About a year ago, I could tell that there were some things that needed to change at home. For starters, I felt really strangely about all the windows on my property, and I knew that I wanted to change them. I began going through and working to make things better, and it was really interesting to invest in technologies that were so beneficial. It made it easy to make sure that my doors were closed and that my windows were locked, and I was grateful for the new technology. This blog is all about home technologies that could help your family.
Do you have a dead hard drive with a lot of important data? It could be pictures, movies, documents that you can't recreate with the original feeling, or just a lot of things you'd rather not hunt down and organize again. Such is the temporary nature of storage media, but there are ways to find victory if you've been caught without a decent backup as drive failure strikes. Here are a few hard drive failure details, along with ways to recover the data that is important to you.
Why Do Hard Drives Fail?
Product quality paranoia exists in a lot of areas, and the old phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to." certainly feels true sometimes. Hard drives are susceptible to wear and tear due to their nature of their moving parts, but the type of failure determines how easy recovery can be.
Normal failure from wear and tear happens as too many read-write cycles occur. When data is being stored on the hard drive, you're actually creating a magnetized or demagnetized print of a specific area on spinning discs. Over time, these magnetic changes will wear away at the surface, creating bumps and dips that first cause data to go unread, then streaking/tearing across the rest of the disk if you keep using it.
Most people stop using the drive long before the second part can kick in during normal circumstances. Streaking and tearing can still happen if you bump the hard drive, which may cause the actuator arm and reading head to lose its place or scratch against the hard drive. Modern operating systems have ways to work around the weakest scratches, but working around leads to time wasted, and any vital data that wasn't copied anywhere else may be lost to normal reading techniques.
One frustrating failure comes from the control board. This board is like a small computer that allows the drive to "speak" to the rest of the computer, facilitating all commands and techniques between the computer and the hard drive. Like any electronics board, static and burning from excessive heat are possible. Board failure is rare except for physical damage situations, but can happen to an otherwise pristine, new drive.
How Can Data Be Saved?
If your hard drive isn't working at all, there are a few diagnostic steps to take. A data conversion and collection professional can find out if the drive is simply near complete failure and needs to be copied under a slower process while connected to a normal computer or a dedicated recovery computer.
A drive that has excessive physical damage will need to be opened in a clean room. This is because even dust can lead to heavy scratches that can wreak havoc inside a high-speed hard drive, but the platters need to be removed to be converted under higher scrutiny and engineering-level control.
For board failure, a replacement board is possible. Unfortunately, some boards require a specific chip to be taken off of the old drive and carefully soldered onto the new drive. If you're not comfortable with soldering or board replacement, contact a data conversion service to have your data placed onto a newer drive or online storage option.
Share26 September 2017
