Thai floods float Seagate to top of hard drive biz • The Register

Posted on February 29, 2012 by cheadled

Thai floods float Seagate to top of hard drive biz • The Register.

Seagate seem to be doing well. Production has barely dropped compared with other manufacturers, yet the prices are still high. As usual we have been seeing plenty of the high capacity 1TB Freeagent drives in. Typically with a spindle motor seizure. That and plenty of the 500GB 7200.12 CC38 and CC44 firmware drives.

These disks tend to read normally when look read ahead is turned on. This sort of problem tends to relate to a fault with the buffer. Which with the right equipment can be turned off and a full recovery can be made.

What ‘cheapo’ data recovery companies won’t do…

Posted on February 22, 2012 by cheadled

At Cheadle Data Recovery we make it a priority to ensure that you are happy with what data you receive back before any money changes hands. To do this in advance of raising an invoice we send a file listing detailing the recovered data. Not only do we send a file listing but we provide software to view the listing easily. This makes a big difference, as being presented with just an excel spreadsheet with 50,000+ lines showing what data has been recovered is, in our opinion, rather frustrating.

Below is an image of what you would expect to see when you have loaded the file listing into the software. Not only will you see a complete directory structure which is browsable, and details telling you the number of files recovered, but there is also a search/filter function to make finding those critical files easier.

Moreover, we include a ‘Status’ column. This gives an indication of whether the file is working, or whether it is corrupt. In most cases the data is working, but on occasions there can be files which are corrupt. We would prefer to tell you this in advance of receiving your data back, rather than you getting a nasty surprise when you come to access your files. Also, if for whatever reason the critical data you want is corrupt, and you do not wish to receive the other data back, then we will not make any charges for the recovery services up to that point. Remember, we want you be happy with what you get back.

When you can tell data is unrecoverable just by looking at the outside of the disk

Posted on February 16, 2012 by cheadled

Rather a long title to this post, but you are probably asking your self, just how? No we don’t have X-ray vision here. Or special (fictional) tools we see on TV in CSI that we can wave over a hard disk drive. Take the picture below of a 500GB Seagate HDD. This HDD was received in this week from a local PC shop.The picture is a little blurry, but can you tell why this data is unlikely to be recovered? Look carefully.

In fact I’ve made it a little easier by exaggerating the issue myself just to give you a chance – notice in the top right hand corner the white sticky label looks as if it has been peeled back. On close inspection it looks as if the white sticker has been peeled back to reveal the security screw underneath it.

So why does this make the data unrecoverable?

Well it doesn’t per se. However it indicates to us that it is likely that someone has exposed the screw to undo it, and accessed the hard disk assembly (HDA) and exposed the platters. In nearly all cases when the owner/PC shop has accessed the HDA and exposed the platter surface we find the data is unrecoverable. This is because they do not handle the disk appropriately and contaminate or damage the very sensitive components in the HDA. In this case we found a fingerprint on the platter surface and a scratch on the platter surface where someone has tried to move the head assembly. As such what was likely to be a good opportunity to recover the data has been lost.

I cannot express this clearly enough: if you want to recover your data DO NOT open the hard disk drive and expose the platters. You are not going to make matters better, and most likely they will become worse, very quickly.

Fixed price quotations, but chocolates welcomed.

Posted on February 8, 2012 by cheadled

Sometimes it is pleasant and helpful to have data recovered. Sometimes it is very important. No matter what the scenario our prices remain the same. On diagnosis of the hard disk Cheadle Data Recovery specifies which tier of pricing the drive failure fits into, and a fixed price quote is generated. This includes the cost of any donor parts required, so there will be no phone call a week later asking for an upfront, non-refundable donor parts fee on top of the original quote.

Last week a 1TB Hitachi Desktop 3.5″ HDT721010SLA360 was received in with a PCB failure. Over the last few years Hitachi desktop hard disk drives have been relatively reliable and we have few spare parts in stock. The requirements for matching a donor PCB on a Hitachi drive are quite specific, and are based on the NVRAM and CPU controller, it’s useful to match the machine level code (MLC) too. We were able to find a supplier with a matching part within 2 working days, and work was completed with 5 working days. A full recovery was made of the data, including the university MBA dissertation that was due for submission in a fortnight.

