While RAID 6 offers higher fault tolerance than RAID 5, its error correction system creates unique challenges when multiple drives fail or a controller malfunction occurs. Successful data recovery requires correct identification of the parity rotation and the exact point...

You need to recover files from a hard drive, solid-state drive (SSD), USB stick, RAID array, or some other type of storage device — but you’re not sure what to do next. Logically, you know that you’ll need to work...

A drive showing its full capacity as Unallocated Space despite containing files moments before indicates a failure of the partition table or file system metadata.  Your data remains physically present on the media, but the operating system has lost the...

In the process of a data recovery evaluation, you might hear that your device has stiction.  Stiction occurs when the read/write heads of a storage device become physically stuck to the data storage media. That prevents it from reading or...

Recovering files from a failed LTO-9 tape involves identifying the specific failure mode and using forensic imaging techniques to extract the raw data bitstreams. In this guide, we will cover common LTO-9 failure scenarios, the technical challenges of the format,...

A failing pre-amplifier (pre-amp) can cause one of the most famous hard drive failure symptoms: the dreaded click of death. However, a clicking sound can indicate a number of different failures, and pre-amp issues — like many hard disk drive...

Happy 2026! At Datarecovery.com, we’ve set a few new goals for the New Year — and one of our resolutions is to help our customers avoid permanent data loss by following a few industry-standard best practices. Here’s what we want...

When a hard drive stops working, it’s typically for one of two reasons: a mechanical failure or an electronic failure. In a mechanical failure, the moving parts inside the drive — commonly the HDD actuator (Hard Disk Drive actuator) or...

The HDD actuator (Hard Disk Drive actuator) is the mechanical component that positions the read/write heads over the magnetic platters to access your data.  It’s similar in design to the arm of a record player, except that the read/write heads...

Your computer will show the capacity of a 1 Terabyte (TB) hard drive as only 931 Gigabytes (GB). That’s simply a difference in how manufacturers and operating systems define storage (manufacturers use base-10 math, while Windows computers use base-2).  But...