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Storage Wars – Hard Drives Reach 2TB – Good or Bad

Michael Stankard — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:24:48 +0000

Seagate Constellation 2TB

And in this corner… The hard drive Storage Wars have been heating up lately as Western Digital and Seagate battle it out for not only the largest capacity disks, but they are also going green! Western Digital went as far as to name it’s new 2TB hard drive the Caviar Green series. Before I get into how 2TB hard drives work and why buyers should beware, let’s look at how a hard drive can be green. Western Digital has slowed the RPM’s down to 5400 on their Caviar Green, hoping to reduce heat and power consumption, without users noticing the drastic drop in speed. While Western Digital is by far the leader in high capacity storage for consumers, Seagate is also dipping their feet in by offering their 2tb drive as SATA, not just SAS. For those of you unsure about SAS and SAS 2.0, it is meant for enterprise level storage needs, not Joe Public. Western Digital has their 2TB hard drives going out as OEM as well as offering the drive in their online store. They also have a 2 hard drive 2TB My Book out that offers protection in the form of a RAID 1 mirror.

The 2tb My Book is priced to sell with a tag under $300.00. In fact it is really a two drives for the price of one situation since the OEM Caviar Green is $280.00 for just one hard drive. This is kind of confusing since I don’t see how they can sell 2 hard drives for the cost of a single internal 2tb drive. If you add up the speed slow down of 5,400 RPM along with its USB interface, this drive is OK for backup, but just won’t cut it for users planning to actively store and watch movies or listen to music.

Why 2TB Hard Drives Scare IT Professionals

Both Western Digital and Seagate have released 2TB hard drives this year. Even though the physical size of the drives remain at 3.5 inches, they are holding quite a bit more data. How did they pull that off? A couple of years back, Toshiba released information about perpendicular recording as a new technology for traditional magnetic storage, but it was Seagate that delivered the first drive to consumers.

Perpendicular recording significantly increases the areal density and storage capacity of hard drives. The ones and zeroes are now stored vertically rather than horizontally. This allows for much greater storage because a sector can hold the same amount of data, but in a much smaller sector size. For example, if a platter can hold 100 sectors with longitudinal recording it will be able to hold 250 sectors with perpendicular recording. Using this technology and other advancements, hard drive manufacturers can now have areal density up to 500GB per platter. A 2TB hard drive will have four platters that hold 500GB each.

The problem here is that this type of areal density squeezes more and more bytes into sectors making them smaller and smaller. The heads have to be perfectly aligned to read and write to the sectors correctly, and more importantly read and write to those sectors on a consistent basis. If the heads write to the sectors even a hair out of alignment, then that data will be corrupt. If this happens over and over again, soon the OS won’t load and the computer won’t boot. If that doesn’t sound bad enough, the level of heat the motor generates to spin 4 platters, will swell the platters and the same problem happens – the sectors get out of whack and data gets corrupt. There is an old Latin phrase Caveat Emptor that means “buyer beware”. I bring this up not to criticize Western Digital and Seagate or their ability to make hard drives, but to warn our readers about high capacity hard drives and to ask you all to take a wait and see attitude beofre plunging in and getting another drive because it is new. As owners of Seagate’s 7200-11 series drives found out to their misfortune, new technology often needs to be tested thoroughly before being released en-masse! If you do take the plunge and go for a 2TB hard drive, you better get 2 and use them to back each other up. If you have a 2TB disk failure you will need hard drive recovery so back up!

External Hard Drive Data Recovery Review – Seagate FreeAgent Pro

Michael Stankard — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:21:29 +0000

Seagate FreeAgent External Hard Drive

When looking at external hard drives, most reviewers only look at capacity, pricing and performance. DTI Data Recovery looks at these things, but has a focus on the stability of the external hard drive and its ability to withstand heat and not need hard drive recovery. The Seagate FreeAgent Pro is a FireWire400, USB 2.0, eSATA external hard drive that is built to last. Even though Seagate is actually a competitor of ours, they acquired ActionFront Hard Drive Recovery a couple years ago, we would be remiss not to look at their products in the interest of our readers.

