Storage - Hard Drives

Avoid having to recover data by picking the right hard drive!

According to Data Recovery Labs, External Hard Disk Drives provide great flexible storage option and security by providing a mobile back up option, yet this advantage has dangerous twist to users. With storage capacity running in hundreds of Gigabytes, with high rates of data transfer, in addition to the flexibility to plug the external drive to a Laptop, Desktop, Server, Memory cards, Camera or iPod and sold at reasonable prices have increased their popularity dramatically. However, as the popularity of the external drives containing backups and valuable data are increasingly to accomodate the bigger Music & Photo files emerging from Apple-Mac sysytems & Xserevers. External drives are failing for no apparent reasons. Majority of these failing drives are often of well known commercial brands such as Lacie, Freecom and Omega and with the latest high capacity Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital hard disk drives models with storage capacity exceeding 320Gb or even 400Gb on a single drive. According to a study of 100,000 drives conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, it is widely believed Hard Disk Drive vendors manipulate the (MTTF) - mean time to failure. In fact The mean time to failure (MTTF) of drives, according to their manufacturers, vary from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours, suggesting a nominal annual failure rate of at most 0.88%. Whereas the study finds that "up to 13% observed on some systems.". This suggests that field replacement is a fairly different process than one might predict based on datasheet MTTF. It has also been established that failure rate is not constant with age, and that, rather than a significant infant mortality effect, evidently a significant early onset of wear-out degradation. That is, replacement rates in research data grew constantly with age, an effect often assumed not to set in until after a nominal lifetime of 5 years. The study, also carefully point out that the study didn't necessarily track actual drive failures, but cases in which a customer decided a drive had failed and needed replacement. The study also explains that no vendor-specific failure information, and that his goal is not "choosing the best and the worst vendors" but to help them to improve drive design and testing. Also, little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, potentially an indication that disk-independent factors, such as operating conditions, affect replacement rates more than component specific factors. On the other hand, we see only one instance of a customer rejecting an entire population of disks as a bad batch, in this case because of media error rates, and this instance involved SATA disks. Time between replacements, a proxy for time between failure, is not well modeled by an exponential distribution and exhibits significant levels of correlation, including autocorrelation and long-range dependence. Generally, inside the slick casings, often are poorly ventilated or even not ventilated at all, external hard drives assemblers include the cheapest available drives such as Maxtor & Seagate, combined with badly ventilated enclosure casing, the combination is catastrophic for any given user, especially when the hard disk drive is of high capacity containing crucial back-up data For any given Lacie with multiple drives, this can be a terrible experience with RAID drives and data in excess of 1 terabite. Often with RAID array external drives, the drive failure are more frequent and the damage is more extensive than single drives. According to Haj Majed Aziz of UniRecovery – RAID Data Recovery Labs “many of the 1 terabyte LaCie external drives contain 250Gb Maxtor IDE in RAID array, inside badly ventilated enclosures, when used on regular basis, especially within office environment, they are utter disaster.” Hitachi has unveiled a drive which has reached the new heights of one terabyte (TB). Its drive looks like any other, but uses perpendicular magnetic recording to make space for all that data. The current technology generation of LRT-Longitudinal Recording Technology, which records the bits laying horizontally, has been superseded by the recording of the bits standing vertically. However the cost is in the region of $18,000 ! UniRecovery Laboratory - http://www.unirecovery.co.uk


If you have to recover data!

 Hard Drive Recovery and the recovery of apparently lost files and date can often be restored with some simple know hows or data recovery software. What a great world we live in. Computers are one of the best tools that has come into the hands of man since the convenience of toilet paper. Your computer offers you the ability to store all your valuable files and data in one convenient place and in most cases makes it portable. But in the event of a Hard Drive Crash or the the loss of important or valued data, files, pictures, movies etc., that wonderful computer turns into an expensive paper weight taking up space on your desk or kitchen table. Sometimes we tend to convince ourselves that our lost or deleted files are gone forever and that hours or weeks of work to replace them is required. But in many cases lost files and data, even a Hard Disk Recovery can be done in moments. Lost or deleted files can be located and recovered. Often you may just find it sitting in your trash. To recover it, simply click and drag it onto your computer desktop. If you would like to replace it back into it's original place or folder simply right click it and choose that. On occasion, you start up your computer and can't find that file you worked on so hard. Before you start yelling out to your spouse or children a simple search of files on your computer may bring it up. Often we quickly save our files not noticing where our computer decided to save them to. Often they are in a folder we have not thought of. To find that file click on "Start" and use your search function there. Type in part or all of the name of your file and you may just find it ! In the event that you or someone has accidentally deleted your wanted file or data then all is not lost. Data recovery software will search your computer and restore it for you. Imagine a file being like a painting. It is painted over white ready for next use, but the painting, or in this case the data, is still there underneath. You just need to remove the white paint. Data recovery software does the job for you. It scans your computer for recoverable items and asks you if you want to recover any or all of them. You may be surprised what you find! Hard Drive Recovery Tools are also available. When your computer starts choking on memory, freezing, crashing to a halt or re-starting itself or you hear strange noises coming from your hard drive then a crash may well be on the way. You'll probably start seeing serious looking error messages, note these done before you click them away. In most cases free computer support is available. Click your "Start" button, then right click on "My Computer" then choose "Properties" then "Support". It should show you a phone number and times to ring for free computer support. Support will walk you through steps to rectify your problems but may end-up recommending you completely recover your computer losing all files on your "C Drive". Effectively your computer returns to the day you brought it home from the shop. The good news is that a full recovery of your computer doesn't involve your "D Drive" so placing important and large files there is good advise. It also frees up your "C Drive" which does most of your work and the all the complaining within your computer. To prevent hard drive crashes and the need for hard drive recovery we are always warned to back-up our files. Unfortunately we often don't or not as often as we should do. Hard drive recovery experts are somewhat available at a cost, but nowadays the simple use of Hard Drive Recovery Software is, luckily, at our finger tips.

How to avoid destroying your data!

Computer data is typically stored in magnetic form on Hard Disks, Magnetic Tapes, Compact Discs, DVD and RAID. Data on these storage media could become inaccessible owing to physical damage or corruption of the logical file system. The logical file system is a way of organizing and accessing the file system and its contents. For example, the disk surface might be divided up into sectors of, say, 512 KB, and each sector allocated a distinctive ID. The file system would keep track of the sectors used by each file. These sectors would usually not be contiguous because delete operations might free up some sectors that might not be sufficient to complete the next write operation. In such cases, writing would be done on sectors that are physically separate. It follows that the file system has also to keep track of which sectors are free for the next write operation. The file system logic is a complex one designed to meet the requirements of many possible read/write/delete scenarios in an optimum manner. If it gets corrupted (owing to, say, power problems or system crashes) the contents of the disk would become indecipherable. How Data Gets Lost
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