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...

A simultaneous head crash across multiple drives in a RAID 10 array is a severe data loss scenario that requires immediate treatment in a professional data recovery laboratory.  In fact, multiple head crashes require a laboratory diagnosis — head crashes...

Data carving is an advanced data recovery technique that extracts files directly from the raw bits and bytes on a storage device. It’s an option when the storage device’s file system is missing, corrupt, or otherwise inaccessible.Ideally, data carving...

Enterprise and consumer-class hard drives are built for vastly different workloads. The average consumer probably won’t benefit from a HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) drive, for example, and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is overkill for most consumer applications — but...

Running the Check Disk (CHKDSK) utility on a degraded RAID volume can cause catastrophic, irreversible data loss. If you’ve lost data from a RAID array, contact a professional data recovery provider as soon as possible — do not run CHKDSK...

When your business’s primary accounting drive fails, immediately power down the computer or server. Continued operation, even for a few minutes, can turn a recoverable situation into a permanent data loss, especially for mechanically failing hard drives or logically corrupt...

The most reliable way to securely wipe a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is to perform a single-pass overwrite, which writes a pattern of zeros over the entire drive. That’s sufficient to make the original data unrecoverable by even the...

No, you should not rely on the ATA Secure Erase command to wipe a USB-connected solid-state drive (SSD). The ATA Secure Erase command is a powerful, built-in function for sanitizing internal drives, and it’s perfectly sufficient for sanitizing internal SSDs....