouldn’t have the radial lines halfway across the surface and it shouldn’t have the black debris either. Infact it should look nice and shiny and be so clean that you could eat your dinner off it. The hard disk in the photo above has suffered a head crash.

So What Is A HeadCrash ?

This is when the arm that moves back and forth across your disk reading your data comes into contact with the shiny round disk surface that holds your data.

Is Data Recovery Possible ?

Headcrashes come in various severities: from simple impact areas where the heads of the arms have bounced against the disk platter and created a small scratch right up to where the disk surface has been completed stripped and gouged by continuous scoring by the heads of the arm. The black debris you see is infact parts of the hard disk surface that are now no more than dust.

Recovering the data from scratched hard drives is sometimes possible – it depends on the severity of the scratch, recovering data from hard drives with significant damage is often problematic resulting at best in a partial recovery of data rather than a full one.

We are delighted to announce that DataClinic Ltd and Seagate Data Recovery Services have formed a unique data recovery partnership in the UK.

The Key Benefits to You….

• Unparalleled Levels of Success in Recovering Your Data: Who better to work with than the very people who designed your hard drive in the first place ?? Having access to Seagate’s data recovery knowledgebase means that we know EXACTLY how to recover every single hard drive. No other UK data recovery company have access to this knowledge.
• No More Waiting Around – We have immediate access to a massive library of donor spare parts – When a hard drive fails, one of most challenging and time consuming issues is the sourcing of a compatible spare part for the faulty drive. It’s not just a case of buying another drive the same size and swapping the parts over. Compatible hard drives are few and far between – often only drives from the same production run will do – and these have to be sourced from across the globe. It can literally take weeks for a compatible drive to become available, if at all. Our agreement with Seagate means that sourcing compatible spare parts is no longer an issue for us… but it remains a problem for every other data recovery company.
• We recover more data from more hard drives from more types of failure than any other UK data recovery company. GUARANTEED

Contact us on 0871 977 2525 to recover your data.

Now I don’t know what our internet presence is like in Mongolia, or even how accessible the internet is… but word of DataClinic’s data recovery prowess has obviously reached them ! We are due to receive a hard drive tomorrow from that very destination.

Episode 1 – The PC Repair Man…

Several years ago we had a call from a PC repair man. He’d been to visit a distressed client who could no longer access their data. When onsite he quickly concluded that the hard drive had developed a fault, and that it would need to be repaired, or as he termed it… “cleaned”.

He then described how the knocking noise made by the hard drive was an indication that it’s heads were dirty and probably contained grit…

We asked him what he did next…

He told us that fortunately in his van he had some liquid cleaner and a brush, and he was able to remove the cover of the hard drive and clean the components, thus removing the grit. When he’d finished the cleaning he dried the hard disk and then put the top back on but he was puzzled why the drive still wasn’t working…

The PC repair man obviously had no idea what he was doing, but he did it anyway, even though the data belonged to somebody else.

We’ve just completed the successful recovery a badly damaged 750GB Seagate hard drive that came to us all the way from Australia. The hard drive had previously been sent to other data recovery companies who were unsuccessful in recovering the data.

Faults and Problems with the drive:

• Read/Write Head assembly had multiple head failures
• Excessive vibration on lowermost platter (possibly the result of previous recovery attempts)
• Firmware corruption in Service Area (SA)
• Physical damage to platter surface(s)

 Work Carried Out:

• Mild physical damage (head crash) to platter 0 confirmed by visual inspection in cleanroom
• Head Assembly replaced in cleanroom
• Firmware relating to head calibration recovered from SA
• Platter re-aligned to reduce vibration
• Corrupted SA modules replaced
• Heads re-calibrated to accommodate replacements
• Full read of data not possible so data read from individual heads one-by-one with head specific recalibration at each stage
• Data from individual head ‘reads’ re-assembled and tested for file structure, confirmed as being partial recovery only.

Have you sent your faulty hard disk to another data recovery company only to be told it was not recoverable ?? Speak to DataClinic – we absolutely guarantee we can do more to recover your data than anyone else.

Have you been told that the spare parts required for your hard drive are not obtainable ?? Speak to us – we have access to more spare hard disk parts than anyone.

UK: 0871 977 2525

International: +44-161-761-0620

Testimonial from Bradley Reed:

“It isn’t possible to put a price on the information I would have lost if I hadn’t found Data Clinic. Value for money? incalculable. “

Using our Advanced Data Recovery service to recover a hard drive that another data recovery company had declared unrecoverable.

Testimonial from Co Syn:

“I did my detailed research online for a number of companies that do Data recovery. There are a lot of them out there, with really fancy websites, and really awesome claims and even really awesome initial pricing. But as my data was very critical to me, I called each one and interviewed the technical people who were going to do my data recovery. A lot of them would only allow you to talk to sales individuals, who will promise the world, but when asked how or anything remotely technical, they cannot deliver.

At Dataclinic, I talked to an actual technical engineer. He explained the process in as much detail as I needed. Also the real winner for me the previous independent reviews they had. The third factor was that they are connected to some really big data recovery research facilities.

I sent my drives to them, and they were able to recover all my data. Very happy, and will use them again. “

If another data recovery company have told you your hard drive data is not recoverable, please contact us – we can often recover it.

You can read more information about our ADR service by selecting it from the ‘Services’ menu at the top of the page.

