1Tbit/in2 nanosphere platters

July 15th, 2010

Researchers are reportedly working on 1Tbit/in2 nanosphere platters, this storage capacity would increase hard disk storage to truly spectacular levels of storage the like of which never even dreamed of just a few short years ago.

All information and news regarding this research can be found here;

http://www.teramagstor.eu/

Working on the nanometre range the nanospheres are evenly set up across the disk surface or media based on silica substrate production costs of this type of technology is believed to be lower.

Current research also shows evidence that the areal density could also be increased six fold.

As a European venture this technology would be very welcome as of now there are no large scale manufactures of hard disk drive from the EU, although certain sputtering technology is available.

The system is based on an entirely new concept in that it creates ‘zones’ or magnetic ‘domains’ which do not interfere with adjacent or closely neighbourhood other areas.

Watch this space for new developments and news on this exciting new technology.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , ,
Posted in Data Recovery News | No Comments »

RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 10 JBOD server data recovery

July 15th, 2010

Losing a server with a RAID configuration especially if you are a business with mission critical data or other such type of very important information will strike fear into the hearts of all responsible for data backup and preservation within the company, this situation is particularly embarrassing and potential litigious if the RAID or server contains backup Set’s of other clients data, in other words you are an online storage backup and management company, no worries you might think RAID is indestructible and never fails right?, Wrong, it does and often without any warning at all.

RAID Redundant Array of Independant disks has many configurations and permatations, lets take a brief look at some of the options;

RAID 0: This is not really a RAID in the classical view or description as there is absolutely no redundancy whatsoever, they data is striped in blocks across both disks from anything from 4k to 512k, although 64k is a common configuration, as the data is ‘split’ if one drive fails catastrophically so will your data set as only ‘half’ the data will be available on the working disk.

RAID 1: Data is written in an identical manner to both disks symotaneously and is classed as a mirror set.

RAID 5: Requiring 3 disks or more offer distributed parity across all disks if one disk fails it can be rebuilt from the remaining disks, this configuration is very popular as it offers a level of protection and some operating ead and write performance.

JBOD: Just a bunch of disks this is not a RAID configuration at all it simply is one large volume configuring all disks into one large system.

Let’s take a look at failures and causes of such to the server and storage setup.

External issues such as power fluctuations can seriously damage your hard drives, a very good preventative measure is a UPS uninterruptible power supply, this device will stop excess power from reaching your hard drive, also it will power the system in power outages, a truly excellent piece of kit for any computer user and modestly priced, especially when you consider the value of your data.

Heat from within the computer system can be a serious problem for hard disks as this can cause the hard drive to degrade, a simple but very effective hard drive cooling kit will keep the drive from over heating and keep the system operating a optimal performance.

I can not over emphasize the importance and need for the items mentioned above  as they require little time and resources to implement and are inconsequential in terms of the value of the data.

Failure of the RAID may be instant and without warning at best you may have a S.M.A.R.T. warning or a basic RAID offline or RAID degraded error, please do not attempt to rebuild the RAID as this will compromise the data at best and potentially destroy the data at worst.

Each hard drive should be professional diagnosed to operability and then cloned from LBA 0 to the end of the user data, this should be performed on all hard drives, including any physical work that may be requyired in a clean room environment for physical damage to the HSA.

Rebuilding the file system using a hex type editor will then be the final stage with folder and file structure this can and often is a very complex area, discovering the drive order, start drive, block size, file system and user data area start, it may be NTFS with MFT master file table, or Linux, Unix Mac type structure an experienced engineer will be able to reconstruct manually such data.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Data recovery cases | No Comments »

Toshiba hard drive clicking noisy 2.5 BIOS issues

July 14th, 2010

Toshiba brand of laptop 2.5″ media are often used by laptop and notebook manufacturers in their builds and make a very reliable form of data storage with decent performance in read and write tests.

Excessive heat within the laptop may cause issues with the disk surface or magnetic coating this will first exhibit itself as degraded media and many bad sectors appearing, perhaps the operating system will attempt to repair or mark as bad these sectors.