All that being said, the FreeAgent Pro is a solid external hard drive. Seagate has always made a good hard drive and this is no different. The FreeAgent line of external hard drives comes in 3 types, the Pro, Desktop and Go. Since we like lots of storage we only looked at the Pro line and we were impressed by its durability and data protection. As far as pricing goes it is comparable to other external hard drives with the 1 TB version under $200.00 from Seagate’s store. The only thing that bugged me was it didn’t come with the eSATA cable, but the Firewire transfer, while not as fast as some like the Western Digital series, it was fast enough for me. I think people should be more concerned with stability and failure or hard drive recovery than speed anyway. All in all the FreeAgent is a good external hard drive.

Hard Drive Form Factors Explained

Michael Stankard — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:00:38 +0000

This is the first article in a series that will explain how hard drives work, why they fail and what you as users can do to protect your data. When looking at hard drives the first step is to identify what it’s form factor is. Simply put, the form factor is the size of the hard drive and how it connects to your computer.

The most common type of hard drive form factor is 3.5 inch for desktop disks. Laptop hard drives are almost alwas 2.5 inch form factor. Almost all computers manufactored today for consumers and small businesses have either IDE or SATA hard drives with a normal 3.5 or 2.5 inch form factor.

Why Is a 3.5 Inch Hard Drive Form Factor actually 4 inches wide

The 3.5 inch form factor doesn’t actually refer to the physical measurement of width or height of the drive, but refers to what the size of the bay is on the computer. Originally the 3.5 inch form factor was used in reference to the size of the PC’s floppy drive. Today hard drives are typically smaller than their counterparts from 5 years ago.

Watch the video below for a visual guide to common hard drive form factors:

[See post to watch Flash video]

Laptop hard drives are 2.5 inch form factors and like desktop disks, can be either IDE or SATA. The video above shows the difference between the cables and power connections on the two types of hard drives. Today there is also a significant difference in hard drive pricing when it comes to SATA and IDE. When looking at hard drive recovery, we don’t charge more for one or the other.

Western Digital Hard Drive Pricing

Michael Stankard — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:49:25 +0000

We are asked all the time which are the best hard drives to use? Since we are a hard drive recovery company we get to see all the major hard drives up close and personal. While there are certainly some hard drives that we see more often, that is more because of their saturation of the marketplace than a particular hard drive failure.

When it comes to storage and hard drive pricing, it usually is reflected in a cost per GB as well as how fast it is. A hard drive that has a large buffer and higher read write speed, will cost more than a hard drive that is slower and has less of a buffer.

Since all hard drive prices are relatively similar, the best deals are usually found either online or in your local computer or office supply superstore.

One of the most popular type of hard drive are external hard drives. Most people use them as backup, but with everyone working with video, pictures and music, the demand for storage has risen. That means people are using external hard drives for storage. This can be dangerous since external hard drives have a tendency to overheat and can get banged around as they are moved.

We have looked at quite a bit of external hard drives. Here is a link to the review of Western Digital MyBook. By far the highest selling external hard drive in the world, the My Book is also pretty inexpensive. If you look at that post, you will see a lot of comments on the page. Most of them are users talking about problems that they have had with their MyBook’s are better than other external hard drives, the fact is there are so many of them out there, that we are bound to see some in here for hard drive recovery. ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL, it is just a matter of when.

When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare

Jacqui Best — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:49:08 +0000

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the drive separate and even though that data area has grown over the years it is in essence exactly the way it has always been. When we need more room we just make a new array and transfer the data over. Now on the array are all of the things you would expect, backups of our desktop machine, pictures of the family, tax information, drivers for all of our machines, and all of our work/personal documents. On the day of the crash I go to access the data drive on the server and it is no longer there. I think to myself, “hmm that is odd, let me reboot the machine”.

So I reboot the server and when it starts to come up I have a message that the array is in critical state and that one of the drives has dropped out. Now note that this is a common problem with this array, so I just figure I will go into Windows Sever 2003 and add the drive back in, no problem. WRONG, the drive can’t be added back in, so now I am sitting with an array I can’t get to and all the data I have ever had on it. (That’s right I didn’t back up) I eventually have to take it to our RAID guy Dick Correa, and have him fix it for me. He had to pull one of the drives because it was physically gone.

