Very easy to use simply straight out of the box so to speak, they offer a quick and portable way of storing your data such as photo’s, music and video data, and because they are small you can carry them around with you and transfer your data from one system to another.

Typical failures of this device though are snapped or broken USB ports, this usually occurs because the memory stick is left in the computer and gets accidentally knocked, thus damaging the connector, repairs to this area often yield a full recovery and requires a hot air gun and decent soldering skills.

Further failures to this device can be SMC failure of the crystal or other components such as resistors or capacitors, again rework via a hot air gun, a digital multimeter and sometimes a oscilloscope can repair such failures, however sometimes the actual controller itself will fail, this is not a repairable item really, unless you have the skills to unsolder and rework 100 pin quad flat pack or similar components.

The next stage from this is to actualy read the flash NAND directly and then rebuild the file system and folder structure, this is VERY complex and requires skill and knowledge at several levels, firstly there are many different types of controlers, also how many actual flash chips are there?, then the file system reconstruction stage.

Often memory stick data recovery can be more complex than hard drive recovery for the above reasons, and as such can be very labour intensive.

Newer SSD storage devices utilize a similar technology although they are on a larger scale in terms of size, chip count, and resources required.

Most computer users would conclude that because the solid state technology has no moving parts their data is safe and secure, well it is until one of the above issues occurs, so to be safe why not duplicate the data? also make sure that the pen drive has a unique memorable password to safeguard your precious data.

Many data retrieval websites are either ressellers for larger labs or simply operate from a home address or a rented office they do not have an actual clean room facility just a fancy website to hook unsuspecting clients in with, oh and one last clincher is the VERY low price offered for the service.

Clean rooms are based on laminar flow cabinets which contain a pre-filter and main filter, these filters cost considerable sums and the time for an engineer to attend on site to install and calibrate the cabinet to spec, this has to achieved on a regular basis.

Engineers, particularly good data recovery engineers are not readily available nor are they inexpensive as they often have years of knowledge they have built following 1000′s of recoveries both of logical or physical types.

Testimonials is a good area to consider, after all the client type may speak volumes such as MoD, or large corporations, however if those testimonials are on their website of what value are they really, could not they simply be made up? Independent websites which offer testimonials offer or give impartial advice about the service they have received from company x for instance really can help you make a more informed choice, also there may be examples of a similar situation or hard drive which was dealt with successfully, proving the company is capable of performing such work on your media.

Competitor bashing is highly unprofessional and should be avoided, surely it is best for a companies results and track record should speak for itself? Competition in any sector is obviously good for may reasons and should be welcomed, however if a company continually attacks other companies and praises there own, is this a bit passe or old hat? Why after all should they praise their competitors, a mere recognition that a potential client has mentioned them and requests your feedback about them should be along the lines of acknowledgement only and to pass no negative or potentially damaging comments which are untrue.

How may data recovery companies are there in the UK alone?
Well at the last count there appeared to be over 50 companies offering data recovery services of one type or another, however in reality this is easily narrowed down to 10 or less with clean room facilities and a decent track record, perhaps a visit to companies house will show exactly how long the company has been running, a lot less that the 15-30 years some state, this should serve as a warning.

Speak to friends and colleagues and find out if they have ever required hard drive recovery and if so who did they use and was it successful?

Once you have selected a company check to see if they are members of any organization or trade body, this could further serve as help to make your choice.

Why all the rigmarole you may ask, after all if one company fails to recover my data surely I can send it elsewhere, like plan B? Yes you can send to other labs for a second opinion, however with every potential recovery and opening of the media via different labs the chances of recovery diminish, sometimes a hard drive may have a finite time of existence, particularly if there has been serious media damage following a head crash and the magnetic domains are now failing.

These storage devices obviously contain such data is iTunes, movies and pictures to name a few, basically your digital life so to speak, but could you do without them, or More’s the point just live with them alone and sell all other possessions?
Seems extreme but people really are doing this, OK there are some items that we will need in addition such as a bed, roof over our head, food, clothes, but gone are other extraneous or superfluous items such as ornaments, trinkets general clutter, I for one think this digital minimalism is a good idea and does not bog you down with other such details as buying the latest this or that even for digital items, what is the point of upgrading every time a new upgrade or model comes along? OK there are exceptions to this rule, but if it is not broken don’t fix it mentality surely with a minimalist attitude has to be good for you, especially your pocket in these difficult financial times we live in.

