When we treat water-damaged hard drives, solid-state drives, and other storage devices, we often receive the devices in plastic bags filled with white rice — which tends to complicate the data recovery process. Of course, “put it in a bag...

The market for solid-state drives (SSDs) was valued at over $30 billion in 2022 — and it’s continuing to grow, for somewhat obvious reasons.  SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives, more resistant to physical damage, and capable of...

Seek error rate is a hard drive performance metric reported through Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) tools.  Hard drives, solid-state drives, and other storage devices use SMART to monitor for issues that may indicate an impending failure. For hard...

A hard drive’s seek time is the time that the head assembly takes to travel to a specific track on the platters where data can be stored. Since seek time varies depending on which track it needs to access, “seek...

If you’ve accidentally formatted an SSD, data recovery is unlikely, but potentially possible. Here’s an overview.

In data storage technology, a partition is a container with a file system. The file system allows the data storage device to manage files.  Every popular data storage device uses partitions. Without partitions, a device might still contain the magnetic...

If your computer identifies a hard drive (or other data storage device) as RAW, that means that the file system has become unreadable. The operating system cannot understand how the data is organized, so the drive is treated as unformatted. ...

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...

Solid-state drives (SSDs), like all other data storage devices, can fail.  In fact, SSDs have a set lifespan — eventually, the floating gates SSDs use to store data become less reliable, as we discussed in our article about SSD wear ...

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are often considered more reliable than conventional hard drives — and there’s some truth to that.  Hard disk drives (HDDs) have moving mechanical components, so they’re much more susceptible to physical damage than SSDs. But both storage...