Data recovery from fire-damaged RAID servers is frequently possible; each year, we receive several dozen cases (sometimes more, such as when wildfires impacted California business in early 2025), and most cases result in a full or partial recovery. However,...

A grinding hard drive is a critical data emergency. This noise — which is distinct from the repetitive “click of death” — is the sound of an immediate and severe physical failure. The only safe action is to power it...

If you’ve noticed a burning smell from your computer or external hard drive, or if the device is completely dead (unresponsive and the computer fails to recognize it), you may be looking at a damaged hard drive circuit board.  The...

Can you recover data if a hard drive’s platters are physically damaged?  Yes — sometimes, depending on the extent of the damage. The success of the recovery depends on the location and severity of the damage, as well as the...

Hard drive firmware is the embedded software that acts as the drive’s internal operating system. When the firmware becomes corrupted, the drive can become completely inaccessible, even if its physical components are otherwise healthy.Firmware corruption occurs due to sudden...

A simultaneous head crash across multiple drives in a RAID 10 array is a severe data loss scenario that requires immediate treatment in a professional data recovery laboratory.  In fact, multiple head crashes require a laboratory diagnosis — head crashes...

Enterprise and consumer-class hard drives are built for vastly different workloads. The average consumer probably won’t benefit from a HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) drive, for example, and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is overkill for most consumer applications — but...

Running the Check Disk (CHKDSK) utility on a degraded RAID volume can cause catastrophic, irreversible data loss. If you’ve lost data from a RAID array, contact a professional data recovery provider as soon as possible — do not run CHKDSK...

The most reliable way to securely wipe a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is to perform a single-pass overwrite, which writes a pattern of zeros over the entire drive. That’s sufficient to make the original data unrecoverable by even the...

No, you should not rely on the ATA Secure Erase command to wipe a USB-connected solid-state drive (SSD). The ATA Secure Erase command is a powerful, built-in function for sanitizing internal drives, and it’s perfectly sufficient for sanitizing internal SSDs....