Technical advice for data recovery, tips for data preservation, and general wisdom from someone who has been recovering data and working on computers and other electronic hardware for decades.
We recently had a case where a 4.0TB Western Digital hard drive had been dropped. When a hard drive is dropped, the read/write heads are typically damaged and need to be replaced. In the best cases, there is no platter damage, but on average there is some damage, even if it’s just to the edge […]
This is an example of a recent recovery we did at Blizzard Data Recovery. In this case the USB flash drive had been broken in half. Some cases are just a matter of replacing the broken connector, testing for shorts or open circuits, and then recovering the data. Although that doesn’t sound too difficult we […]
We recently added to our long list of HDD repair tools and were pleasantly surprised at the quality and value of these new tools. The platter removal tools and platter stand from HDD Head Tools (DFL) support both 2.5″ and 3.5″ hard drives. The platter removal tools (1 x 2.5″ and 1 x 3.5″ tool) […]
We continue proving to new customers that we are more than competitive, “we make data recovery affordable”. This past month, we received cases for rotating magnetic storage (Hard Disk Drives) that had already been quoted by Drive Savers and by Secure Data Recovery. Here are two examples. Case number 1 was a Western Digital SATA […]
This post might be helpful if you are thinking about starting your own USB Flash Device or hard disk drive data recovery lab, but the primary reason for writing it is to let our customers see why the business is different than computer repair and support. We also get questions about the the cost of […]
This week’s special case was a 2007 PATA HDD. This Samsung SP2514N was in an external enclosure and got knocked over. Since the drive was identified as dropped and “previously opened” we first opened it in one of our laminar airflow workstations. Upon inspection we noticed a stiction mark on the top platter but the […]
At Blizzard Data Recovery we sometimes get asked “What is a re-certified hard drive?” According to Seagate if you return a defective drive they “may replace your product with a product that was previously used, repaired and tested to meet Seagate specifications”. In our experience the replacement drive the customer receives will often have a […]
The following is information we have gathered to help find compatible hard drives for Seagate head swap data recovery cases. None of this information is guaranteed to help you find a matching Seagate donor drive. This is just information that we have gathered from other resources and then refined from our own experience. Use at […]
This weeks special case was a 6GB Western Digital EIDE hard disk drive. That’s right! That was not a typo, six gigabytes of storage in one desktop hard drive that was manufactured in 1999. The data was distributed across two platters but only used 3 heads. This hard drive was making some very unusual screeching […]