Failed Hitachi 1TB with PCB fault and a little gift

How easy is it to find a donor hard disk drive? Part 1.

Posted on February 7, 2012 by cheadled

A significant proportion of the hard disk recoveries we see in require donor parts. That is to complete the recovery of data from the failed hard disk drive it is necessary to source a compatible (matching) hard disk drive. There are three main types of failure that require a donor part:

Printed circuit board failure (PCB)
Firmware failure
Read/Write head failure

The set of requirements for each is different. Over the course of the next few posts I will discuss the difficulties and nuances in finding suitable matching donor parts for each type of failure.

To begin with, where do we look? Understandably many customers expect that we can go to our nearest computer hardware dealer and buy one off the shelf. Much like if your car broke down you would take it to the nearest garage, and they will probably have matching exhausts, tyres, brake pads in stock. Sadly this is not the case for us. All HDD donor parts we look for tend to have been manufactured at roughly the same time (often within the month) of your failed HDD.

Customers then wonder if we can order one directly from the manufacturer; that would be to order one direct from Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung, Fujitsu etc. If only! This would be ideal, sadly they do not provide spare parts for any storage devices they make.

When finding donor parts it is necessary to match exactly many of the parameters listed on the front of the HDD and on the PCB. This can be challenging, and most regular sellers will not list such details. Realistically there are three options:

Internal supplies – hard disk drives we have in stock. In our case this numbers several hundred disks, Wonderful as there is no direct cost to us. The downside is we are currently storing approximately 1500Kg of hard disk drives on the premises. They take up a lot of space too.
Specialist HDD suppliers to the data recovery industry – they list the important details of each drive. The down side is the cost. The price of a disk from a dealer is often two or three times the cost of a new disk.
eBay - wonderful if you have the time to go through hundreds of listings and squint at out of focus pictures of hard disk drives. It is usually necessary to contact sellers to confirm the details of the drive they are selling. Often they are unresponsive or even bemused at such requests and do not always provide reliable information. On the positive side, the prices tend to be lowest.

In following posts the requirements for donor spares will be discussed. Hopefully this will illuminate those with an interest on how challenging it can be to find the necessary parts to successfully recover data.

: A 500GB Seagate HDD manufactured in 2008. Note the reference to ‘site code’ – this relates to part compatability for some recoveries

: An altogether diferrent 500GB Seagate HDD, manufactured in 2007

Solid State Disk reliability – no need to backup?

Posted on February 3, 2012 by cheadled

We have already had one or two customers tell us that after the failure of their hard disk drive (HDD) they have decided to purchase a solid state disk (SSD). Prices for SSDs are falling, whilst in recent months prices for HDDs have been increasing. That combined with the perception that SSDs are more reliable have allowed them to fall into favour.

However, it came as quite the surprise to one customer when his SSD had stopped functioning completely. This is typical for SSD drives. Unlike HDDs which can often have a slowly degrading performance to the the point of failure, SSDs tend to be working OK one day, then catastrophic failure the next.

Put in the most simple terms, SSDs are much like a giant usb memory stick. A usb memory stick typically has one or two NAND flash memory chips and a single controller chip. An SSD has multiple NAND Flash memory chips. For example the 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD has a total of 16 Flash NAND chips and a single controller chip.

In the case of recovering data from Flash NAND technology it is necessary to dismount the memory chips and read them directly using specialised technology. Then the controller chip is emulated and folder and file structure is recreated. Needless to say it is not as easy to achieve good results as it might sound.

In this most recent case, the OCZ 120GB Vertex II, the controller chip is manufactured by the popular supplier “Sandforce“. These controller chips have shown excellent performance and are currently being used widely by a number of SSD manufacturers. Unfortunately the Sandforce SF-1200 series controllers encrypt the data stored on the Flash NAND chips. This means if the chips are removed all the data pulled from them directly is useless due to the 128bit AES encryption.

As such the options for recovering data from Sandforce based SSDs are very limited. The printed circuit board components can be tested to see if any other parts are at fault, and a reflow of the PCB can ensure there are no bad contacts between any of the components and the PCB. Otherwise it is a non-recoverable device. In the case Cheadle Data Recovery received this week, this was just the case. As such, do not think of SSDs as a safe storage method, and do continue to back up your data.

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