DTI Data Recovery continues its excellence in software development by releasing Speed Clone for Windows. The new Speed Clone download package includes the Windows version as well as a bootable DOS ISO for cloning hard drives that are registered in the BIOS. It also has the original Speed Clone that works off of a floppy.

Speed Clone is a powerful tool that allows technicians to clone from physical to physical drive or create an image file of a physical drive. The most powerful feature of the software is the error reporting facility.  Using native Windows diagnostics as well as the internals of the software the technician can get a clear idea of the physical status of the drive.  By using a simple file system map a technician can accurately pinpoint problems in the file system. This software was designed with the knowledge that there may be bad sectors on a drive and that is the reason it is being cloned/imaged. In order to facilitate an accurate diagnosis a robust error reporting system has been integrated into the software.  This fact alone will make Speed Clone a technicians most valuable tool.

In addition, Speed Clone will allow the technician to walk away from a multi-drive multi-image session instead of watching for each image to finish.  This time saving function will allow for easier replication of RAID components before a destripe or RAID mount is attempted.

Even if the technician is not cloning the ‘Scan’ facility allows you to take a diagnostic look at a hard drive.  With the printable error report this tool can be used to advise a potential client of the possibility of recovery.

When working with hard drives a technician rarely sees one that is not damaged.  Speed Clone was designed with the technician in mind to help give them a leg up in this competitive market.  Add this software to your arsenal of data recovery tools in order to better and more accurately serve your clients.

If you work on hard drives you cannot be without the full suite of Speed Clone!

Purchase Speed Clone here or read more about it on our Speed Clone page.

Only $49.50

The new external hard drives are small in size, but large in capacity. According to Western Digital, they are the largest hard drives on the market that don’t require a RAID system. Being in hard drive recovery, we see a lot of external disks that overheat. WD is taking on that problem by putting the new drives in standby mode if they are not accessed after 10 minutes. This power saving function could increase the life span of these external hard drives.

The only drive that I haven’t tested is the MAC edition because I just don’t do Mac’s. I had no problem getting the My Book to work with Kubuntu or Vista, the two operating systems that I use. I like the price, but am still concerned over the vast amount of heat that external hard drives use. Heat kills hard drives!

If you need huge amounts of storage, your best bet is to get 2 of these and back one up to the other. If you think I am being paranoid, remeber that we do hard drive recovery for a living, and hard drives all fail!

New Western Digital 2 TB External Hard Drive Recovery

Not So!

Last Monday Western Digital announced it bought the leader in solid state storage: Silicon Systems. They threw down a whopping $65 big ones (millions) for the company and the patents that they own. While Western Digital is a huge player in the 2.5″ hard drive market, before this purchase, they had nothing as far as solid state goes. That all changed on Monday with the creation of WD Solid-State Storage, the division filled by the acquisition of Silicon Systems.

So what does this mean to regular computer users? Solid state storage will be more reliable than magnetic media which requires hard drive recovery all the time. Solid state hard drives will probably last longer than their magnetic predecessors. The downside is when they die, there is virtually no chance for recovery because there is no way to repair anything like a hard drive. Now we do have some tricks that allow us to read solid state media when normal means fail. This will give us a leg up when the time comes for solid state to firmly replace magnetic media as the storage of choice for computer manufacturers.

With solid state storage knocking on the door, magnetic media companies, and businesses that rely upon magnetic media, had better take the long view and figure out their place in the solid state world. If you are wondering what DTI is doing, we are putting together a new product that will be launching in the next few weeks, that will be a virtual data insurance policy. This will be a necessity for those taking the solid state plunge. While it will take some time for all computer makers to embrace solid state storage, the death of magnetic media and hard drive recovery as a business is no more than 5 years away!

Even though on Apple’s website they call the iPod’s storage a “hard drive”, not all of them are. The storage is for the most part flash media or solid state, not a drive with platters and heads. Some of the exceptions are the 60GB, 80GB and 120GB which use Toshiba hard drives. Look at the Apple site to see what is in your iPod. As far as data recovery goes, we have a lot more options when a hard drive is involved since they have working parts that can be fixed. Solid State Storage has no moving parts, but there are still plenty of things that we can do from an electronic level to perform iPod data recovery.

DTI Data has the capabilities to recover all files that reside on an iPod, music, pictures, video, etc.

