Hard drive data recovery

Forums › IT Pro and developers › Hard drive data recovery - mechanical

Zal

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#153635 3-Oct-2014 12:35

Hey GZ
Looking for the experts in data recovery with proven track record if possible?
Likely someone who has a dust free room who can open it up and replace needed parts.
I've been told the heads need replacing.

Understand it will cost much $$$$

Who you SMBE dudes sending your drives to?

lxsw20

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#1146552 3-Oct-2014 12:39

http://www.datarecovery.co.nz/

Stu

Hammered
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#1146554 3-Oct-2014 12:41

Used to refer to Computer Forensics Ltd www.datarecovery.co.nz.

People often mistake me for an adult because of my age.

Keep calm, and carry on posting.

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Inphinity

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#1146565 3-Oct-2014 13:00

Yep, Computer Forensics have been doing this stuff for 15 years or so and my experience with them has always been good, but expect it to cost anything upwards of $500 if recovery is successful. They're pretty good at giving you a cost estimate fairly early on in my experience also.

Zal

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#1146584 3-Oct-2014 13:25

GZ FTW. Thanks team. Will make contact with them.

nedkelly

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#1146633 3-Oct-2014 14:13

Hmm wonder how hard it would be to learn this?

trig42

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#1146647 3-Oct-2014 14:26

Not super hard to learn I don't think, but, you need a clean room, positively pressured.
You also need many many hard drives spare.

I was talking once to one of the guys from datarecovery (are they the ones in Hamilton?) and he said they bought 3 or 4 of every new hard drive and kept them 'on file' so that they had the exact model/logic boards etc. for when someone sent in a dead drive. Usually he said it was just a case of swapping out the logic board and the drive would go again, but more complex (and expensive) cases involved replacing heads/platters from dead to going drives (a lot more skill and care required there).

They do a great job IMO, and when I was sending drives to them (it wasn't many, but probably 4 or 5 a year), their service was awesome. Pretty fast return too.

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lxsw20

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#1146667 3-Oct-2014 14:48

We had one recently, think it was a WD drive, brought one with the same part number off eBay to get the heads out of it, apparently same part number does not mean same manufacturing location or that they have compatible internals!!!

DravidDavid

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#1146807 3-Oct-2014 17:05

I know a clean room is recommended for this work, and it would be stupid to try in anything but...But my mind likes to wonder, and I wonder if given the same situation with two drives and the same technician fixing the problem, how much worse the end result would be if the work was completed in my dusty office over their clean room and of course, long term impacts of not doing it in recommended conditions.

I wonder exactly how much you can get away with before you actually make a difference to the operation of the drive is what I'm saying I guess.

We are supposed to operate one of our printers in a clean room. There are 8 print heads in this particular printer, each worth $6,000. Dust clogs the 10's of thousands of nozzles on the end of each print head. We can't afford a clean room. We keep the place tidy, but rarely have problems with clogged nozzles. Result is the same. Even if some nozzles do get clogged, the over-all print is hardly affected.

Would even the smallest piece of dust really inhibit the drive to the point it was unable to write data to the disk?