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.

3. Resist the temptation to get creative with radiant laptop warmth. Hot laptop air is not a suitable means of cooking breakfast or drying hands.

4. Don’t forget to pick your laptop up when finished checking email on the tarmac.

5. Keep out of reach of children. Don’t listen to advertisers: the point of buying kiddie laptops is actually to redirect innocent kiddie curiosity away from your baby (baby being laptop).

6. You cannot afford to have both your computer and coffee in the form of rogue portable objects. Since you have chosen a mobile laptop, you must invest in a coffee stabilization mechanism, or secure cup holder, so that the two remain separate at all times.

7. Remember it is not your laptop’s fault if you call up infuriating, rage-inducing content onto the screen. If you see incriminating evidence against yourself or your partner on Facebook do not shoot/punch/throw/smash the messenger. Also, if your laptop is acting up you don’t need to resort to physical violence.

8. When surfing the internet try your best to stay away from content of an adult nature, as it often comes with laptop destroying viruses.

9. Secure laptop in a locked cupboard or safe if planning to get drunk, as altered state of consciousness can encourage behaviour along the lines of some of the points above.

10. Above all, know that laptops and cats are sworn enemies.

These 10 tips will ensure a long and happy future for you and your laptop – follow them for success. Unless you want to break your laptop like this guy. If this advice fails to assist and your laptop ceases to function, a reliable data recovery service can help you out.

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.

The first topic, or say phrase I get asked is “On power up laptop fails to recognise the hard disk and fails to boot up, clunking sound can be heard”. This can happen due to the laptop being accidentally dropped, faulty power cable being inserted, power surges, coffee spillage and hey I have even heard people forgetting their laptops on top of the car and then reversing over them. All of these accounts basically affect the hard disk drive; this contains all those important emails, word documents and images. We can recover data from most of these situations.

When you hear the clicking noise from a laptop hard drive the read heads that float over the platters have failed. This sound can be loud or very faint, but either way when this noise is heard, the best action is to switch the laptop off as the drive has failed. Being left to run can cause serious data loss.

The clicking noise can also be a firmware issue with the hard drive, and not always a mechanical problem. By no means does it make the recovery any easier though, the firmware I am referring to is not a simple update you can download from the manufacturer, but firmware that occupies the Servo or Service track on the hard disk platters. P-list or G-list areas contain modules and these become corrupt over time or due to electrical surges.

If you have any questions or even just want to have a chat about your storage needs and faults, please don’t hesitate to ask us.

The challenge with LTO (and most other tape technologies) is its limited ability to throttle performance. Users must carefully manage their environment to ensure that they stream their drives or else backup performance will decline dramatically. Backup software vendors have recognized physical tape’s limitations and have developed technologies to improve backup speeds; however, the result is a degradation in restore speed.

The best solution to this problem is to introduce disk as a backup target. Disk provides infinitely variable ingest speeds and will not suffer the shoe-shining penalties of tape.
In summary, LTO-5 shows the LTO consortium’s commitment to increase tape density and performance. The real world performance improvements experienced by end users transitioning to LTO-5 will vary widely. This has always been the case with tape technology, but the added streaming requirements of LTO-5 increases the challenge. However physical tape still has a place in many enterprises as a deep archival medium, easily stored offsite, inexpensive, with instantaneous recording and good reliability. In this respect LTO-5 is well suited for this role.

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.

Manufacturers such as Western Digital, Samsung, TDK and Hitachi are all introducing 2TB+ drives and the other manufacturers will not be far behind. However if you are storing this amount of data, is a single HDD the answer? Given the well-documented manufacturing problems with many of the 1TB drives, should users be more cautious?

Well in our opinion the answer should be a resounding yes. New technology is always fraught with teething problems and it often takes several generations of media, before a reliable product is found. Although companies like Hitachi are spending large research budgets on developing this technology, the mean time before failure (mtbf) cannot be accurately calculated until the product has been on the market for a while and all failures carefully analysed by the manufacturer.

Given the minute tolerances within a HDD and the associated heat dissipation issues, my advice would be to stick with lower capacities for the time being and even RAID them together for added security. RAID data recovery is always a possibility if the RAID drive fails.  Hitachi still remain at the top of our list of the most reliable manufacturer, but I would sit tight until the new technology is proven.

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.

In our opinion, Hitachi drives are currently the best on the market. When we tested them for average read speeds, write speeds, burst speeds and random access timing they were head and shoulders above their competitors. However, where they really shine is in their reliability.

Many of their competitors are still fighting ongoing lawsuits, because of the inferior quality or known malfunctions, which were not disclosed to customers. High reliability at Hitachi begins with the design process. As a new disk drive program develops, reliability goals are set, along with access times, data rates, RPM, and cost. Reliability problems and failure modes of past products are studied to help make improvements in the new product.

So which drives to avoid – it is difficult to list every make and model, so we will simply list the drives in manufacturer order, rather than elaborate.

Hitachi – Samsung – IBM – Maxtor – Seagate – Western Digital

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).

