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...

You attempt to save a document or transfer a file, and your computer throws an error: The drive is “Write Protected” or you’ve got a “Read-Only File System.”  If this isn’t a permissions error, it’s an issue with your storage...

Head parking ramps are small, static plastic guides located near the outer edge of a hard disk drive (HDD) platter that provide a safe resting area for the read/write heads when the drive is powered down or idle.  By physically...

Recovering access to Dogecoin is often possible provided the underlying data — the wallet.dat file, a seed phrase, or a private key — still exists in some form. Losing a password, suffering a hard drive crash, or finding yourself unable...

A new USB device is attracting attention for offering a “military-grade” solution to a common problem: How to permanently erase sensitive data from a hard drive.  The device appears to be the sole offering of the brand DESTRUCT, which claims...

Hitting a failing hard drive or SSD will not fix it — it’ll make the problem worse. There, we’re done with the article.  What’s that? You need proof that percussive maintenance doesn’t work on data storage devices with extremely narrow...