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.
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 data recovery professionals find a matching Seagate donor drive. This is just information that we have gathered from other resources and then refined from our own experience. […]
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 […]
Even if you have opened your hard drive we might still be able to recover your data. If you experienced a hard drive failure and started searching for solutions like: How do I fix a failed hard drive? How to recover lost photos Dead hard disk drive repair Can I fix my own HDD? How […]
In a typical week for some data recovery shops you’ll get standard recovery jobs where drives or files are not accessible to the end user, or maybe an easy, dropped drive case where there is no platter damage and you just need to swap out the head stack assembly. You might also get 1 or […]
Photos of hard drive heads and information about the transition to 4k sectors.
The case of the dropped WD10JPVX-75JC3T0. Hard drives that are dropped while they are in use can present some of the most complex data recovery jobs. This was one of those jobs.
This is what it looks like inside a Western Digital WD5000LPVX-11V0TT0. As you can see they don’t look very complicated. The heads are pretty durable compared to some other brands and models.