Data Recovery News

‘Critical’ flaw with China-made HDDs?
By Tony Smith → More by this author
Published Tuesday 30th October 2007 11:52 GMT

Updated Data recovery company Retrodata has challenged Apple to come clean about what it claims is a “critical manufacturing flaw” affecting some hard drives used in MacBook laptops and desktops like the Mac Mini - an issue that could result in data loss.

According to Retrodata, its customers have sent in a much higher number of failed Seagate 2.5in SATA drives made in China and loaded with firmware version 7.01 than of any other current hard drive model.

Learn more at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/30/apple_seagate_drive_warning/

19 July 2007

By Chris Mellor, Techworld

Scientists have discovered that “avalanche” effects in spinning magnetic fields can cause data loss in disk drives - and are working on changes to recording layer chemistry that should give us more reliable storage.

Read more at Disk data loss caused by magnetic avalanches

The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers.

Find out more at Hard disk test surprises Google

Comment: Contents of article do not reflect our views. But we thought there was some interest value in this!  

Robin Harris
10 Jul 2007

Vendors and large users won’t tell us who makes the best hard drives. So I decided to figure it for myself. Surprising findings: Over all quality is up. Western Digital is doing much better. Seagate/Maxtor has work to do.

Read more at Who makes the best hard drives?

Robin Harris
July 5th, 2007

What is the primary determinant of drive life? I’ve read the latest research and talked to insiders. There are so many variables that the best answer is just . . . luck. Why is that? Is there anything you can do?

Read this article at Disk drive life depends on… luck

Comment: Brief, concise, sweet. The reasons in point form.

The reasons, at Why partition a disc drive

Comment: This article is a little old, but useful for those who really know next to nothing about drive partitions. It’s a good basic article to read.

Partitioning your hard drive can make it more efficient, and it can also enable you to install more than one operating system on your computer. But partitioning can also be an arcane task. This article offers some advice on partitioning.

Read this article at Partitioning your hard drive

The simplest and most reliable method to protect data on a hard drive is to monitor its health. Even within a standard operating system, you will be able to protect your notebook hard drive if you add the HDDlife drive health monitor to standard utilities. It constantly monitors the drive state and shows you the health percentage. HDDlife gives recommendations and takes measures to ensure the health of your drive.

Download at http://shareme.com/details/hddlife-for-notebooks.html

May be worth considering.

By Andrew Whitehead

If you find that your hard drive is no longer functioning, remember that a hard drive recovery is nearly always possible, so there is no need for panic. Data loss is not unusual and in nearly all cases the data can be recovered. Only in severe severe cases involving platter damage, magnetic degradation, or over-write of a file will the data be practically unrecoverable…

Read the article at Initial steps in hard drive recovery

A step-by-step guide for action when you think your disk has crashed. A bit on the techie side, but it’s good knowledge to have at any rate.

Read the steps at Surviving a disk crash