Electronic components generate heat, and ventilation is certainly a factor in the long-term health of your computer. Most modern computer cases are designed with adequate airflow, but a failure in ventilation can lead to catastrophic data loss.  When internal fans...

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...

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...

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...

While Datarecovery.com provides services for all digital storage devices, the vast majority of the cases we receive involve solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs).  The prognosis for data recovery is strong for both device types, provided the work...

In an earlier article, we discussed a novel scam utilizing Seagate hard drives: Sellers were marketing used Exos hard drives as brand-new units, in some cases modifying the S.M.A.R.T. parameters to display lower runtime hours. The scam has spread,...

You’ve just bought a new hard drive — or did you?  On February 8th, Seagate responded to reports that Exos hard drives were being sold with S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) values reset, effectively making the used hard drives...