Another form of failure may be caused by a back EMF electro motive force, an excessive or wrong power supply which may cause an over voltage, ofcourse the hard drive has rudimentary protection in the form of a fue(s) or a TVS transient voltage suppressor, however they have a limited use and may allow excess currents to enter into the disk enclosure and damage the HSA head stack assembly, thus causing the clicking or strange noise heard from the hard drive.

In 0ver 90% of cases a noisy Toshiba laptop hard drive can be located to a failed HSA and will require the intervention of a clean room and skilled engineers to resolve the issues, it will most likely not be the PCB as some users may attempt to change without success.

The MCU on the PCB together with the firmware will allow the hard disk to spin up and then when it has reached the correct speed will release the HSA to seek out the servo wedges and tracks, if this can not be located in x time it will shutdown the hard drive to stop any further damage to the disk surface or disk.

Locating and matching the Toshiba HSA is not straight forward as the manufacture will not simply sell this component, it requires the location of the same model and head stack assembly and date match, this requires determined effort by trained and dedicated people and good contacts worldwide to supply the correct replacement HDD.

Replacing the HSA in no clean room conditions and without correct ESD precautions will destroy the good HSA and compromise or destroy any possible data on your failed hard drive as the HSA literally files over the platters using Bernoulli effect at less than 1 micron, dust and fingerprints represent massive obstacles for the HSA to deal with and thus will destroy it and further degrade and damage the disk surface further.

A head crash can occur when the HSA comes into direct contact with the disk surface at a place and time it should not, vertical damage like a dropped laptop , particularly when it is on can cause massive damage as it has less than 1 micron distance to impact into the platter, if this happens do not switch your laptop back on it will further damage it.

Some of the range within the Toshiba hard drive disks are;

MK GAS, MK MAT, MK GAT this is not a definitive list.

In the right hands and with the right tools Toshiba data recovery to 2.5″ media very often is a success so do not despair if you lose your important and precious data.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Data recovery cases | 2 Comments »

The absolute logical paradox, I give you the Quantum

July 13th, 2010

On first reading and studying the quantum world I was immediately awe struck and dumbfounded with what I was reading, I thought, why does not everyone in the world know about this? The mere mention of quantum to many people means nothing at all to possibly to a vague connection to a relatively recent James Bond film, staggering really.

It has been famously paraphrased that unless ‘the hairs on the back of your neck go up’ you do not understand it.Yes the theory does illicit an emotional response along with denial and logical conundrums.

Einstein’s relativity sat nicely with all known theories of his time, all of his work and ideas were logical so to speak, beautifully complex math, succinctly condensed into a singular expression which most of us could understand relatively easily, the classic of all such being E=MC2, no description necessary.

Neils Bhor who was a very close friend of Einstein first postulated the existance and math of quantum theory, which sat very uneasy with Einstein, who liked to think of the universe in a homegenous isatropic view way, the same every where in all directions.

In one of Einsteins famous quotes he said ‘I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.”
Yes perhaps I now have your attention, that is what the great man himself said regarding the theory, OK it may have been said slightly tongue in cheek, but his sentiments are expressed quite adequately.

To explain further let us deal with the old chestnut of light, is it a particle or a wave? Well experiments tell us that it can be both, however surely this is not the case is it? The double-slit experiment covers much of this.
Quantum theory would say that light and wave particle duality is resolved on how you observe it, because the crux or main point is that of observation or more likely consciousness, as particles appear to ‘know’ they are being observed, hairs on the neck going yet? They should be.

Yes the quantum world is based on observation and consciousness, until and object is observed it does not exist, as a famous philosophical question once asked many years ago’ does a tree make a sound when it falls in an empty forest’

The famous EPR Einstein Podolsky and Rosen thought experiment also sought to make people think about the long reaching effects of quantum theory, they suggested that two particles, called A and B were entangled, then one of the particles was sent to the other side of the universe,(this is a big experiment),  because you know what particle A is doing you would instantly know what particle B was doing, this breaks faster than light and all other known laws by a country mile, and of course is illogical, however falls well within the laws and framework of quantum entanglement.
So why not use this as a form of communication? Entanglement is not that easy to setup, however there have been and are in roads into this fascinating new technology.

