Technical advice for data recovery, tips for data preservation, and general wisdom from a team who has been recovering data and working on computers and other electronic hardware for decades.
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 […]
Intel Optane SSD is a discontinued line of solid state storage devices that differs from traditional solid state drives by the fact that two different kinds of storage are utilized in one device: NAND memory, like a traditional SSD, and 3D XPoint (“crosspoint”) memory, a more exotic kind of flash memory jointly developed by Intel […]
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 […]
Some “ultraportable” laptops, particularly Sony Vaio Z-series models from around 2010, are equipped with an unusual type of solid state drive, which is actually two SSDs in one. With these drives, each side of the PCB houses a distinct SSD, which both share a single 29-pin (15mm) LIF connector to connect both devices to the […]
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 […]
At Blizzard Data Recovery, we try to help new data recovery professionals as they learn the trade. Sometimes it’s by email and sometimes by remote work, and when that’s not possible, a number of data recovery companies will outsource their cases to us. We try to publish information that is not easy to find or […]
Data recovery customers ask me all the time: “What’s the best flash drive to get? What is the most reliable thumb drive?” They’re looking for the one perfect USB drive that will never fail, and though not all flash devices are created equal (you can bet that free goody-bag flash drive with someone’s logo printed […]
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 […]
I’ve written before about some things to consider before attempting “DIY” or letting a friend or computer shop fix your flash drive. We recently recovered a SanDisk Cruzer USB drive which serves as another great example of the risks that come with these attempts. One assumption many people make is that computer repair shops are […]