He then had to de-stripe them, then harvest all of my data off, and put it all on a 500 gig external for me. It was a Maxtor 200gb IDE drive, and all the others drives in the array are the same so all that I can guess is that I am just having total bad luck. That drive model is known to be pretty stable and all the other drives in the array are still in good working condition.

Fujitsu 500 GB Hard Drive Review

Jacqui Best — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:24:41 +0000

Ok here is another review of a new Fujitsu hard drive from my personal fave in hard drive manufacturers. This is really kind of awesome, a 2.5” half terabyte drive. I don’t know how you can go wrong with that. It only uses minimal power, 1.8W for read write, because of the Fujitsu’s Green Policy Innovation Program. It is a SATA 3.0/Gbs which makes it great for data transfer and storage. It runs at 4200 rpm which is a bonus in my book, those super high speed drives seem to fail all the time.

Now, whether that is because it is just too fast or because of the heat that it generates I am unsure but I know the fail rate is much higher on those 9k rpm drives. They are listing the seek time at around 13 milliseconds. I think these drives would be perfect for using in an external USB chassis since it is likely they are not going to run to hot. I should probably note that this is also the largest laptop drive out there now. I know that this will please all of you power laptop users. My husband is always out of disk space on his Dell, and I think this will make a great Father’s Day gift! Because the drive was only released on February 25^th there are no real reviews out there and we haven’t gotten any in for hard drive recovery, so if anyone has one of these big boys let me know what you think.

Western Digital My Passport Essential USB Drive: A Sleek New Portable

Jacqui Best — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:19:54 +0000

I think I have mentioned before that Western Digital is one of my favorite hard drive manufacturers. I was reading around on the Internet today and came across this. It is really a sweet little portable drive. With a max capacity of 320Gb and only weighing in at 5 ounces it is an awesome answer to all of the huge files need to move around now.

I am a little concerned about heat on this guy though, and would not recommend running it all the time. It would be best to just plug it in when you need to do your data transfers. It is not in need of a power source either, because it is powered by your USB port. I tried to look and see if anyone is talking about problems they have had with it and the only negative I could find was people thought the price should be lower. On this point I have to disagree, you can get the 320 for 200 bucks on their site, so I am sure there is a deal to be found on them. They come with special encryption software, as well as synchronization software. This can be very useful if you are transporting a PST file between 2 places (i.e. home and work). It is USB 2.0 compliant so you will get transfer rates around 450 to 480(MAX) Mbps. Let me know guys if you have any trouble with this hard drive.

Feel free to contact us if you need hard drive recovery on a My Passport or any other type of storage media.

Maxtor Shared Storage II and the Release of Central Axis

Jacqui Best — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:52:54 +0000

So in an effort to make our data available to us from anywhere Maxtor/Seagate has come up with a really cool idea. The Maxtor Shared Storage II line, which comes in 500 GB and 1 TB, now has the ability to allow users to log into a safe Internet browser site and gain access to their network attached storage (NAS) from anywhere.

You don’t need any special downloads or installs. Also there is no reason to open ports on your firewall or router to gain access to your data. I found this idea to be a long time coming, and think it is awesome that Maxtor is offering it free of charge with this line of NAS device. In the past I have expressed my dislike in the decline of what in the early 90’s was the Caddy of hard drive lines, and finally I think Seagate is moving that area of the company in the right direction.

I know I personally spend a lot of time out of the office and have found it difficult even with having a PDA/Phone to be able to gain access to my files I need to email easily. I am seriously considering the purchase of this product in the near future and will let you all know how that works out. I am very interested to see how the transfer rates are and if the ease of use is really what they are touting it to be. If anyone has one of these devices let me know what you think.

Seagate Momentus Hard Drive Recovery Review

Jacqui Best — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:02:09 +0000

The Seagate Momentus® 5400.4 hard drive recovery review.
At the end of January, Seagate started shipping the much talked about Momentus® 5400.4 hard drive. This drive is the newest in a line of laptop hard drives they have been developing. It uses a second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Which means instead of storing the data in conventional ‘longitudinal’ magnetic recording, in which the bits are directed circumferentially along the track direction, they are storing them perpendicular pointing up and down to the track.