Superposition, decoherence and the qubit.
Classical computers with binary 0 or 1, on or off with a quantum qubit the system would utilize superposition of both 0 and 1, further to this there has been a white paper entitled Solid-state quantum memory using the P nuclear spin, both of these technologies if developed would represent a paradigm shift the like of which has never been seen before the the massive processing and storage potential would be staggering and mid blowing.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,
Posted in Physics | 1 Comment »

Fast, reliable hard drive Western Digital WD6000HLHX

July 12th, 2010

If you think that spinning magnetic media aka hard drives or disks to me and you are dead and SSD or solid state drives are taking over, think again.

The Western Digital Wd600HLHX hard drive is absolutely amazing.

Here are some the specs of this drive;

10,000RPM, 32MB cache, SATA 6G/bs, 1.4 million mtbf mean time between failure, 5 year warranty, read seek times 3.6 ms and write seek time 4.2 (avg), a truly stunning piece of kit for any gamer or performance system, pair these up or better still configure into a RAID 5 configuration you have a decent data protection and file server setup with very fast read and write access times.

Cooling of the drives is catered for by a inbuilt heat sink and offers rack mount back plane for extra colling of the hard drive.

Capacity is now doubled from the 300gb previous model and offers a decent storage size for users that require more room for their digital archive of music, photo’s and the like.

How many hard drives come with a 5 year warranty these days? Not many, in fact it wasn’t all that long ago many manufactures supplied 3 and 5 year warranty, however there appeared to be a shift back to 12 month warranty not so many years back, so this hard drive shows confidence and reliability from the manufacture in the long term performance of this drive, they represent a very good ROI for your data, after all how would you recover if your hard drive failed and you did not have any backup at all? Perhaps data recovery has been attempted and failed, you are left with nothing, no data.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,
Posted in Data Recovery News | No Comments »

Dropped hard drive & disk

July 5th, 2010

A dropped hard drive or disk, particularly if it was running at the time can cause significant damage to platter surfaces and or the HSA head stack assembly as you would imagine.
Perhaps it was an external hard drive which was knocked over on the table? Worse still falling directly to the floor?
During R&D lab tests we have seen catastrophic failure to certain hard drives which are dropped from just 1″ while in operation.

Why does the hard drive become so damaged?
Spinning magnetic media operates at a typical rotation speed 7200 RPM (speeds vary on exact model) the HSA Head Stack Assembly literally files over the disk surface by the Bernoulli effect and has a distance of less than 1 micron, so any excessive  horizontal movement can cause impacts to the surface.

The term is ‘head crash’ and can strike fear into the hearts of any who have heard those words and have important data on the drive.

Do not on any circumstances open the hard drive, ‘just to have a look’, as some have tried as this will compound the recovery further.

In a class 10 clean room environment a full and professional diagnosis can be made and a clear process can be developed as to secure a successful recovery of data.

The HSA will often need replacement, and this is not as simple as it first starts, as hard drives are unique and require exact replacement parts to be fitted, and it is not simply a case of contact the manufacturer for parts, because they do not sell such parts, a replacement hard drive with the correct MLC machine level code or DCM drive configuration matrix, site code and or relevant dates are required, no mean feat I can tell you, and requires a full time position to track down such parts.

