Have you ever wondered why your computer says your disk drive has a lower capacity than the package it came in? For example, let’s say you just bought a shiny new 2.5″ 5 TB portable hard drive. You plugged it in; you waited in suspense as its five platters and ten heads finally overcame and […]
Probably the most popular hard drives we receive for recovery are portable USB hard drives. In this post I will tell you about Western Digital Elements and Passport drives as well as Seagate Backup Plus and Slim drives, why they fail, and what makes them more complicated to recover than many other drives. Portable hard […]
This is another post in our Tech Series for new data recovery professionals. Modern Western Digital portable USB hard drives use an integrated USB PCB rather than a USB to SATA adapter, so it may seem obvious to attempt recovery of these drives over USB, however, it’s not recommended to attempt hard drive recovery over […]
When data recovery professionals are selecting a matching Seagate drive for parts, it’s important for them to get a good match so the heads can read and write to the drive. In a previous post, I listed some common rules for identifying a Seagate donor drive. This post is specific to the Seagate Rosewood family […]
Most modern portable hard disk drives use relatively new technology, first implemented in the early 2010s, called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to write data to the platters. SMR can achieve higher areal density than the older method of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR, sometimes referred to as conventional magnetic recording or CMR) which simply means more […]
In this post we provide you with some useful insight to help determine what model Western Digital drive might be Inside: a particular model of enclosure. We have included pictures of the shell to help you identify these drives quicker when searching for a matching donor. If you have done some research you have probably […]
With cameras available to just about everyone all the time, most of us find ourselves needing more and more storage space for pictures and video. Sure, cloud storage is advertised almost everywhere now, but not everyone is ready to pay recurring fees to store their family photos, videos, and documents. That’s one reason spinning disk […]
While many predicted we would see the death of the hard disk drive by now, we keep seeing innovation from both Seagate and Western Digital. Let’s explore some interesting details you might not know. The number of bits that are stored in a specific area on a platter/disk is measured in terms of areal density, […]
One of the most popular hard disk drive families today is the Seagate Mobile series, often referred to by data recovery engineers as the Rosewood family. Over the past two years, we have seen Seagate Rosewood mobile drives become one of the most popular disk drives in the market, and in our hard drive recovery […]