Desktop Hard Drive Data Recovery

Most of the digital information in the whole world is stored on the desktop hard drives. For the customers that buy them and the people that sell them, large hard drives are a thing of beauty. "Cheap and Deep" is the mantra that calms the nerves of those trying to accommodate an era of surging data and dwindling budgets. On the other hand, for those technical and engineering types that actually make their living making large hard drives work, the impression can be quite different.

Unlike their “big brother” enterprise class hard drives, the average desktop hard drive lacks several features and has gaps in the manufacturing process to make them cheaper and more affordable for general customers. For example, the desktop hard drive has limited error correction capability and they aren’t specially designed with shock and vibration protection.

Modern desktop hard drive stores data to the tune of 240,000 tracks per inch. As a point of measure, your typical 20# copy paper measures out at  .0038". That works out to be about 900 tracks sitting on a space the size of the edge of a piece of paper. A hard drive head reads these tracks one at a time, so in order to read or write your precious data it has to accurately hit a target 1/900th the thickness of a piece of paper every time it goes to work. To make matters worse, your typical hard drive is enclosed in a computer case and strapped in next to other drives, DVD or other devices, which can vibrate these heads. With a desktop hard drive, it doesn't take much movement to make a head miss a target 1/900th the thickness of a piece of paper.

When a mechanical shock happens, hard drives may experience damage caused by the

read/write heads dropping down

 onto the moving platters. Normally these heads float on a thin layer of air over the spinning platters, but if a shock happens and the two do come in direct contact, the heads can literally become “glued” to the plates. When this does happen, the heads can only be “unglued” from the plates by a trained engineer using special equipment.

Also, regular desktop hard drive platters are not a subject of full media certification. The times when you could run low level format on your drive are gone. Modern manufacturing process accepts some percentage of bad sectors, which are placed in a so called “P-list” at manufacturing time and are skipped by the hard drive during regular operation without involving the file system software, as it was originally designed 30 years ago at the beginning of hard drive era.

High-capacity hard drives use three or more magnetic disks, or platters. Because of this, the most common failure is a wedging of the drive's axle. The additional platters increase the load on the axle, and the resultant physical stress often leads to premature motor failures. With high-capacity hard drives a drop of only 4 inches can be enough to wedge the axle, which will first manifest itself through increasing hard drive noise and vibration. Some hard drive vendors’ designs make drives particularly vulnerable to such shocks and pressure. For example, when vendors Don't secure the hard drive axle with a separate screw to the drive cover then any pressure exerted on the housing or cover can actually shift the axle, resulting in it changing its angle, and then damaging the platters.

No matter the cause of data loss, accidental, mechanical, or environment related damages, our team of recovery engineers have the capability and skills to make things right.

Any Operating Platforms and Hard Drive Vendors:


At

Data Recovery Services

, no matter what type of hard drive it is, we use only non-destructive desktop hard drive data recovery processes that use drive sectors cloning. This means we pull data from your drive on a sector by sector basis, and we work directly on the clone. This will ensure your drive is not damaged further and that a second image of the original structure can be acquired if needed.

DRS hard drive recovery process meets manufacturer’s requirements and will not void your original warranty.