Abiguy DATA Recovery Solutions

25/01/2017

Hard Drives, SSDs, Flash Drives: How Long Will Your Storage Media Last?

When looking for storage media, we’re not short on good options. Whether you want large capacities, superfast performance or portability, there’s a perfect choice for you.

But just how reliable are these different media? We know that CDs and DVDs don’t last forever. What about hard drives and solid state drives?CDs Are Not Forever: The Truth About CD/DVD Longevity, "Mold" & "Rot"CDs Are Not Forever: The Truth About CD/DVD Longevity, "Mold" & "Rot"The digital age has revolutionized the way we handle information. Never before could humankind record and store so much information and in such diversity.

How long will they continue to work in your computer, and how long will they store your data if you use them for archiving?

Let’s take a look.

Hard Drives

It’s well-known that deleting files from a hard drive does not mean that they are gone forever.How Can You Make Sure Your Files Are Deleted Forever?How Can You Make Sure Your Files Are Deleted Forever? So, you've just deleted a file. Congratulations, that file is no longer a part of your life. Or so you thought!

Security experts will, from time to time, collect drives from discarded computers purely to demonstrate how much data can be recovered off them. It’s normally a startling amount. In fact, the only way to be sure your data is gone is to physically destroy it.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that a hard drive is a reliable long-term storage device.

A hard drive is totally reliant on a series of moving parts — a spinning disk that’s read by a moving arm with a magnetic head. Like anything with moving parts, it will break eventually.

Hard drives are prone to suffering what is called a head crash, where the head touches and scrapes across the disk. This can be caused by all manner of things, from a power cut or surge, to physical shock to a manufacturing defect.
Do you unplug your computer during severe storms? If not, you may want to start.

With regular use, a head crash, or other physical failure, will be the reason you need to replace the drive long before any other form of degradation sets in.

A 2013 study by cloud storage company BackBlaze looked at 25 thousand drives and found that around 5 percent failed during the first year and a half, most likely due to manufacturing defects. They were then largely stable until the fourth year, when the failure rate rose to 11.8 percent. 74 percent of drives lasted beyond the fourth year.

If the drive is unused — if you were to copy your data to it then store it away — you can reasonably expect your data to last for many years.

A hard drive stores its data magnetically, and as long as you keep it away from another strong magnetic source, it is fairly stable.Understand What Makes Your Hard Drive TickUnderstand What Makes Your Hard Drive TickHave you ever wondered what's inside of your hard drive? Let's find out together!

The magnetism can diminish over time, putting the data at risk, but this can be restored by powering on and reading or writing the data. You should do this every few years if you’re using a hard drive for long-term storage.

Solid State Drives

The long-term viability of SSDs is less well-known, simply because they haven’t been around long enough for any definitive studies to provide the answer.

A solid state drive doesn’t contain the moving parts of a hard drive. The spinning platter (the disk), the arm and magnetic head are absent, and flash chips are used in their place.

This means an SSD is not vulnerable to head crash in the way that a hard disk is. The added durability gives the SSD an obvious reliability advantage, especially when it comes to shock or exposure to less than optimum environmental conditions. They’re also not affected by magnets.

However, it should be remembered that the other components in an SSD are the same as those in a hard drive, and are no more or less likely to fail. SSDs are also extremely susceptible to power failure, leading to corruption of data or even the failure of the drive itself.

With solid state drives still being in their relative infancy, it will likely be a few more years before we get a true picture of how well they hold up to repeated use.

The lifespan of each memory block in an SSD is limited to a certain number of write cycles i.e. the number of times a piece of data can be stored to it.

The number of cycles will only be a few thousand on most drives. This sounds alarmingly low, but is not really an issue in modern SSDs. Unlike hard drives, which write their data to the earliest free block, an SSD uses technique called wear-levelling to ensure that each memory block is used before the cycle begins again at the first block. Solid State Drives (SSDs) have really taken the mid-range to high end computing world by storm.

