If your computer stores data on a SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drive, you may run into an unusual issue: Windows may recognize the drive as a removable device — rather than as an internal drive. This is caused by...

Modern hard drives use S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) metrics to forecast hardware failures.  In most cases, home computer users don’t need to worry about S.M.A.R.T data — but if your hard drive seems to be operating at slow...

At Datarecovery.com, we discourage the use of data recovery software. Software can exacerbate issues like hard drive head crashes, potentially causing permanent damage (and preventing a successful recovery, even if the drive is treated in a professional data recovery laboratory). ...

Seek error rate is a hard drive performance metric reported through Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) tools.  Hard drives, solid-state drives, and other storage devices use SMART to monitor for issues that may indicate an impending failure. For hard...

Recently, MaxDigitalData began selling a 14 terabyte (TB) hard drive on Amazon and other online platforms for about $120 USD. That’s an incredible deal — but as is often the case with budget storage media, there’s a catch.  As TechRadar...

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is data recovery software for the macOS and Windows operating systems. It features an intuitive user interface and a “free” edition that claims to restore up to 2 gigabytes (GB) of data.  Like most popular data...

Disk Drill is a (mostly) free data recovery utility for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. The software claims to be able to recover files from “virtually any storage device,” including internal hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs),...

Conventional wisdom holds that a hard drive lasts for about 3-5 years — and most manufacturer warranties tend to support that assumption.  But it’s important to remember that despite precise engineering, hard drives are profoundly sensitive devices. Recently, we’ve seen...

The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line Utility (WMIC) is a simple tool that allows users to manage their Windows operating system.It runs through the Command Prompt and can access information from Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART), a monitoring system...

Hard drive crashes remain a leading cause of data loss, and while solid-state drives (SSDs) offer better performance and (arguably) better reliability, they’re still a single point of failure.  If an HDD or SSD fails, you lose data — unless...