Speed Kills? With Hard Drives It’s Heat!

A few months ago I bought an internal thermometer for my computer. I was told by Malcolm our hard drive recovery engineer that the most common reason for hard disk failure was heat. I was shocked to find the internal temperature of my machine was 120 degrees! How did it get so hot?

When it was put together a couple of years ago it was pretty standard fare, 3ghz Intel Pentium IV processor, 1gb RAM with video, sound and network on the motherboard. After a while I put in an ATI 9800 video card with 256MB as well as an Audigy 2 sound card and a gigabit LAN card to match a new router upgrade. Little did I know that those items raised my tempature internally. Not knowing any better I didn’t add any extra fans or anything.

A couple of days ago my hard drive crashed see my blog post:Data Recovery Case Study- My Own Machine to read all about it. It turns out that the platters had warped due to heat. At the time all I knew was that the platters needed to be swapped it wasn’t until later that I found out why. I replaced the drive (a 250GB Maxtor IDE) with 2 160GB Western Digitals set up with a software RAID 1 which is a mirror. I was determined not to go through the humiliation of loosing data while working for a data recovery company again.

Two weeks ago my power supply went, taking with it my video card and creating some problems with my sound card. I went ahead and ordered a new XPS from Dell, but asked the guys at DTI to fix up my machine for gaming. It was at this time that they started to tell me about heat and how the case I was using (A big Thermaltake) didn’t have enough fans.

Now I looked at the internal temp of my new Dell and sure enough it is 105 degrees in there. This goes to show that we need to educate ourselves on how best to deal with heat. This machine has Serial ATA so the drives are big and fast, but they get blazing hot. I installed hard drive fans on them I snagged them from Tiger Direct for 7 bucks. Because Dell has a good setup with the proper balance between positive and negative air flow, this helped a bunch. Right now it is at a solid 75 degrees.

Understand that there are many other methods of cooling that can be added to almost ANY computers including the case or the housing itself that will drop the computers core temperature drastically. Aluminum cases are becoming very popular as they can run up to 6 times cooler then a standard steel case.

The one thing that I didn’t understand was how does a platter warp? It seems that with usage the drive heats up then as it turns off or goes into hibernation, the hard disk cools down. This can cause minimal warping. When I say minimal we’re talking less than a millimeter. The hard disk drive is a very precise piece of technology that is born to fail. Tolearn more about hard drives see Dick Correa’s post about hard drives with bad sectors . It is actually a pretty scary post which should motivate you to get a good backup plan going if you don’t have one already.

If your hard drive is clicking stop what you are doing and call us at 727-345-9665!

[tags]hard drive recovery, computer repair[/tags]

DTI Data Recovery Services

Welcome to DTI Data Recovery’s new corporate blog! We are calling this our Resouce Center because in it we will share knowledge gained through experience about everything computer related. DTI has a vast amount of experience dealing with hard disk failures ranging from clicking laptop hard drives to failed RAID arrays.

 DTI creates all of it’s software IN HOUSE. We have a staff of programmers and engineers that work hard to create technology and viable solutions. If you are dealing with catastrophic data loss, then you have come to the right place! Don’t be fooled by so called data recovery companies making claims to recover data from any drive regardless of size with prices that are too good to be true. That is unrealistic. In reality, if they were to exhaust every option of recovery on each drive, they would quickly become bankrupt.

DTI DATA RECOVERY has actual engineers that are specialized in specific hard drive manufacturers. We have a Maxtor engineer, a Western Digital engineer, an IBM/Hitachi engineer, etc. Every avenue of recovery is explored. We go through EVERY option to bring your data back to life.

In addition, all of our customers receive a 100% satisfaction guarantee on all hard drive data recovery or data loss from any media or OS. If you are not completely satisfied with the data we have recovered, you do not pay us anything. To see a more comprehensive list of our services, training courses, data recovery tools, forensic investigation services and much more. Please go to our data recovery service page.

Hard disk recovery services: Why use dtidata as your data recovery company? Quote From NASA “Lockhead Martin referred us” end quote. Over 100,000 data recovery service and software clients since 1992.

Our Drive Tracker allows you to log in and review updates of your case (drive recovery) status 24/7. Our state of the art customer service module also provides you with access to your tracking and shipment dates. With our new “Invoice on Demand” option you can easily log in and obtain a new data recovery invoice if you have lost your previous invoice and need a duplicate. Just log in under your case number and your invoice will be automatically sent to you. Our new system has enabled us to establish unsurpassed customer satisfaction with the use of technology and our friendly DRS ( Data Recovery Service) Team. For Data Recovery you have come to the right place.

Using Restore Feature With Dell And Compaq HP

Dell Compaq and HP System Restore feature and how to recover your data files.

I take a lot of time to evaluate, what the most frequent Technical support calls I receive are. After a thorough evaluation I have noticed that I receive an inordinate amount of calls referencing the go back or system restore feature that many of the new computers are preloaded with. This is one of the most common data recovery calls we get.

The most popular of these seem to be Dell’s PC Restore by Symantec and HP Compaq’s PC system recovery. Let me take a moment to explain how these restores work. When your hard drive is installed at the factory and the operating system loaded, a very small semi invisible partition area is created at the beginning of the drive. This small partition usually uses about 2 gig of your drive and is used to store a compressed image of your machine as it was when it left the manufacturer. In other words, it takes a snapshot of how all the software was loaded and stores that in the tiny partition. If something happens to your operating systems and you can no longer get into Windows, you employ this partition.

In your documentation there is an explanation of how to get into you recover partition or diagnostic partition and is usually done by hitting F10 when you boot up. At this point you will be asked to make sure you have your data backed up and then you will be asked if you would like to restore your machine. If at the time you’re doing this you happen to be speaking with the manufactures technical support people they advise you to click yes and continue the restore procedure. Now, the party is over and from this point forward your data has become highly compromised, if not totally destroyed. Understand that the tech support at the manufacturer only cares about getting the PC back up and running and feel no responsibility to your data. This is an important point that must be clearly understood.

Ok so now you have run the system restore, you boot in to windows and low and behold all of your data is gone. Your operating system and applications have been restored to the original state and your data now resides in the Twilight Zone. The following are the steps you will need to take in order to try and recover some of your data files (ie .jpg, .doc, .mp3).

1. Move the hard disk to another computer either via USB chassis or by slaving it to another PC.  Please see DTI’s blog if you don’t know How To Slave A Hard Drive.
2. Purchase a piece of file carving or file harvester software for a raw file recovery. The piece of software that we sell that does this kind of data recovery is Fast File Finder the link will take you to the download page where you can download the demo. Like all of DTI Data Recovery’s software, it will show you your data before you buy it! We have a long list of file types that we can recover and hopefully yours will be on it. Data Recovery Software like this normally recovers many different types of data file formats.
3. Run a scan of the hard drive and see what files Fast File Finder locates.
4. Save the files to a different hard drive because you do not want to put any data on the hard drive you are trying to recover from. Let me say that again, do not save the data to the physical drive you are trying to recover data from.
5. Lastly, go through all the files that the raw file finder has recovered for you and see if your data is there.

If you had not defragged your drive in more then 2 weeks before the system restore a lot of the files will be corrupted due to file fragmentation. You can see DTI’s blog on how to set up a scheduled defrag so that in the event that this happens again you will be prepared. You will also notice you have lost all your directory structure and file names. It is unfortunate, but because you have a perfectly good working file system at this point, and all of the old information in the Master File Table, Partition Sector, and Master Boot Record have all been over written this is the only option. The best way to avoid data recovery all together is to back up often!