Following a dropped hard drive many users attempt to restart the drive, again this is not a wise move as further damage can occur, for those that have attempted to spin up the drive they may hear a beeping like noise, this could indicate that the spindle is now seized, and for a modern 1-2 tb disk this is a very serious and complex recovery as a procedure called a ‘platter swap’ is now required, and as the name suggests it involves moving the damaged ‘patient’ platters to a good working ‘donor’ which has a free working spindle, this procedure must preserve the rotational alignment of all disks and in some instances eccentricity issues must be catered for.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Data recovery cases | 1 Comment »

Maxtor hard drive family name aliases, BIOS issues

July 5th, 2010

Maxtor Corporation hard drives and disks, (now part of the Seagate Technology), may exhibit failure symptoms where the hard drive is detected in the BIOS or file system by its family name, here is a list of such names for various models;

N40P, Athena, Aries, C64K, Calypso, Gala, Nike, Romulus, Vulcan, Rigel, Falco, Vulcan, Sabre, Grizzly, there are many more Maxtor hard drive names, this is not definitive.

What actually has happened to the hard disk?
Usually the disk is suffering from microcode or firmware failure and has resorted to ‘safe mode’, this mode is a somewhat protective action as it is unable load its main modules to boot the drive in normal operating mode and restricts access the the disk surface.

The SA (System Area) is a vital and unique area of the hard drive containing the firmware of the hard drive, if this becomes damaged, or corrupted in some way then the Maxtor product will display the family alias.

ATA commands utilizing vendor specific commands allow techno or super on commands to the device, these commands are beyond access to end users as very serious damage can be caused to the system under untrained hands.

PCB swapping is another favourite and simply will not help gain access to the user data area, as all PCB’s are unique to each disk they are initially configured with at the factory.

Professional help is now required to help gain access to your data utilizing hardware and software based systems, possibly the disk has head stack assembly failure of one or more heads, again this will require a class 10 clean room and engineers to physically rebuild your drive.

  • Share/Bookmark

Posted in Data recovery cases | 1 Comment »

www dead, long live the Web

July 5th, 2010

www or world wide web as some name it, is a truly remarkable communication device, instant world wide publishing of ideas and thoughts through blogs, forums, email and other such types of digital architecture allowing collaborations to act in unity of purpose from across the globe in a way not even dreamed of just a few short decades ago.

However this expressive and relatively free medium does have certain caveats, or dangers, and not from areas that you might think of.

Take a web site which allows consumers to post their findings of products and services they have received from a supplier, you rave about how good they are, perhaps they successfully recovered data for you from a faulty hard drive, maybe on the other hand you had a terrible holiday and want to warn all against company x and their awful ways, OK I hear you say what’s the problem, well what if the ‘complainent’ or ‘reviewer’ is a competitor hell bent on destroying a competitors good name? Or maybe a disgruntled customer or client who received a satisfactory service or product, but now for reasons only they truly no, decide to make untrue allegations? Surely all websites clarify or request that firstly the reviewer is a genuine client of company x? No so, in fact the Internet is littered with many forums, and websites which allegedly offer you a chance to voice your opinion on services and products and do little if nothing at all to uphold and complaints a company or individual for that matter may receive unfairly to the detriment of their business.

So what’s the big deal? Well how do you or can you trust reviews on the web today? is not this a very counter productive and insidious digital rot being allowed to erode the very ethos and structure of a particularly good section of the web? Of course on site testimonials are worth nothing in my view as they could simply be made up by site owners.

Just as the ‘real world’ has standards over such issues as libel, defamation, and factual accuracy, so the web has, however many feel that they can post inaccurate comments with impunity, not so I am afraid, the same laws apply to the web as any other form of media, clearly education and sadly legal avenues of well covered cases will help to ‘clean up’, however much of the accuracy must be placed with the website holders, after all they probably have some form of financial remuneration from either ads or similar and are responsible to ensure their postings are accurate and offer respondents the chance to reply and re-but any inaccuracies.

So are all reviews misleading? Absolutely not, there are many very good sites which offer honest comments which allow consumers to make informed choices about their purchase decisions, I think when looking at a review website here are a few areas which should be considered;

How old is the review site? Is it a Government or large organization based company? Can and do companies reply to any comments made good or bad?

