Can You Perform a Hard Drive Head Swap?

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...
January 24, 2023

Software RAID vs. Hardware RAID: Advantages and Drawbacks

If you’re not willing to trust a single hard drive (HDD) with your data — or if you need faster performance than you could reasonably attain with a single HDD — RAID makes a lot of sense.  RAID stands for...
December 27, 2022

I Snapped My USB Drive in Half. Is It Recoverable?

USB flash drives are convenient, but if you’re carrying a storage device in your pocket, you’re taking certain risks. We frequently receive flash drives that have been cracked open, snapped in half, or washed in the laundry — obviously, those...
November 28, 2022

4 Things to Know About SSD Write Cycles

If you’re buying a new data storage device, you’ll need to do some research. This is particularly true if you’re buying a solid-state drive (SSD). While SSDs provide better performance than hard risk drives (HDDs), different models have different features...
November 18, 2022

What Are Hard Drive Error Correction Codes (ECCs)?

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...
October 28, 2022

What Is a Hard Drive Spindle Failure?

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...
October 13, 2022

Can You Recover Deleted Files From an SSD?

Recovering deleted data from a solid-state drive (SSD) is difficult, but not necessarily impossible. To explain why, we need to provide a basic overview of how SSDs work — and compare that to the way that hard drives operate. When...
October 6, 2022

Will SSDs Reach Price Parity with Hard Drives in 2023?

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...
October 3, 2022

Throwing Out an Old Hard Drive? Here’s How to Protect Your Data

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 ...
September 21, 2022

Please Don’t Pry Open Your Hard Drive (Unless You Don’t Need the Data)

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...
July 28, 2022