What is good about this is the ability to get much higher storage as they can stack the data. On a laptop hard drive that means huge storage capacity never before seen. The 5400.4 is a 250 gig hard drive using SATA 300 and running at 5400 rpm. I did a lot of reading about this drive and really haven’t been able to find anything positive or negative about it. It is mass shipping to laptop manufacturers and I will update the status as soon as it is in the hands of the masses. Let us know if you have any questions about hard drive recovery by leaving a comment in this post.

Gateway Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery

Victoria Stankard — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:50:33 +0000

Like Dell, Gateway is a laptop /computer manufacturer that uses other companies hard disk drives. They don’t make their own so they rely on buying hard drives in bulk. While Gateway has many types of laptops for business and pleasure it is hard to determine without opening the laptop which hard drive is inside.

If your Gateway laptop hard drive is making clicking noises or isn’t seen in the BIOS, you will need hard drive recovery. DTI Data Recovery Services specialize in laptop hard drive recovery. We have a class 100 clean room to open the drive safely to retrieve your data.

If your Gateway laptop hard drive IS seen by the BIOS, but won’t boot or load Windows, you can more than likely recover the data yourself using our data recovery software. The first thing you will have to do is remove the hard drive out of the laptop. Once that is done you will need to slave the laptop hard drive to another computer to recover your data. We have a step by step video that details how to slave a laptop hard drive to a USB enclosure.

DTI Data offers no data no charge flat rate pricing on all types of hard drive recovery. Call 727-251-2058 for a no obligation quote. Mention that you were in our blog to receive a major discount on Gateway laptop data recovery.

Gateway Notebook Data Recovery Services

Gateway® ML3704Laptop hard drive recovery		Made for Mobility The affordable ML3704 notebook features dual-core technology, easy wireless setup and Windows Vista™ for productivity on-the-go.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Basic² • 14.1″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 512MB DDR2 memory • 60GB hard drive³ • CD-RW/DVD combo drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® ML3706 data recovery		Thin and Light Dual-Core Mobility The ML3706 is an affordable notebook with dual-core technology, easy wireless setup and Windows® Vista™ for productivity on-the-go.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Basic² • 14.1″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 512MB DDR2 memory • 80GB hard drive³ • CD-RW/DVD 24x Combo Optical Drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® MT3705 notebook hard drive recovery		Performance On-the-Go The MT3705 is a premium notebook with enhanced multimedia capabilities, dual-core technology and the advanced features of Windows Vista™ Home Premium¹.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 14.1″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 100GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

15.4″ Widescreen Notebooks
Gateway® ML6219 data recovery		Essential Computing Choose the sensible ML6219 and experience a 15.4″ widescreen Ultrabright™ display, integrated wireless and Windows Vista™ for complete mobile productivity.• Intel® Celeron® M Processor 430¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Basic² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 512MB DDR2 memory • 80GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® ML6701MSRP $699.99		Everyday Performer Complete your work and play on-the-go with the ML6701 notebook, featuring Intel® dual-core power, a 15.4″ widescreen Ultrabright™ display, integrated wireless and Windows Vista™.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Basic² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 512MB DDR2 memory • 100GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® ML6703MSRP $749.99		Essential Computing The ML6703 features Intel® dual-core power to complete your work and play on-the-go. Do more on the 15.4″ widescreen Ultrabright™ display, integrated wireless and Vista™ Home Premium.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ HomePremium² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ WXGA TFT Display • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 80GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® MT6702MSRP $799.99		Inventive Mobile Performance Get your creative juices flowing with the MT6702 notebook, This system is designed with the advanced features of Windows Vista™ Home Premium, mobile dual-core power and widescreen entertainment capabilities.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 120GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® MT6451MSRP $849.99		Creative Performance The loaded MT6451 notebook is designed with your creative performance needs in mind. From dual-core command to widescreen features, the array of advanced features will keep you productive and inventive.• AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 120GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® ML6704* /ML6704H**(Canada)MSRP $849.99		Dual-Core Power for Your Digital Lifestyle The ML6704 and ML6704H are designed with the advanced features of Vista™ Home Premium, mobile dual-core power, widescreen entertainment features and the protection of an extended warranty.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ WXGA TFT • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 160GB SATA hard drive³ • DVD ± RW 8x Multiformat Dual-Layer Optical Drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® MT6820MSRP $899.99		Digital Media Performer The high-performance MT6820 notebook delivers powerful Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology for all of your work and play. Not to mention, you’ll experience the advanced features of Windows Vista™ in a premium mobile design.• Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2250 with Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 160GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Intel® PRO/Wireless 802.11a/b/g