There is obviously one serious caveat to this, backup your data! You may have little or live out of a rucksack so to speak, but make sure you have a decent and reliable backup not just for your hard drive or disks but all other devices such as phones etc.

Seriously though how can modern society function without it’s digital counterpart? Think if you lost your phone and Internet for 24 hrs, how would that effect you? What about if you lost them for a month? I am sure this would cause at the least a major disruption in your life or worse.

How really did we get to this enlightened stage where we all rely so heavily on gadgets or technology? It appears to have crept up on us by stealth, sure PCs were about 10 years ago so was the net, but not to the level we see today, many see the advancement of technology as a good thing, and it has to be said that the Internet really has helped in so many ways we never even thought of previously, take the dissemination of knowledge its instant on demand and can be converted at the touch of a button from virtually any language to your own native tongue, this speed has helped in collaborative projects such as medicine and health care, much needed help and understanding has and is achieved.

The 24 hr digital world is constant, available and on demand to all, and to date has never failed, what would happen if the internet failed? Surely this is not possible? Or is it? Then we have the various mobile phone networks supported by satelites, again what if they were to fail?

Studies have shown that not only are there the obvious terrorist threats to various networks there may also be a threat which is out of our control, that threat is from the Sun.
It is well documented that the sun has various cycles, such as sporadic E, additional to this there are krona mass ejections, these solar winds and high energy particles are ‘dealt’ with via the poles here on earth, however as most of the infrastructure is based in stationery or geostationary orbit(s) around the earth and outside the protection of earth they are very vulnerable to such high energy events and could in theory be ‘knocked’ out or damaged, depending when and where the solar stream came from the effects could be devastating to networks here on earth.

Of course scientist do  factor into their equations such events and have rudimentary systems such as Faraday cages and other such type systems and subsystems for protection, usually there are also secondary satellites that can be brought online, so its not all doom and gloom, if anything form this blog consider your digital assets and how safely you store them against any possible data loss.

Many users may have to invest in software or a service to securely destroy any data that may be remaining on the hard disk, also there can be a further resource of time such as setting up and configuring the data destruction application, so having this facility ready to go out of the box is very handy indeed, although this is intended for high security environments and probably not aimed at the consumer end of the market.

It is also reported that the technology will used in larger disks for desktop PCs and even printers and copiers.

1. Place hard drive in freezer
This possibly is the most widely known and tried myth which often results in complete hard disk and drive destruction, let’s take a look at the reasons why.
Hard drives operate on extremely fine tolerances there are fly heights of the head stack assembly rotational alignment between platters and spindle position for eccentricity information from the spindle., if the hard drive is placed into the freezer all of those measurements will be destroyed, additionally to this there will be a degree of water after the hard disk returns to normal or ambient temperature, how could the drive deal with this? Simply put it can not and may short out the preamplifier and or PCB upon switch on, for sure there are anecdotal evidence on the Internet of successful recovery from such a technique, our advice is do NOT attempt this if you value your data.

2.Replace PCB
This old chestnut has been doing the rounds for may years yet still is taking unsuspecting people in as they try this out, often with no recovery or worse still cause further issues which complicate the recovery further>
Many computer users are simply not aware of the complexity of modern hard drives and what each part of the disk actually perform, the PCB for instance is unique to the hard drive it was manufactured with and can not simply be exchanged or swapped with another even if you think that you have the right revision  or firmware details as the PCB will not function correctly on the patient drive.
A ROM on the or flash storage devie will contain such details as the head map and other such type data pertaining to adaptive information of the storage device, so in short do not change the PCB.

3. Hit or drop the hard disk
Yes this really does happen! some clients actually hit the device to try and ‘coax’ the hard drive back into life, when you consider point 1 of this article you can see how dangerous this could be for the hard drive and your data, never drop or hit the media it will damage your drive further than it already is.

