Week 2017-1015 in the Lab

by Oct 22, 2017

WD7500AAKS-00RBA0This week is another story about how “we make data recovery affordable”. In this case we received a Western Digital 750GB desktop model WD7500AAKS-00RBA0. The HDD had already been to Secure Data Recovery lab and quoted $1964. When the customer mentioned our prices the other recovery company told them nobody could recover their HDD for that amount, but they lowered their quote to $1562. We can only speculate but they may have misdiagnosed the problem in this case. We ended up charging $395 which included return media. That’s right! It wasn’t even a case that required our level-3 clean room recovery service. How is that for saving money on data recovery?

ST31000524AS-SeagateAnd now let’s talk about the worst case scenario. Let this be a reminder why you should stop what you are doing right now and go backup your important data. Whenever we receive a Seagate 7200.12 model my heart starts racing for just a moment. It is probably the most common drive we see that is DOA, with the ST3000DM001 running a close second. This week we received two 7200.12 cases. The 750GB was recoverable with only about 3000 bad sectors. The 1TB model ST31000524AS wasn’t so lucky, as you can see in the photo to your left.

And back to better news but another warning. The award for most common cases that have media damage but are partially recoverable goes to the Seagate 1TB and 2TB DM series hard disk drives. In this week’s shared case we have a model ST1000DM003. It was recovered but it required 2 head swaps and ended up with over 30,000 bad sectors. All of the important data was recovered but it was a gamble that could have been easily avoided.

This week’s lesson? BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA right now. If you don’t have a backup device you can get a 1TB portable USB 3.0 hard drive for less than $50.

If you have suffered a disk drive failure just click the button below and send it in for recovery.