Occasionally, people lose crypto due to catastrophic blockchain failures or multi-layer attacks from sophisticated hackers — but preventable user error is far, far more common. For various reasons, people fail to treat crypto like real currency, and given the high...

Yes, your Solid-State Drive (SSD) can and will eventually fail. No storage device is perfect — and while SSDs don’t have any moving parts (depending on how you define “moving parts,” if you want to get technical), it’s still susceptible...

Data can often be recovered from a self-encrypting drive (SED), but the can be complex. Successful recovery rarely involves “breaking” the encryption, which is — by design — virtually impossible.  Instead, engineers must repair the underlying issue that is preventing...

Data recovery from fire-damaged RAID servers is frequently possible; each year, we receive several dozen cases (sometimes more, such as when wildfires impacted California business in early 2025), and most cases result in a full or partial recovery. However,...

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...

A hard drive’s service area is a hidden, reserved section on the data platters that contains the drive’s firmware (operating instructions). It’s completely inaccessible to the user and to the computer’s operating system.  The service area impacts how the drive...

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...

A “cyclic redundancy check” (CRC) error means that the data on your storage device is corrupt and unreadable. The device’s operating system performed a data-verification check and the result didn’t match what was expected, which means that the raw data...