Unless you’re writing tens of gigabytes of data a day, every day for several years, you won’t get close to the limit on write cycles. Even if you did, the memory would become read-only, so your data would still be accessible.

All this means that SSDs are a great choice for day-to-day storage over HDDs, so long as performance is bigger priority than capacity, given the relatively higher price of a solid state drive.

An SSD is not a good option for long-term storage, though.

How long an SSD can store data without power depends on a number of factors including the number of write cycles that have been used, the type of flash memory used in the drive, the storage conditions and so on. A white paper produced by Dell in 2011 (PDF link) stated that it could be as little as three months to as much as 10 years.

Many SSD manufacturers will list data retention either as part of the specification or the warranty for their drives. The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association sets the industry standard at one year for consumer drives.

Flash Drives

USB flash drives, as well as memory cards like SD cards, have similar issues to solid state drives.

They have fewer components and are far more robust, but are restricted to a finite number of write cycles usually in the range of 3,000 to 5,000. And since they tend to use cheaper memory modules, they can be less reliable than SSDs.

Again, though, this needs to be kept in perspective.

If you’re using the flash drive for its primary purpose of moving files from one location to another, then a cheap drive will be more likely to fail through physical damage (such as breaking the connection between the USB jack and the printed circuit board inside the drive), before the write limit is reached.Move, Copy, Open, & Remove Files With File Sorter [Mac]Move, Copy, Open, & Remove Files With File Sorter [Mac]Much of our purpose with computers is to get work done faster and more efficiently. there’s a free option that might make a useful introduction to bulk file and folder automation; it’s called FileSorter

Equally, an unejected drive will be more likely to put your data at risk. A lack of fault tolerance can put the entire drive in danger.

USB flash drives aren’t a great option for archiving. Drive manufacturer Flashbay has said that data retention could theoretically be in the region of 60 to 80 years, if stored in a perfect environment. In reality, it is far lower.

As with SSDs, data retention is affected by the health of the memory blocks. A flash drive bought specifically for backing up files then storing could potentially last for many years; a heavily used drive could lose its data within months if left unpowered.

Wrap-up

The most important thing to remember when looking for storage media for backup is that nothing lasts forever.

You can reasonably a expect storage device to keep hold of its data for a couple of years if it goes unused. But you should also regularly check the drive, and that the data is still intact. Copying the data off the drive and then back on will ensure it extends its life for a few more years.

Of course, the only reliable backup solution is to make two or three backups and rotate them periodically (or use the triple backup solution).The Ultimate Triple Backup Solution For Your Mac [Mac OSX]The Ultimate Triple Backup Solution For Your Mac [Mac OSX]As the developer here at MakeUseOf and as someone who earns their entire income from working online, it's fair to say my computer and data are quite important.

What storage media do you use for your day-to-day computing? When you make backups of your important files, how often do you check that it is still accessible? Let us know in the comments.

14/11/2016

Hard Disk Working | How does a hard disk work | Hard Drive

14/11/2016

In today video I am going to share three awesome ideas about what can be made from an old HDD at home. All too often people are used to getting rid of old st...

01/11/2016

Please, HDD should be open in a clean room only.

HARD DISK SOUND

01/11/2016

In this video I explain the difference between a HDD (hard disk drive) and an SSD (solid state drive). I also explain the difference between a desktop and a ...

01/11/2016

Please note that I have now uploaded an 2014 update to this video: see http://youtu.be/TFoOyPXYJ-E This video explains how solid state drives (SSDs) are beco...

01/11/2016

When you watch this, you will never mess around with a faulty hard drive. Kindly contact us for data recovery. We have all the tools and facilities to successfully recover your files.

Deconstruction of a PC Hard Disc Drive

01/11/2016

What you need to know about western Digital.

Western Digital hard drives being manufactured at a factory in Thailand.