4.Format hard drive
This really is a shocking one, many users either voluntarily format there hard drive or follow the request to format the drive if there is some form of logical error and the system requests this, again do not format the hard rive it will not help.

5.Remove platters
This is a relatively new concept for end users and myths, basically the computer user will open the hard drive up and remove the platters to another working hard drive, this procedure is known in the industry as a platter swap and is very complex and requires a clean room and specialist equipment, and moreover is only required when the spindle is seized, many users have been observed attempting this for such issues as media which is not detected in the BIOS or clicking, media will not require platter swapping under these failure conditions.
Platter swapping requires a clean room environment and skilled engineers, equipment and techniques, NEVER remove the platters from your hard rive, as you will render your hard drive unrecoverable.

Can you imagine if you lost your business data and a competitor managed to get hold of it? (It has been reported the the ICO has increased the previous fine level 100 times from £5000 to £500,000 for loss of data in serious breaches),  Or that your personal data ended up for sale somewhere to the highest bidder?
Sadly it does happen but all these events and scenarious are avoidable if you are security minded and consious of your data.

Typically your data may end up in the wrong hands if you dispose of your computer system or hard drive with securely erasing it, in other words uoi data destruction or erasure services are applied, simply formatting the device WILL NOT delete your data and can be recovered relatively easily.

If you are a business then the IT department should have a system in place that can be utilised for end of life or asset management where the equipment will leave your premises for refurbishment or re sale.

As stated earlier simply formatting the hard drive will not suffice as the data will remain on the storage device, so what exactly is required?
There are a number of services available, some are paid for a some a free, perhaps on site or a third party the choice has to be broken down into security, costs and practicality.
If the data is to be securely wiped then a reputable system or piece of software must be used and allowed to complete with a understandable report outlining that the procedure was undertaken and completed, any errors must also be reported as this could be area of weakness and must be scrutinized later, do not simply allow this to pass as there still could be vital or important data remaining.>

Many systems utilize a specific pattern of overwrites, sounds very impressive but in reality it simply can mean that 00 or 11 is written to all sectors available to the user data area at that time, this overwriting is very secure and can NOT be recovered at all despite what you may hear of or read on the Internet that Mi5 or Mi6, FBI or similar can recover overwritten data, it is not possible.

The main weakness from the system is with the hard drive itself, (that is if a hard drive holds your data, other storage systems operate differently,) hard dives utilize a system of handling bad sectors, I am not talking about meta data $bad sectors that the file system may handle but actual real bad sectors which are locked away from the user under normal conditions such as the G-list or growing list, the area may contain data which is now locked away from the user and the erasure software can not access, it is theoretically possible that a well used hard drive which has been used to capacity over a period of years and now has a full G-list may contain documents or other such type data locked away, however still available to people with the right tools.

As far as we are aware no data destruction tools actually can deal with or take into effect this vital area and are leaving hard drives open to further examination by qualified trained professionals with the right type of equipment.

If you are at all concerned over data erasure or data destruction please contact us directly and we can advisie you of the safest course without comprising your data.

Well google utilizes a search algorithm, much is hyped, made up and for the most part unknown to the general public, however there are basic areas that we do know about.

You find yourself in the position of requiring data recovery to a failed hard drive, wow! you weren’t expecting over 60 million results were you? I mean how do you firstly select a provider and secondly back on theme how do you compete if you are a DR company and actually get listed?

Lets look at what we know. (This list is not necessarily in order)
1. Age of URl: The domain age is important as it builds trust in searchers just like real world examples if you required heart surgery who would deal with the newly qualified surgeon or the surgeon that had performed over many years?OK the analogy is extreme but you get the point

2.Content: Content truly is still king, recent google updates such as caffeine have shown that websites with new fresh content are often will rank higher than those with outdated older news, forums, blogs and other such areas which do not get updated, the world changes an awful lot in 24 hrs, try to reflect this with your website with original content that searchers will want to read and connect with, this also builds trust.