Additionally to this you may want to contact any company direct and get their take on the comments, perhaps there are genuine issues, or maybe there has been a genuine misunderstanding, I phone call or email may help you decide.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , ,
Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Sony Vaio to be re-called RE: over heating issues

June 30th, 2010

Sony has reportedly requested the voluntary return of VPCF11 Series and VPCCW2 Series laptop computer systems which may overheat, and in some reports have deformed the case and keyboard, further reports suggest that in extreme circumstances it may be able to hot to handle.

The fault is thought to be with the software which controls the temperature and cooling of the Sony notebooks, a firmware upgrade has also been announced to help users deal with this particular issue.

Cooling for a notebook or laptop is more important than you might obviously realize, as clearly the CPU has a major requirement here as it gets very hot due to switching in GHz range, another area for temperature control which has little attention from all manufacturers is the cooling for the hard disk drive, clearly there are issues with laptops, notebooks netbooks and creating ever smaller footprints, this creates design issues and logistical problems, exactly how and where do you cool a 2.5″ laptop or smaller media in such a confined space?
One answer is to buy a laptop cooling kit, and they do exactly as they state, basically they are comprised of a naicely shaped piece of metal with one or two fans, the laptop or notebook sits on top of this and creates an air gap for air to circulate and blow cool air onto the hard drive and the battery compartment, this helps keep the computer running at opttimum temperature which helps prolong the life of the hard drive and preserve your data integrity.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , ,
Posted in Data Recovery News | No Comments »

Firmware SA Virus utilizing ATA commands unstoppable

June 30th, 2010

All computer users are all to aware of malware or virus type payloads delivered to cause any thing from mild annoyance to more serious forms of destruction like the loss of data, hidden partitions and the like.
All antivirus and antimalware software companies work on a 24 hr basis from all corners of the globe to combat this ongoing threat, as this number has past over 1000,000 that’s right one 1 million.
One of the most insidious types of malware is the root kit, root kit malware can be a hardware or more often software system which is able to get control of kernel or high level services without being detected.

Most types of malware are dealt  with via those good guys out there from the antimalware companies such as Norton, AVG, McAfee, TrenMicro and others to name a few, there is one area to my knowledge that is completely unreported or being actively researched, what exactly could this be? Well it is do with the way hard drives and disks operate at a very low level and is an area most computer suers are aware of, the system is ATA commands which are part dealt with via the vendor specific commands made via the manufacturer and also the T13.org group which chairs and build the structure of the committee.
ATA commands are locked away from all users and as such are ‘hidden’, the closest you may encounter this system is if you’re hard drive has a S.M.A.R.T issue, this is a small part of the firmware and a very basic diagnostic routine based on re-allocated sector counts and other possible tables of bad sectors.
Utilizing specific techno and vendor specific commands access to this very vital area is possible and indeed utilized by data recovery technicians worldwide to help restore and recover data on a daily basis.
Some of the functions of the firmware or SA are to deal with what is called the P-List or factor list, this table contains very important information for the surface of the disk and where all the bad sectors are at the creation point of the hard drive process, this P-List also works with what is called the translator which can be either static or dynamic in nature, this translator deals with physical to logical location of sectors and is classed as ‘A’ as in terms of importance, if it is destroyed your data, even though intact on your hard drive will become unrecoverable.

As of yet we are uncertain as to whether any virus or malware has been devloped that once tha payload or root kit has been deployed the P-list or translator is destroyed, thus rendering your hard drive broken and more importantly your data unrecoverable.

We would like to discuss with any anti virus / malware software company what if any research they have undertaken in this area and if they would like to work on a  collaborative effort to deal with this very serious issue, if developed and deployed on a worldwide basis the effects would be devastating.

Advice to avoid any issues at all are as always, update your antivirus daily, run at least one weekly full scans of all drives including network attached storage, defrag your hard drive at least once a month, never open emails you do not know who the sender is, or at the least place in your spam filter, delete immediately all deleted emails, anything suspicious should be quarantined or send the file(s) to your software provider.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Data Recovery News | No Comments »

« Older Entries