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.
The single most common failure for USB flash drives is a broken USB connector. Accidents happen easily; the drive is plugged in the side of your computer and somebody bumps into it, or your toddler knocks your laptop off the table, or you forget about it and shove the laptop in your bag without taking […]
At Blizzard Data Recovery, we occasionally get emails, phone calls, and comments on blog posts asking about failed hard drive PCBs (printed circuit boards). One of the most common things we hear is the user swapped the PCB with a donor PCB from an exact same model and the drive still doesn’t work. The reason […]
Each year, we see new hard disk drive models released and each year, we see the firmware get more complicated or the drive security increased by the manufacturer. Two of the most common portable drives we see by Western Digital are the 2TB Charger and the 4-5TB Spyglass models. Both drive families already presented specific […]
Last year was our busiest year to date at Blizzard Data Recovery, with a 66% increase in data recovery cases since 2019. As I gathered up the numbers for this 2020 retrospective, I remembered a number of blog posts I’ve seen from other companies “warning” about flat rate data recovery pricing. Some people make claims […]
We recently completed a flash recovery case where the drive was not repairable, and a chip-off recovery was not, at first, successful. Once Clint had determined that the device was not physically repairable, it came to me to dump the memory chip to attempt a logical recovery. The controller on the device was a Chipsbank […]
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 […]
We recently completed data recovery for a customer with a 32GB Lexar Jump Drive which had taken an impact while plugged into a USB port, and, as is the case with many of these Lexar flash drives, the impact flexed the circuit board enough to lift the controller (Silicon Motion SM3267L AB) and tear solder […]
In the past few years, there has been a spike in new data recovery labs opening up across the USA and other countries. When researching topics on data recovery forums, it looks like a number of computer repair shop owners are looking for a new business, and data recovery is enticing. Let’s be clear: PC […]
When it comes to flash memory devices – whether USB flash drives or memory cards like SD and MicroSD – there are two main types of construction: surface-mounted technology (SMT) and monolithic. SMT type devices are made of distinct components soldered to a printed circuit board, which requires a certain amount of space to fit […]