The common factor that all RAID levels share, is the use of a RAID controller that intercepts data intended for storage on the logical hard drive. This data is then either duplicated by the controller for storage on multiple drives in the array at once (’mirroring’), or broken down into smaller chunks which are then divided between the available drives in the RAID array (’striping’).

Setting up RAID on your PC could not be easier. RAID is managed through Windows XP’s disk management window, found by right clicking on ‘my computer,’ then selecting ‘manage’ followed by ‘disk management.’ Windows XP Professional is only capable of creating RAID 0 striped arrays, while the various Windows Server operating systems can also create software RAID 1 mirror arrays. Alternatively, RAID can be purchased as an external unit, such as in NAS (Network Attached Storage). RAID 0 data recovery is possible despite the fact that it does not contain mirrored drives.

RAID is a much safer option for your data, as opposed to external hard drives, which have a very high failure rate. The access speeds are much greater with RAID, yet the price is equivalent. We would advise that external hard drives are only really useful for transporting data, or as backup devices.

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.

Rotate at least 5 copies of your backup media and keep at least 1 set off site in case of fire, flood or other disaster. Do not rely on the verification utility on your backup software, the only way of ensuring your backups are viable, is to complete a trial restore. If you are using tape backup, ensure the drive is serviced each year, otherwise the head alignment will change and whilst you may be able to write to your backup tapes, reading them back may be a problem!

If your website providers ceased trading tomorrow do you know where the files are that you would need to give to a new website provider? If you don’t know, you need ask your website providers to provide you with a backup of the website and its data base, if applicable. If your website uses a Content Management System to hold the content of your database, you should also request that the database is frequently backed up to a 3rd party or your own server.

For free advice on best practices please call our experts on 0800 050 1128.

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.

The faulty drives predominantly include all Seagate 2.5″ drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. and SATA interface. However we are also seeing high-capacity Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, which are freezing up during data transfers or failing all together. The Barracuda 7200.11 is the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs and comes in capacities ranging from 160GB to 1.5TB.

We suggest all users determine what drives are in their system by going into System Profiler, looking under Serial-ATA for the Revision, which shows the firmware of your hard drive.

We are receiving quantities of these drives for recovery, and nearly all display the same cause of failure. The read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives unrecoverable. There are also firmware issues associated with many of the drives and Seagate’s firmware upgrades are having varying results.

Should you have one of these drives in your system, we recommend you ensure that your data backups are regular and even consider replacing the drive. For more information, talk to one of our technicians on 0800 050 1128.

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.

Other things to think about are the size of the array. If your RAID array is over a TB then RAID 6 is definitely a better choice because of the long rebuilding process. Also what if an unrecoverable read error occurs while the hot spare is rebuilding, in a RAID 6 environment the second set of parity can be used to continue rebuilding.

What about RAID level 10 to be absolutely sure of safeguarding your data? RAID 10 mirrors everything, therefore an array requires double the disk capacity of the data to be stored. The remainder of the capacity constitutes the mirror.

If a RAID 6 array comprises four disks, only 50% of that space is available as usable capacity, but the proportion of usable space increases as you add more drives. That means half the total capacity of a RAID 10 array will always be dedicated to protection, but with a RAID 6 array the usable capacity grows as the number of drives increases. For example, if you increased the number of disks in a RAID 6 array from four to eight, the space consumed by parity data would decrease from 50% to 25%.

RAID 10 has among the fastest rebuild times possible because it only has to copy from the surviving mirror to rebuild a drive, which can take as little as 30 minutes for drives of approximately 1 TB. The key drawback of RAID 6 is that the time it takes to rebuild the array after a disk failure is lengthy because of the parity calculations required, often up to 24 hours with even a medium-sized array.

RAID 10 doesn’t need special hardware. Most controller hardware will support RAID 10 with good performance. Because RAID 6 doubles the parity calculations for every write, it requires specially designed controller hardware.

Many storage managers have a hard time deciding which redundant array of independent disks level to use for the best availability and reliability. If you are undecided on RAID 1 or 5, consider RAID 1+0 or 6!

A popular reason to make a second partition on your hard drive is to separate your OS (operating system, such as Windows) from your applications and personal data. For example, Windows XP could reside on the C: partition, but you would install all of your programs and save all of your files to the new E: drive. Kept segregated from Windows, your data will stand a much better chance of surviving undisturbed should you need to reinstall or repair either the OS or your data.

Most tools will let you convert a partition from one file type to another, i.e. from NTFS to FAT/FAT32 or vice versa. Needless to say that in most cases, such a conversion, especially from NTFS to FAT/FAT32 will cause the files to lose their NTFS permissions and can cause you to lose access to these files. So beware of using multiple file types on a hard drive.

Partitioning also makes it simpler to install multiple operating systems on your computer. For instance, you might want a multiboot system with Windows and Linux or WinXP and Vista. Installations on different partitions may avoid certain problems and allow each OS to run at its full speed on your hardware.

Partitioning gives enormous advantages and should be considered as a very important precaution.