How not to take care of your laptop

March 12th, 2010

These essential tips have been compiled (loosely) based on actual enquiries received by our data recovery experts.

1. Cardinal rule: like any electrical instrument, keep away from water at all times. The thought of Tweeting from your Jacuzzi or blogging from a bubble bath is very sexy, but can result in death by electric shock, or exorbitant laptop repair bills.

2. Despite solid rectangular exterior, laptops should not be mistaken for sturdy props. Avoid using laptop as a weapon, flyswatter, tea tray or sports equipment.

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Common questions we get from our customer

February 23rd, 2010

“On power up laptop fails to recognise the hard disk and fails to boot up, clunking sound can be heard”

I am planning on spending some time writing about all the questions I get from users regarding hard drive failures, desktop computers not starting up, laptop data recovery because of having a blue screen or external drive data recovery because of beeping noises. I will try and cram as many of these phrases and elaborate on them.

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Will the new tape formats be the last generation?

December 17th, 2009

Imation will soon be making the industry’s first terabyte-plus raw capacity tape, in the LTO-5 format, with delivery in early 2010. However are tape formats drinking in the “last chance saloon”?
The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium has three technology-providing members: HP, IBM and Quantum and these licensed manufacturers continue to supply tape media and build drives. External drive data recovery when performed on these tapes i also extremely tough.

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How reliable are the new generation multi terabyte hard disk drives?

December 17th, 2009

As we come to the end of the year, 2010 is going to be the age of multi-terabyte storage, with many manufacturers introducing 2TB hard drives. But how reliable will they be?

A new manufacturing process that will put 640GB on a single HDD platter, has allowed manufacturers to dramatically increase storage capacities drastically. As the 3.5-inch drives used in desktop PCs typically hold four or five platters, that suggests a whopping 3.2TB hard disk space of storage on a single drive. Looking at the likely timing, the new manufacturing technology could put the giant drives in shops as early as February next year.

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Which Drives to Buy and Which to Avoid

November 3rd, 2009

As said above, there is a lot that can go wrong with a hard drive, both mechanically and electronically. However until solid state media can prove its longevity, hard drives are still our best option. Yet like cars, some drives are much more reliable than others. Here at MVI Data recovery we spend many hours every day, analysing and rebuilding drive failures, we have built up strong opinions on which are the best drives for reliability.

The root cause of system downtime or failure is due to hard disk drive failure, so you should be chosing the most reliable drives possible. Hard disk drive manufacturers calculate mean time to failure (MTTF) measurements for their products, but usually do not disclose such information.

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Don’t be fooled by External Hard Drives

November 3rd, 2009

It’s an unfortunate fact that hard disk drives are rather slow at storing and retrieving data. Due to their mechanical nature they can only retrieve and send data to the controller at a certain speed. Many users now opt for an external hard drive as a supplement – big mistake if you are storing a lot of critical data, such as client files etc.

Hard disks are mechanical devices with moving parts, and as such will break down eventually, compromising any data stored on them that is not backed up. External drives are likely to break down much quicker. One technology that was developed to deal specifically with this issue and deal with this is a RAID data recovery drive (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).

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Common data backup problems

October 13th, 2009

Many businesses copy their critical data to the same USB memory stick or other media without realising that should the copy fail you could find yourself with no backup at all. This puts them at risk for needing data recovery in the future.

It is recommended that you back up your data daily and keep a minimum of 5 sets of backup media. Rotate the backup sets so that on each new backup the oldest previous backup is overwritten. Be aware that if you are only using 1 backup set, which could be a streamer tape, hard disk device, or even a USB stick, when the backup is running, you effectively do not have a backup in the period of time between the backup starting and its completion – you are overwriting an old file with a new file and if for any reason the backup failed the partially written files cannot normally be used.

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Problems with Seagate Hard Drives

October 13th, 2009

Due to the ongoing problems we are experiencing with Seagate and some Maxtor drives, we would like to elaborate on the issues, so that users can make informed choices when purchasing new drives. Despite any problems with these drives, we are able to perform Seagate data recovery.

Seagate says they’ve isolated a ‘potential firmware issue.’ They say there’s ‘no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;’ however, ‘the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.

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RAID Level 1 or 5 – why not try Level 1+0 or 6?

September 9th, 2009

RAID-6 offers additional redundancy in allowing for two simultaneous drive failures. It is essentially an extension of RAID level 5 which allows for additional fault tolerance by using a second independent distributed parity scheme (two-dimensional parity). RAID 10 (or 1+0) uses both striping and mirroring. Either way RAID data recovery is always an option.

Drive failures frequently are correlated and if you absolutely don’t want to lose your data, RAID 6 is the safer of the two options. There’s always the possibility that a second drive will fail during the build of the hot spare process.

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Secrets of Partitioning

September 9th, 2009

Whether you use your PC for work or play (or both), partitioning your hard drives appropriately can help you keep organized. It will also protect your work from disappearing should the first physical disk fail and the need for a hard drive data recovery arise. Lastly it is good practice to keep cache and log files separate from other files which can change size dynamically and rapidly, potentially making a file system full.

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