The average cost of a healthcare data breach reached $10.1 million in 2024, the highest of any industry for the 14th consecutive year, according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report. It’s likely that that number climbed...

Most hard drives are designed to withstand non-operating temperatures up to 158°F (70°C). A house fire can easily exceed this limit — but even if a hard drive is no longer functional, it may still be recoverable.  The physical chassis...

For any law firm, the sudden loss of a case file or the failure of a centralized document management system is a crisis. When a partner’s workstation won’t boot or a server array is degraded, your immediate concern is integrity:...

NAND cell read disturb is a rare failure scenario that affects flash storage devices including (but not limited to) solid-state drives (SSDs).  Unlike a mechanical head crash or a firmware brick, read disturb is a form of data corruption....

Automatic RAID rebuilds fail most often because of secondary drive failure or an unrecoverable read error (URE) on a surviving disk. While RAID arrays are designed for redundancy, the rebuild process is intensive; if hardware is near its breaking point,...

Storing an old hard drive in a desk drawer is not a safe long-term strategy if you want to ensure the data remains accessible. A drawer might protect a drive from direct sunlight and spilled coffee, but it does nothing...

Windows triggers a Preparing Automatic Repair loop when the operating system fails to boot successfully and the built-in diagnostic utility cannot resolve the underlying error. It can indicate anything from storage media failure (which is where we usually get involved)...

Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is an automated RAID management system that allows users to create storage volumes with mismatched drive capacities. It’s flexible by design — and that flexibility has made it a popular choice for NAS users.  The tradeoff:...

Unraid is a proprietary operating system that stores complete files on individual disks; it doesn’t stripe them, as is typical with RAID arrays (hence the “un”). As a result, recovering data from an Unraid setup is generally more straightforward than...