29/03/2016

RE/CODE: HOW THE FBI MIGHT BE HACKING THE SAN BERNARDINO IPHONE WITHOUT APPLE’S HELP

Nature deplores a vacuum. So in the absence of any details about how the FBI plans to access the information locked on Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone without Apple’s help, forensic scientists have been filling the void with some well-informed speculation.

Forensic scientist Jonathan Zdziarski (who’s known in the hacking community as NerveGas) has suggested one theory that others in the cyber security community agree holds promise. It’s a technique called NAND mirroring — and it involves making backup copies of the phone’s memory, so the information could be quickly restored if the device slows down or attempts to wipe the data after five or 10 failed password attempts.

This sort of technique would clear the way for the kind of “brute force” attack the FBI has described in court papers, in which investigators would make thousands of guesses at a password without risking the loss of evidence.

“Think of this as a game save, like Super Mario Brothers. You want to play the same level, so you keep killing Mario to restore the game state,” Zdziarski said in an interview with Re/code.

In a blog post, he explained how it would work: The NAND chip would be removed from the device and placed in a chip reader to copy the contents of the memory. The original chip would be reattached to the phone with a harness. After 10 failed password attempts, the memory could be restored using the backup file, eliminating the risk that the data would be lost to the iPhone’s auto-erase security feature.

“This seems like a promising approach,” said Matthew Green, a noted cryptographer and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. “The main barrier is just the ability to de-solder the Flash memory chips without damaging them, and install a device in between the phone and the chips. This isn’t easy, since the solder joints are delicate, but it doesn’t require breaking any encryption.”

Zdziarski theorizes that the mysterious “outside party” that offered the FBI a last-minute assist is an external forensic company that may be using older gear from a past version of the operating system (iOS 8). The fact that U.S. law enforcement asked for just two weeks to evaluate the technique suggests it already exists — and may indeed have already been demonstrated in a field test.

Given the timing of the offer — Sunday, days before a scheduled hearing on whether Apple could be forced to help the government hack the iPhone — Zdziarski suspects the firm is based in Europe (or, in light of a report today, Israel), where the business week would have already begun.

One U.S. data recovery firm, DriveSavers, is testing the theory. Engineering director Mike Cobb said his firm has already removed the NAND chip from an iPhone 5c — delicate work, because it’s attached by epoxy — and plans to mirror the data, reattach the chip and attempt to crack the password.

“All these things seem very doable,” said Cobb, whose company has been recovering family photos and other data from smartphones, hard drives and thumb drives for years.

But this technique has limited application — the approach wouldn’t work on newer iPhones with more rigorous security, such as the Secure Enclave.

09/03/2016

Hard drives might be the most important part of your computer. They are where all of your valuable documents, pictures, music files, videos are stored on your computer. That’s why when you hear strange clicking noises coming from your hard drive, you should be concerned about all of that valuable information. It’s been called the click of death which is You may have heard it as the click of death. Whatever it is, it doesn’t really sound right, and you’ll likely find that the hard drive isn’t working. Understanding what’s happening in your hard drive can help you identify what the problem with your hard drive is, and what you should and should not do to make your hard drive functioning again, or at least recover the valuable data from it.

Why Does a Hard Drive Click?

To understand why a hard drive makes a clicking noise, you have to understand a disk read/write head. The read/write head hovers over a hard drive’s platters, and quickly scans across a platter either adding data to the platter or reading from it. In the event that damage is done to the platters, such as a head crash (the read/write head comes into contact with the platters, damaging them), the read/write head is unable to perform its tasks. This causes it to move back to its original position and try to locate the right position on the platters again – all in a very fast process. Occasionally, the read/write head will reach the end of the platter and hit a stop, resulting in the audible click sound that we recognize.

What Shouldn’t You Do?

While a non-functioning and clicking hard drive is annoying, the first thing that you should do is to make sure that you don’t do anything that might make data recovery impossible, even for a professional. There are a few things that you shouldn’t do on your own, and you should leave up to a data recovery professional. There are also a few things that no one should ever do while attempting to recover data from a hard drive.

