Data Recovery for Fire-Damaged RAID Servers: An Overview

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,...
October 21, 2025

Hard Drive Making Grinding Noises: What to Do Next

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...
October 20, 2025

Data Recovery for Burnt or Damaged Hard Drive Circuit Boards

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...
October 16, 2025

Scratched Hard Drive Platters: Is Data Recovery Possible?

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...
October 14, 2025

How Does Hard Drive Firmware Become Corrupted?

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...
October 9, 2025

Data Recovery Challenges: Simultaneous Head Crashes in RAID 10 Arrays

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...
October 7, 2025

Enterprise vs. Consumer Hard Drives: Key Differences in Recovery

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...
October 3, 2025

Why You Shouldn’t Run CHKDSK on a Degraded RAID Volume

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...
October 2, 2025

How to Securely Wipe a Hard Drive Before Selling or Recycling It

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...
September 25, 2025

Should You Use the ATA Secure Erase Command on a USB SSD?

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....
September 24, 2025