Icon	Model	Year-Month introduced	Scrolling device	Capacity	Current iPod Software Version
	iPod shuffle (2nd generation Early 2008) (2 GB) data recovery	2008-02	n/a	2 GB	1.0.3
	iPod touch (32 GB) data recovery	2008-02	multi-touch display	32 GB	1.1.3
	iPod touch (8 GB or 16 GB) data recovery	2007-09	multi-touch display	8 GB or 16 GB	1.1.3
	iPod classic (80 GB or 160 GB) data recovery	2007-09	Click Wheel	80 GB or 160 GB	1.1.1
	iPod nano (3rd generation) data recovery	2007-09	Click Wheel	4 GB or 8 GB	1.1
	iPod shuffle (2nd generation) (1 GB) data recovery	2006-09	n/a	1 GB	1.0.3
	iPod (5th generation late 2006) (30 GB or 80 GB) data recovery	2006-09	Click Wheel	30 GB or 80 GB	1.2.3
	iPod nano (Second Generation) (2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB) data recovery	2006-09	Click Wheel	2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB	1.1.3
	iPod nano (1 GB) data recovery	2006-02	Click Wheel	1 GB	1.3.1
	iPod (5th generation) (60 GB) data recovery	2005-10	Click Wheel	60 GB	1.2.3
	iPod (5th generation ) (30 GB) data recovery	2005-10	Click Wheel	30 GB	1.2.3
	iPod nano (4 GB) data recovery	2005-09	Click Wheel	4 GB	1.3.1
	iPod nano (2 GB) data recovery	2005-09	Click Wheel	2 GB	1.3.1
	iPod with color display (60 GB) data recovery	2005-06	Click Wheel	60 GB	1.2.1
	iPod with color display (20 GB) data recovery	2005-06	Click Wheel	20 GB	1.2.1
	iPod photo (30 GB) (also known as iPod with color display) data recovery	2005-02	Click Wheel	30 GB	1.2.1
	iPod mini (4 GB Second Generation) data recovery	2005-02	Click Wheel	4 GB	1.4.1
	iPod mini (6 GB Second Generation) data recovery	2005-02	Click Wheel	6 GB	1.4.1
	iPod shuffle (512 MB) data recovery	2005-01	n/a	512 MB	1.1.5
	iPod shuffle (1 GB) data recovery	2005-01	n/a	1 GB	1.1.5
	iPod photo (40 GB) (also known as iPod with color display) data recovery	2004-10	Click Wheel	40 GB	1.2.1
	iPod photo (60 GB) (also known as iPod with color display) data recovery	2004-10	Click Wheel	60 GB	1.2.1
	iPod (20 GB Click Wheel) data recovery	2004-07	Click Wheel	20 GB	3.1.1
	iPod (40 GB Click Wheel) data recovery	2004-07	Click Wheel	40 GB	3.1.1
	iPod mini data recovery	2004-01	Click Wheel	4 GB	1.4.1
	iPod (20 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-09	touch wheel	20 GB	2.3
	iPod (40 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-09	touch wheel	40 GB	2.3
	iPod (10 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-04	touch wheel	10 GB	2.3
	iPod (15 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-04	touch wheel	15 GB	2.3
	iPod (30 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-04	touch wheel	30 GB	2.3
	iPod (10 GB touch wheel) data recovery	2002-07	touch wheel	10 GB	1.5
	iPod (20 GB touch wheel) data recovery	2002-07	touch wheel	20 GB	1.5
	iPod (10 GB scroll wheel) data recovery	2002-03	scroll wheel	10 GB	1.5
	iPod (5 GB scroll wheel) data recovery	2001-10	scroll wheel	5 GB	1.5

If you are here you need data recovery, more than likely, internal hard disk repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need data recovery.

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.

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.

NAND Storage Explained

 NAND Flash architecture is one of two flash technologies used in memory cards like the type in MP3 players, USB pocket drives and the most common application: digital picture storage. NAND is particulalry useful for high capacity data storage in small devices.

NAND flash devices offer faster erase, write, and read capabilities over NOR architecture.

NOR Storage Explained

NOR flash is the preferred technology for flash devices used to store and run code, usually in small capacities. NOR flash devices have fast read capabilities, but they have slow write and erase functions compared to the NAND architecture. NOR technology is more commonly found as embedded designs and in lower-end set-top boxes and mobile handsets, or BIOS chips.

NOR flash architecture was introduced by Intel in 1988.
NAND flash architecture was introduced by Toshiba in 1989.

Unlike hard disk drives, solid state storage devices have no moving parts. The majority of data recovery that happens on flash media whether it is a SmartCard, SanDisk or some other type of digital media is done on a software level. Most flash media storage devices emulate a hard disk’s way of dealing with file systems. Cameras or MP3 players have an embedded operating system that needs to access the storage device the same way your computers operating system accesses a hard drive. Unless the media was damaged physically, the problems lie within the file system and can be recovered with DTI’s file recovery programs.

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.

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.