USB drives have been around for several years now and because of that fact data, has been compiled that reflects the type of files a USB drive will store.
In addition, I apply my experience, to the types of damage that a USB enclosure will sustain. The following is a method for not only helping you keep you data safer but if your hard drive is damaged how to best optimize your chances for recovery.
Over the years I have found that there are three major types of data that can be found on an external hard drive. This data can be categorized as pictures in the form of JPEGs, videos in the form of MPEG files, and music in the form of MP3 files.
This type of archival data has been the most dominant because most of the external drives have large storage areas and can also be moved around.
In addition this type of data does not need high transfer speeds and since USB 2.0 is a fairly slow protocol this did not impair the use of the data. We now have USB 3.0 but it is still not as fast as bus speed.
Not only is the aforementioned data types most prevalent on an external device, it is also the hardest to accumulate. Pictures of the family vacation, videos of a first communion of a grandchild and music that has been ripped from your old CDs make the data
on this drive extremely precious and would be a real loss to the person if in fact the hard drive was damaged. So, what are the steps you can take to make sure that if the drive is damaged a recovery can be accomplished.
First of all, most damage that happens to an external drive is for one of two reasons.
First the hard drive was dropped or knocked over, second the drive has been left on all the time and heat has caused an anomaly in the heads and or platters. The type of damage that usually occurs from this activity is bad sectors.
Bad sectors, although not a good thing to have, in the data recovery world is considered a fairly simple recovery. However, what makes it almost impossible to recover from is for the owner of the drive to try a piece of data recovery
software on the drive and let it run for hours and hours, sometimes days and days. What eventually happens is that the platters become so damaged that what would have been a simple recovery now becomes no recovery at all.
It is the same principle as writing on a piece of paper with a pencil and then erasing the word. You write in the same spot again however some the integrity of the paper has been lost. Now imagine doing that ten, fifteen, even twenty
thousand times which is a conservative estimate of how many times a piece of data recovery software will try and read a sector. Not only would you erase a hole in the paper, but surrounding text you have written on the paper is also
compromised. The entire piece of paper will become useless.
So instead of recovering a hard drive that has essentially clean and intact platters (Figure 1)
the owner has destroyed platters from overuse and damaged heads as in (Figure 2).
So, instead of letting a piece of data recovery software run and run and run call a data recovery company that specializes in recreating working drives from ones that have bad sectors.
The price is nominal and will give you a better than even chance at a successful recovery.
24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.
You May also fill out an online quote request.