The announcement late last year that the HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) division of Western Digital were planning to launch a range of helium filled 3.5” hard drives aimed at the high level server and data centre market, may have taken some by surprise but HGST themselves say that these have been under development for some time. So why is good old fashioned air no longer good enough to spin platters around in? HGST have outlined the benefits thus:

Turbulence – Spinning current disk platters at speed results in air turbulence which induces wobble in the platters and makes it difficult for the read/write heads to accurately follow the data tracks. Helium only has around 15% of the density of air, this significantly reduces this turbulence allowing the data tracks to be closer together and thus increasing areal density or the amount of data per square inch of platter surface.

Drag – The use of helium reduces the ‘drag’ or internal friction experienced by the drive motors which correspondingly use almost 25% less energy to achieve rotation which also reduces the operating temperature of the drives by up to 5 degrees.

More Platters – The 2 factors outlined above are expected to together allow the use of thinner lighter platters and allow them to be closer together such that the maximum number of platters could rise from 5 to 7 within the same size chassis whilst the overall weight might reduce by nearly 30%. These 3 gains put together could see overall drive capacities increased by around 40%.

Less Space – With the same sized disks having significantly higher capacities, the physical size of data centre servers could reduce for the same capacity or allow greater capacity for the same size.

Hermetically Sealed – In order to keep the helium from escaping the new drives will need to be hermetically sealed to an even greater degree than conventional drives already are. This should reduce even further the possibility of moisture or particulate contamination occurring and allow helium filled drives to operate in more extreme environmental conditions.

This all sounds highly promising but what are the associated challenges and why has Seagate’s Senior Manager of Corporate Communications expressed doubts as to the viability of helium drives?

The Challenges…

Keeping The Helium In – Helium is the Steve McQueen of elements, it is very, very, good at escaping. The aerospace industry actually use this property to test for microscopic leaks in systems by filling them with the gas and ‘sniffing’ for any that escapes. All this adds up to a headache when trying to seal a drive sufficiently to keep the slippery helium in for the life of the drive.

Pressure Relief – A conventional hard drive is already fairly well sealed to prevent the ingress of contaminants, and because of this arrangements have to be made to relieve any changes in air pressure or else the drive is liable to explode or implode if it is transported on an aircraft for example. This is conventionally achieved using a vent hole covered in a membrane that allows the passage of air molecules but not larger particles. This would be like an open door to helium molecules so how pressure relief will be addressed when using helium or whether this is unnecessary are points to ponder.
Helium Supplies – Helium is a finite resource, global production fell sharply last year whilst demand is increasing, especially in China and India. This is likely to add up to prices rising as quickly as a weather balloon. Could this also serve to make helium a regrettable choice of filling for hard drives.

Data Recovery – Though data centres and the other types of users that helium drives are targeted at generally safeguard their data to a high degree by the use of RAID’s and other redundancy features, nothing is perfect. There will always come the time when Data Recovery Specialists are called upon to try and recover that crucial set of data from a drive that has failed. Such failures commonly require replacement of the internal parts, read/write heads for example and this has to be carried out in a cleanroom or other such facility to prevent the delicate internals being contaminated with disastrous consequences. If these Data Recovery heroes now also have to try and work in an atmosphere of pure helium the consequences are likely to involve more problems than just some squeaky voices!

All in all, though helium would seem to offer benefits to a market seemingly desperate for ever more capacity, speed, efficiency etc. it is to be hoped that the manufacturers have both considered such factors and found long term satisfactory answers to the challenges they face.

1. Be aware – How does your hard drive or data storage system behave normally, how fast is it usually, what messages do you normally get from it, what noises does it make. Knowing what it normally does will help you notice sooner when things start to go wrong.

2. Know Your Data – What do you actually have saved on the device?, do you have backups, what would be the consequence of losing this data?

3. Take Note – When problems arise what are the symptoms?, what is your device doing or not doing, what can you see, what can you hear? If someone else is reporting the problem get this information from them if you can.

4. Don’t Delay – Hard drive problems aren’t going to get better by themselves and will always get worse at the worst possible moment.

5. Switch Off – Once a hard drive has problems it is best to turn the system off to prevent the situation worsening. If you are comfortable doing so, remove the drive itself and place it somewhere safe.

6. Free Remedies – Many internet sources will suggest that their free download is the ‘wonder solution’ that will recover your data, don’t risk it! Not only do these rarely if ever work (they are free for a reason!) but they can render the data harder, more expensive or even impossible for the genuine data recovery community to retrieve. This often holds true for even expensive software solutions too.

7. Silly Remedies – Do not try such things as putting your hard drive in the freezer. There will be stories on the internet that someone met a person in the pub whose next door neighbour tried it and it worked a treat…..well internet sources reckon Elvis serves a mean cod and chips, but I would not stake my data on that being true either!

8. Warranties – If you are unlucky to have had a hard drive fail whilst it was still fairly new, you might think that the warranty will come to your rescue. It may well do as far as getting a shiny new replacement drive goes, but it will not have your valuable data on it or cover the cost of getting it recovered professionally.

9. Find The Right Data Recovery Provider – A little time spent finding the right team to entrust your valuable data to will pay dividends. Do they understand your problem and do they have the resources and proven expertise to get your data back.

10. Work With Them – Tell them all the facts, what happened, what you did and what you need, this will help them give you an accurate prognosis and provide realistic pricing. Remember the cheapest quote may not be the best and might end up being more expensive in the long run.