Monthly Archives: November 2011

Seagate’s Raised View Suggests Hard-Disk Drives To Hold Prices – WSJ.com

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Seagate’s Raised View Suggests Hard-Disk Drives To Hold Prices – WSJ.com.

Although consumers and smaller businesses might be struggling with the availability and increased pricing of hard disk drive it seems like Seagate (and other manufacturers) are not. It appears there is much profit to be made as a result of the flooding in Thailand with the higher than average HDD prices holding. One wonders whether the HDD manufacturers will use part of the increased profits to help with the human cost of the flooding tragedy.  It’s hard to know what shareholders might think of that, given increased share prices and a good outlook for the manufacturers profits. Perhaps they just consider it a time for trebles all round!

Hard drive shortage pushes prices up 150% | News | TechRadar

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Hard drive shortage pushes prices up 150% | News | TechRadar.

Still gloomy news regarding the production and pricing for purchasing new hard disk drives. The floods in Thailand have had a massive effect on the industry. Moreover, there is not only difficulty in purchasing new hard disk drives, but also second-hand or refurbished HDDs, as these are being bought up in increasing numbers instead of new drives.

This is particularly important for the data recovery industry, as many of the data recovery jobs we receive in require donor hard disk parts to complete the work. When acquiring a donor HDD to work on a failed patient HDD it is necessary to match some very specific parameters listed on the white sticker on the front of the disk drive. For example, if we were working on a 160GB Western Digital Drive with a head failure we would require the following information from the seller:

Model Number: WD1600AAJS-75PSA0

DCM: HHNNHT2CH

Western Digital 160GB

The requirements required for a donor hard disk drive are critical to the recovery of data.

The requirements vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and many standard retail sellers do not list these specific details, making the acquisition of the required donor parts quite difficult.  Recently, due to the HDD shortages, we have had some cases where there have been delays in completing the work. However, we have an extensive range of donor hard disk drive parts built up over a period of 5 years of business, and as such we have been largely be unaffected by the shortages.

 

Don’t ruin the chances of data recovery by scrimping on foam and bubble-wrap

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Ideally we would like each customer to deliver their hard disk drive them-self. That way we can perform a whilst-you-wait diagnostic test and confirm the fault with hard disk drive and generate a fixed price quotation. However, we know that visiting in person is not always convenient, or possible, given that many of our customers are outside of the North West of England, even internationally. So, like with all other data recovery companies, we require you to post your hard disk drive to us or prepare it for a courier.

When we speak over the phone we always give clear advice on how to package the hard disk drive. Put simply the advice is, “treat it like you are posting an egg.” Unfortunately there have been occasions when a customer seems to understand this as treating the disk like a hard-boiled egg, and the disk gets posted in poor or insubstantial packaging. Sadly the likely result of this is the hard disk drive receiving many physical shocks during transit, leading to a HDD with a more serious fault than it had before it was posted, or worse still, that data cannot be recovered for the HDD due to physical damage to the platter surface. Not a good result for anyone.

Some of the most poorly packaged drives we have seen have come from people that work in the IT industry. We won’t name and shame, but they should know better not to post a hard disk drive in only a plastic courier bag (not even a jiffy envelope!)

Just to be sure we have published a guide on how to prepare your devices, please read it, take note, then send your drive in for a safe recovery.

Hard disk famine shaping up as predicted after floods • Channel Register

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The price of hard disk drives is soaring. This is due to the heavy flooding in Thailand where most manufacturers have factories which make HDDs. We went to buy stock in today to find prices are up significantly over the last month, in some cases up by 100%.

As of the 10/11/2011 the cost of a 500GB Samsung HDD 2.5″ internal HDD is listed at £100.00 on ebuyer.com. Compare this with 2 to 3 months ago when the prices was typically somewhere between £40-50.

Unfortunately this cost is likely to be passed on to the customer. If it is at all possible we recommend that customers who already own a working hard disk drive to provide this to us to return data on from their failed hard disk drive.

Hard disk famine shaping up as predicted after floods • Channel Register.

Data recovery start-up is answer to a student nightmare | Money | The Guardian

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Data recovery start-up is answer to a student nightmare | Money | The Guardian.

Given how competitive and well developed the data recovery market is, with many DR companies offering a discount for students, the addition of such a company does not seem to be the left-field supplement to the industry that the Guardian writer might think it is.

Regarding their quote:

“Deleting a file doesn’t mean it’s actually deleted. Whether you’re using a Mac or Windows, your operating system keeps a record of where your files are stored. When you delete a file, your operating system purposefully forgets where that file is located, but in fact the contents remain stored.”

My comment to this would be both “Yes & No”. Dealing with deleted data from a PC based NTFS filesystem and a Mac based HFS+ filesystem are altogether different beasts. NTFS being a rather tame one, HFS+ being all the more fearsome. That is, trying to recover deleted data from an HFS+ partition, still with its original folder structure and file names, is extremely challenging and in most ‘real life’ situations not possible as the owner of the computer will have often used the computer for many minutes/hours after the deletion.

The difficulty with recovering deleted data on Apple Mac hard disk drives is because a file deletion action on a HFS+ volume wipes data from B-Tree metadata records for the file and updates map of free space. The file name, size and on-disk position are wiped (however file system journal still may contain this information that allows recovering good files).  Compare this with a PC based NTFS filesystem where a deletion of a file with result in the Master File Table record marked as ‘unused’. The bitmap of used space is updated to release used clusters for new data to be written to the physical area of the HDD. File entry is deleted from directory record. The file name, size and on-disk position remain inside of Master File Table record so file recovery chances are near 100%.

Let’s hope that when the students delete their coursework and send the data to Zibit DataLab that they have done it on a Windows based PC and not a Mac.