Conventional wisdom holds that a hard drive lasts for about 3-5 years — and most manufacturer warranties tend to support that assumption.  But it’s important to remember that despite precise engineering, hard drives are profoundly sensitive devices. Recently, we’ve seen...

The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line Utility (WMIC) is a simple tool that allows users to manage their Windows operating system.It runs through the Command Prompt and can access information from Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART), a monitoring system...

Hard drives contain actuator heads that float just above the surface of the platters (discs coated in magnetic material that stores data).  When the actuator heads fail, data is inaccessible — and in many cases, the heads need to be...

Modern hard drives use error correction codes (ECCs) to make sure that data is readable, even when the write process is imperfect.  Hard disk drives store information through magnetic charges, and while actuator heads (also called read/write heads) are extremely...

The hard drive spindle is a shaft that holds the platters in place. The platters are disks coated with a thin magnetic material — that magnetic material stores your data. Modern hard drives often have multiple platters, and part of...

Solid-state drives offer numerous advantages for consumers: They’re faster than hard drives, more reliable (although still susceptible to failure), and more energy efficient.  However, they’re also much more expensive. According to Diskprices.com, the least expensive internal hard drives have a...

This week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) discovered records indicating that Morgan Stanley Wealth Management failed to secure the data of 42 servers, potentially risking the private data of 15 million customers. Morgan Stanley allegedly stored data without ...

At Datarecovery.com, we support consumers’ right to repair their own devices. If you pay $1,000 for a smartphone, you should have the option of repairing a broken screen or a busted USB-C port on your own. Generally speaking, manufacturers shouldn’t...

You’ve got sensitive data that you want to destroy, and you want to be extremely thorough. You want to make sure that no one — not even Datarecovery.com’s engineering team — can restore the target files. What do you do?...

Hard drives are designed to work in a wide range of environments, and a sudden heat wave probably won’t cause your drive to crash. However, there’s certainly a difference between a potential and an optimal operating environment. Over time, extreme...