Gateway® MT6821MSRP $1099.99		Unrivaled Dual-Core Performance The loaded MT6821 features Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology with the latest Core™2 Duo power, a 15.4″ widescreen display, Windows Vista™ Home Premium and an extended battery life.• Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5200 with Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 15.4″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 2048MB DDR2 memory • 160GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Intel® PRO/Wireless 802.11a/b/g

17″ Widescreen Notebooks
Gateway® MX8711MSRP $849.99		Dual-Core Mobility, Widescreen Clarity The MX8711 notebook delivers powerful desktop-class functionality, dual-core performance and an incredible 17″ widescreen for the ultimate mobile entertainment experience.• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 17″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 1024MB DDR2 memory • 100GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN

Gateway® MX8712MSRP $1149.99		Dynamic Digital Widescreen The ultrapowerful MX8712 notebook features sharp desktop-class performance and Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology. To enhance your mobile entertainment experience, the vivid 17″ widescreen won’t disappoint.• Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2350 with Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 17″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 2048MB DDR2 memory • 160GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Intel® PRO/Wireless 802.11a/b/g

Gateway® MX8714MSRP $1249.99		Gaming and Entertainment Action The high-octane MX8714 notebook delivers the ultimate desktop-class performance for gamers and those desiring mobile entertainment. Features include the breakthrough power of Intel® Core™2 Duo processing and an incredible 17″ widescreen for an extreme experience.• Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T5500 with Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology¹ • Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium² • 17″ Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT • 2048MB DDR2 memory • 160GB hard drive³ • Multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive • Intel® PRO/Wireless 802.11a/b/g

Hitachi Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery

Michael Stankard — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 20:43:34 +0000

There are many laptop manufacturers who use Hitachi laptop hard disk drives. You can find them in Dell and Sony’s to name just a couple. As you are probably aware, Hitachi purchased IBM’s hard disk drive division in 2002. I remember the date well since it was on my birthday June 4th. Hitachi kept the 2 primary hard disk lines going: Travelstar and Deskstar.

With the takeover, quality of the hard drives didn’t fall off, in fact the drives actually got better! Take for instance the Deskstar. This drive was commonly referred to as the Deathstar drive in the computer repair industry. Now it is one of the better drives. Since Hitachi maintained, if not increased, IBM’s market share of hard disk sales, DTI sees a lot of Hitachi hard drives sent in for data recovery. This isn’t a statement against Hitachi or the quality of their drives. ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL! If you are interested in the reason for the failures read my wife’s post Why Hard Drives Fail .

If you are reading this you probably need Hitachi laptop data recovery, more than likely, internal hard drive repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form for a data recovery quote.

OK the sales portion of the post is over so lets start talking about specific hard drive recovery issues we run into with Hitachi laptop or notebook drives. The most common Hitachi laptop hard drive is the Travelstar.

Here is a collection of model numbers with current faults we are seeing although this is not gospel and diagnostic procedures need to be run before accurate fault prognoses can be found

Please call DTI Data Recovery Services if you have any questions about hard drive recovery.

Hitachi Travelstar’s:

Most Common Models and Data Recovery Issue:
HTS541040G9AT00 – Bad sectors
HTS548020M9AT00 – Bad sectors
HTS726060M9AT00 - Stuck Heads
HTS548040M9AT00 – Common Fine Ring around Platter

As you can see these are ranging from bad sectors to stuck heads to bad sectors caused by stuck heads to eventually causing damaged platters.

Travelstar 4K120

Download Datasheet

Technical Library

Hitachi Laptop Disk Models And Hard Drive Recovery Issue:

IC25N060ATMR04-0 Common Fine Ring around Platter
IC25N030ATMR04-0 Common Fine Ring around Platter
IC25N040ATMR04-0 Common Fine Ring around Platter
IC25N040ATCS05-0 Jammed Spindle Motor
IC25N030ATCS04-0 Common Fine Ring Around Platter
IC25N020ATCS04-0 Fine Ring around Platter - This appears to be caused by bearing problems and rotation speeds.