On Your Own

Replacing the Control Boards

Many people with clicking hard drives think that switching out the control board might help their hard drive start working again. As the theory goes, if something short circuited in the control board of the hard drive, replacing the control board of the hard drive will do the trick and the owners hard drive will start working again. Many control boards for hard drives look identical from one another, but in fact do not function well with one another. That can lead to the data requiring a much more expensive procedure in order to become recoverable, or to not be recoverable at all. Additionally, the control board is likely not the source of the problem, and it’s not something that a data recovery professional would switch out often.

Taking the Cover Off

Under no circumstances should you take the cover off of your hard drive. Data recovery professionals will occasionally do this, but it is an expensive procedure and requires the specialists to operate in a class 100 cleanroom. If you take the cover off in an unfiltered air environment, you contaminate the hard drive and make data recovery more difficult or impossible for professionals. Additionally, unscrewing and re-screwing the screws of the hard drive misaligns the hard drive, and leaves it not functional. Only a trained data recovery professional with the proper screwdriver can make sure the screws are set to the proper torque in order for the hard drive to work again.

Install Software

There are plenty of data recovery software plans that can assist with recovering data from a hard drive. Unfortunately simply running them on your hard drive can alter the data and make it far more difficult to recover. Many software programs are simply not compatible with certain hard drives, and if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you can end up losing all of the data on your hard drive forever.

We’ve covered a few data recovery methods that don’t work, but we’ll go over a few of them again to reinforce the fact that you shouldn’t try these at home.

Never Ever

Freezing It

Hard drives are meant to operate under normal livable conditions, and inside of a freezer is not one of them. It can short out the electrical components of a hard drive, or lead to rotational scoring. Both of those make data recovery more unlikely and more expensive for you once you realize that freezing your hard drive did no good.

Bashing It

It should go without saying, but you should never apply physical force to a hard drive – no matter how angry you are at it. If you think the hard drive is clicking because you dropped it or the hard drive went through some sort of shock, doing it again won’t ever have any benefit.

Moving It While It’s Running

You can move a hard drive from one location to another, but only if the hard drive is not running! Hard drives are already sensitive to shocks and movements, and are super sensitive while the hard drive is running. If you need to reposition the hard drive, be sure that the hard drive is powered off, and take extreme care while moving it.

So… What Can I Do?

Now that we’ve told you all the things that you shouldn’t do with your clicking hard drive, we’ll tell you what you can do to ensure that you get your data back in the most cost effective way possible. Power it off! Unfortunately, once a hard drive starts clicking, there is some sort of mechanical issue with the hard drive, and it has to be taken to a data recovery professional. The longer you leave the drive running, the more likely damage will be done to the hard drive’s platters, making data recovery more difficult. You can also contact us and we can help you solve your problem. Describe the issue that you have, and we will get back to you.

04/03/2016

Nowadays, when computer industry is developing way too rapidly, manufacturers are literally “forced” to keep up to date — which can sometimes lead to putting “raw” (unfinished) devices on the market. This tendency makes a definite negative impact on product’s quality. Unfortunately, a hard disk drive industry itself is not an exception. With huge sales volume and poor quality, hard drives are eventually “making friends with troubles” (e.g. when the system is unable to detect the drive and so on)... There are cases when drive starts clicking or makes raspy or hissing noises — in 70% cases it means a “dead” head or preamplifier. In this case a surgery — head stack replacement or preamplifier re-soldering is needed. we can do it for you in a clean room.

03/03/2016

Symptoms of a Physical Hard Drive Failure

There are a number of warning factors that can alert you to a physical drive failure. These include:

Drive shows as "Not Initialized" in Windows Disk Management;
Drive not spinning (no power);
An excessively hot drive;
An abnormal ticking noise whilst the drive is reading data;
A loud clicking or grinding noise