We started the whole concept of hardware data recovery (DR) imaging tools back in 2005 with the release of the original DeepSpar Disk Imager (DDI). We were alone on the market until various competitors started to appear in 2009+, and thus a whole new class of equipment was born. The accepted DR process back then was to fully image unstable drives as the first step, and analyze the image afterwards to reconstruct its logical structure. In this article we will go over the main reasons why this process became obsolete, which is what made us discontinue our DDI product line after selling it for 19 years straight.

It is now clear that the interface of the future for solid state drives (SSDs) is PCI Express (PCIe). Samsung, the leading manufacturer of SSDs, announced at the Samsung SSD Global Summit 2016 that they project 111 million PCIe SSDs to be shipped in 2018 versus only 25 million SATA SSDs. Effectively SATA SSDs will quickly start to disappear from the market as early as next year.

Traditionally, adapters are used for conversion between different types of physical interfaces for storage devices that operate using the same communication protocol. This type of adapter is called a passive adapter.

In this blog post we'll give you some tips for using the "Read Ignoring ECC" command. ECC refers to the Error Correction Code, found in every sector.

Software tools must work through hardware which is simply not designed to deal with hard drive instabilities. To make matters worse, standard PC hardware is often specifically designed not to deal with damaged storage devices because its main goal is to ensure the system keeps running as a whole. Working with unstable storage devices that are constantly throwing errors is typically not a good way of accomplishing that goal, so past a certain point of instability system software (BIOS/OS) will drop the device and refuse to work with it. If the hardware has decided not to work with the drive, then it does not really matter what the software is capable of.

A large majority of general IT service providers across the world offer data recovery services to their clients. In most cases, these recoveries are attempted only with software tools by an individual with no formal data recovery training. These unprofessional attempts are responsible for countless cases of hard drive failure and permanent data loss every year. This two part blog post will explain some of the main causes of these undesirable outcomes.

More and more data recovery jobs require donor drives these days, because mechanical hard drive failures are on the rise. Modern hard drives are constantly increasing in density, and manufacturers are using more inexpensive components, which leads to higher failure rates. And with increased density and the greater precision of mechanical parts,

it’s becoming harder to find compatible donors for part replacement.

As SAS drives become more popular on the market, data recovery professionals are facing new challenges in handling various issues introduced by these devices. In this post, we would like to cover the most critical aspects related to recovery processes of SAS drives and how they compare to SATA devices.

A regular imaging process involves acquiring the entire drive, from the sector zero to the maximum logical block addressing (LBA). In many data recovery cases, however, this approach won’t work because time is limited or the drive is highly degraded. Let’s look into various techniques of selective imaging that you can use to make imaging processes more efficient, faster, and less intensive for the drive.

Diagnostics is a crucial step of the data recovery process and is usually done by the most experienced person in the data recovery operation. We believe that up to 50% of the success of each data recovery case depends on the right diagnostics results, for two reasons:

• If you miss an actual issue, you will never be able to get access to data.

• Each time you try to solve a wrong issue, you incur a high risk of ending up with an unrecoverable case.

The data recovery industry is seeing more and more drives with a USB interface. As a result, imaging processes for unstable/degraded USB drives (especially those that have an onboard USB connector) are becoming a concern for many data recovery companies. Let’s look at all the factors that need to be taken into consideration from a data recovery perspective when dealing with such drives.

The Smart Hot Swap method for recovering data from drives with complex damage is based on the basic Hot Swap technique explained in our earlier post.

The Smart Hot Swap procedure is very important in modern hard drive recoveries. In some situations it is the only way to get access to user data, and without mastering this method, a certain percentage of cases will remain unrecoverable.

Fixing a hard drive’s firmware is quite straightforward: just locate the corrupted modules in the System Area and fix them. However, what if the drive cannot write to the System Area to fix corrupted modules? There is still a way around this problem: a method called Hot Swap.

Most professional data recovery companies already have established recovery procedures for a large variety of problems. These procedures allow them to recover the majority of the data from their drives.

But what about the bits of data that were missed or recovered corrupted? How do they impact the final outcome of the recovery?

One of the most common symptoms that data recovery companies see in their labs is a hard drive that is clicking and spinning down. In the vast majority of cases, the problem is that one or more of the heads is bad, and the head assembly must be replaced from a matching donor for full recovery.

However, with the right tools and technology, a technician can often initialize the hard drive and, at the very least, read data off the good heads without even opening up the hard drive cover.

Why settle for less? Here’s the valuable functionality you should look for in a full-featured imaging tool.

Just because your device has a SATA interface, that doesn’t mean it provides native support for SATA. Yes, it’s convenient that you can connect a drive without an external adapter, but the device may be using a built-in SATA-IDE adapter or its software may not be providing native support for this interface.

Your data recovery process needs to accommodate the peculiarities of the Long Physical Sector format if you want to achieve higher imaging speeds, spend significantly less time processing problematic areas, and minimize the risk of facing a drive failure during the imaging process.

Between 2007 and 2010, we conducted a study with some of our largest clients. 55 data recovery companies in 15 different countries participated in this survey. We found the results to be quite valuable and wanted to share them with you, along with some of our notes.