Dell Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery

Michael Stankard — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:59:57 +0000

Our continuing series on laptop hard drives and what makes them tick (hopefully not click), beats on with a look at Dell laptop hard drives. Dell doesn’t make their own hard drives they rely on other companies products. I personally own 2 Dell computers, a notebook, and a desktop. I went with them because of their support. No one is better supporting their customers than Dell.

When researching this post I spoke with a few of our engineers (independently) about the types of hard drives Dell uses in their notebooks. I was surprised to hear “the best”. I was told that after years of bad experiences Dell realized that they save money in the long run by putting in the most heat resistive hard disks since then they don’t have to replace them in 6 months.

If you DO have a Dell laptop that has a failing hard disk drive and you need data recovery, more than likely, internal hard drive recovery, Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need hard drive recovery.

OK the sales portion of this post is now out of the way, lets look at the most common options you will see when configuring your Dell laptop computer. With storage there are many different hard drives to choose from. The less expensive your overall notebook, the cheaper the hard drive. That being said, if you have to invest a little money put into a good drive!

The question is what is a good drive? Well they don’t even tell you on the lesser Inspiron 1501 who make the hard drive! Your choice is 60 or 80 GB, but no manufacturer. They use whatever they can get at a good bulk price on the cheaper laptops. If you can choose the Western Digital Scorpio, do so. It is the best 5400 RPM drive mainly because it uses power like the old and slow 4200 RPM drive. The thing to be careful of is when looking at the 7200 RPM hard drive available for Dell laptops, speed creates heat and heat creates hard drive recovery.

No matter which drive you go with, remember to keep it cool. Here is a product that I use on my personal Dell XPS:

Fold-able and compact, the Vantec LapCool 4 is ideal for those wanting a cooler notebook but want to keep size to a minimum. Dual, adjustable fans keep your laptop cool while retractable legs can keep your laptop at a level that is comfortable. Featuring a 3-port USB 2.0 hub and an 8 in 1 card reader makes the LapCool 4 perfect as a portable docking station. The LapCool 4 also includes 2 storage compartments at its base, well suited for storing memory cards and cables. Easy to store, easy to carry, easy to use, the Vantec LapCool 4 is the easy choice for a laptop cooler. Remember that Heat kills hard drives!

Hard Drive Recovery: Toshiba Laptop Failed Bearings

Victoria Stankard — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 23:12:04 +0000

Toshiba laptop drives MK, GAS, or GAX most common reason for failure is due to the bearings seizing within the hard disk drive. The spindle motor and the bearings within the hard drive are getting stuck. This is one of the most common reasons for Toshiba laptop hard drive recovery.

When the motor seizes, the heads get parked, touching the platters, and this causes the drive to seem like it is not spinning, but if you listen close enough you will hear a faint sound of the motor sticking. This situation must resolved in a clean room . There is no way to recover the data without invasive hard drive recovery services.

If you are here you need Toshiba laptop data recovery, more than likely, internal hard disk repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-418-3843 or fill out an online quote form.

Here are some facts about Toshiba’s newest laptop hard drives: The MK2035GSS, possesses the largest capacity of its class, 200GB, using only two platters which seems a little scary. While this drive has the capacity, it also gets hot! We all know what heat does to a hard drive, If you are unsure read this post: Speed Kills? With Hard Drives It’s Heat!

DTI Data has a lot of experience recovering Toshiba laptop hard drives. We have a very high success rate and charge a flat fee based upon the type of Toshiba laptop you have. Our services are no data no charge. If we can’t get your data back in a working condition, we don’t charge for hard drive recovery!

Hard Drives: A Destiny Of Failure!

Victoria Stankard — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:01:31 +0000

Hard disk drives will always and ultimitely FAIL! Even with all the new technologies that arise such as perpendicular recording, the most basic element of hard drives, their ability to store data, is a lost cause. Faced with the daunting task of working on a technology destined to fail, hard drive manufacturers have to overcome the fact that they are designing a device to store data knowing that by design, the device will fail. Well isn’t that why we are in the hard drive recovery business after all?

Now that we have gotten the sad truth out of the way, what do hard drive manufactureres do about it?

S.M.A.R.T. Technologies. This system was notifies the user when the drive may be failing. Several components such as drive speed, track to track time, head placement and many other tests are performed on the drives daily. These tests are used in a comparison over time and can show a pattern of device failure. During the degradation cycle there is a manufacturer assigned percentage used that will alert the user of impending data loss. For instance, if a drive has been spinning at 7200 RPM for several months, then over the last several weeks the RPMs drop to 7000 RPM, this may be flagged as an impending problem and the user will be notified that possible data loss may occur in the near future. It is up to the user to backup the data and replace the failing hard disk drive or prepare for data recovery.
Sector Map. The sector map consists of two lists. The primary list, which is set at factory, maps all bad sectors out. These bad sectors are found and mapped before the drive is sold. In other words, hard drives are expected to have bad sectors. There is no such thing as a perfect hard drive. A hard disk drive would cost several thousand dollars to the consumer if manufacturers created the means to make a perfect hard drive. In order to keep costs down, drive remapping is used. Now, once the list of all the bad sectors are made at the factory the drive is then shipped and sold. As the drive performs its day to day functions more bad sectors will appear. It is inevitable. These bad sectors are then mapped to another list. Both of the bad sector lists are mapped to a reserved area of the hard drive. There are only so many reserved area sectors for the firmware to remap to. Once these sectors are exhausted the firmware cannot remap and the bad sectors become part of your live data.

Signs that a drive has used its reserved sector area are, slow reads, slow boot sequence, operating system may seem to lock, may have to reboot several times before the operating system comes up. A chronic bad sector problem will eventually cause file loss, and ultimately the drive will not be able to identify itself to the BIOS and your data is either lost, or you will need hard drive recovery services.

The hard disk drive has one or more platters that are made of glass or aluminum coated with magnetic iron oxide particles. The platters spin continuously as the heads travel in and out along a seek pattern. A typical hard drive contains several of these 3.5-inch platters, which can contain tens of billions of individual bits.

The higher the Ariel density of the hard disk’s platters, the more bits that can be packed into each square inch of platter real estate. A platter is segregated into tens of thousands of concentric tracks. Because tons of information can be stored in one track, the tracks are broken down into smaller units called sectors. Each sector can hold about 512 bytes of data. Disk platters are mounted in a stacked formation on a spindle A spindle motor turns the platters at very high speed, typically between 5,400 and 7,200 rotations per minute, but as fast as 15,000 rotations per minute(RPM’S). The platters spin so that the appropriate sector or sectors containing the data can be positioned underneath one of the drive’s reading heads. There’s one head per platter, and all the heads move in unison.

Heads

Each head in the hard drive is mounted onto a slider, which is mounted onto an arm. A mechanical device called an actuator controls each hard drive arm. The actuator moves the arm to the correct position on the spinning platter, which puts the head in the correct position. The reading head ( reading and writing heads are separate) floats about 2/1,000,000 of an inch above the disk surface. As it passes over the appropriate disk sectors, it interprets the magnetic pulses and converts them to electrical pulses that can be interpreted as 1s and 0s.

Although the head may look large, actually the sensitive part of the head is defined by micro lithographic methods so that the actual exposed portion of the head,which can either read or write the information on the disk,is very small-comparable to the dimensions of features on a microchip! As the manufacturing technology has improved over the years they have been able to shrink this area down to smaller and smaller sizes, and that is how the hard disk memories have risen to such large figures now. In addition they have increased the density of magnetic particles on the disk which makes the storage capacity larger. For example in 1991 the density of storage memory was about 0.l3 Gbits/square inch. In 1998 it was up to around 4 Gbits (30X the density!). At the same time the lithography limit of the sensitive head area was about 4.5 uMeters in 1991, and in 1998 was down to 0.5 uMeters, reduced by a factor of 9. So that is how the storage density of the disks is now up to 200 GB or higher.

Any deviation in the platter or head can cause the hard drive to start clicking. If it starts clicking you will need hard drive recovery.

The above description doesn’t take into consideration perpendicular recording which is a whole other ball game whan it comes to ariel density and data storage. How and why a hard drive works leads us to understand why they and how hard drives fail.

Speed Kills? With Hard Drives It’s Heat!

Victoria Stankard — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:13:31 +0000

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 hard drive 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. To learn 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! Click here for more info on Hard Drive Recovery