3.Links: In bound links, in links, back links call then what you Will, essentially links from other websites which directly with your site, I am not talking about paid links, purchased links, or link farms, these should be avoided at all costs, they are not natural and you will be penalized for having them, if you create the right content searchers will bookmark, comment on social network sites and webmasters will create a resource to your site naturally if it is worthy, so just work daily on creating good on theme fresh content.

4.Metatags: Still useful if used correctly many websites create spammy sites which both the content and the tags are spammed, searchers and robots do not want to read such mundane repetitive data they want succinct unique titles pertaining to your site only.

So to clarify fresh on theme natural content and code which is regularly updated will yield search results in the organic SERPS that you desire, off course if you URL or domain is new you will have to wait, however by setting up the above standards now you will be ensuring that your site gets noticed and is eventually treated as a trusted authoritative resource.

First observed in 1934 at the University of Cologne and as with most discoveries was not intended that the project, which was sonar actually turn out the way it did, as small bubbles of bright light were filmed, this they were not expecting.

It has been postulated that the bubbles of light could be several million kelvin.

There is much speculation as to temperature of the phenomena and possible uses, however there are many physicists who claim that this technology one day could lead to ‘safe’ cold fusion reactors in a safe controlled environment, something to which has not been achieved to date.

The possibility of fusion has been confirmed on several occasions where neutron detectors have detected neutron creation coinciding with the the bubble and sonoluminesence.

Cold fusion or fusion has long been the unattainable for many years and is tooted as the worlds best safest large supply of power for mankinds future power requirements as this process has no waste products as per fission and other forms of energy production such as fossil fuels.

Here are a few pictures and specs on this old hard disk.

Please note the 3.5″, 2.5″ and 1.8″ hard drive which has a capacity of 60Gb!

Here are some of the physical dimensions of the very old hard drive;
The storage device is 53Cm long, 37Cm wide, and 13 Cm deep, it weighs a whopping 12.1 Kg, its total storage capacity is unknown at present but thought to be around <50Mb, this is 50 Mega Bytes or less!

When you upscale the storage capacity to 60 GB as per the microdrive you can see how fay hard drive storage has come in the last 30-40 years, a truly massive growth while reducing the footprint of the unit, can you imagine an MP3 or iTunes player with this? not exactly portable and would have just a few select songs, then you would also need an interface and a computer to connect with it, helps put in perspective what modern day electronics offer consumers, really staggering.

3.5″ media is now available in 3Tb capacity and 2.5 media in 750Gb and 1TB capacity, this storage does present some problems as all the technology tries to deal with older formats and emerging and new areas, Windows XP can have issues above 2.1 TB as it was not considered when the format was created many years ago, and with the above hard drive you can see where they were coming from.

I suppose that with new LLBA format and other areas of development I will stick my neck out now and say that surely we will never need single volume hard drives which exceed 140 petabytes, I mean how many tunes are there out there? Or ho many movies do you want to store?

Upon receiving the faulty hard disk it was diagnosed with spindle seizure and HSA damage, both of which are serious failures the recovery would be very complex and would require many hours clean room work and other engineering duties.

The hard drive was not spinning at the time so this did limit the failure to a degree, if the storage device had been spinning then the HSA may have caused further damage to the disk surfaces or platters, this is due to the fact the the platters spin at 7200 rpm and the heads fly at a operational height of less than 1 micron, so the vertical displacement of torque or G’s to the disk only has to be minimal for it to come into contact with the disk surface causing damage.

This failure type was dealt with in the clean room and several techniques were employed, firstly the platters were transplanted to another known good chassis, this procedure is very complex, time consuming and requires specialist equipment, many companies can fail with this procedure, and here is why.
All hard drives are ‘synchronised’ platter to platter, that is to sat the the servo wedges, tracks and other vital areas are calibarated at the factory at the point of manufacture so any ‘slipping’ or moving of the rotational alignment could and very often does render the disk unusable, and more impertinently your data will not be accessible.

Following the platter transplant to a good known chasis with a good working motor, the HSA is the next part to be replaced, this also is not an easy procdure, it requires skill and dedication to source the correct parts and then install them in the new hard drive build.

Following the clean room the drive is then checked via the com port or TTL rs232 to USB port for firmware diagnosis, here a report of the hard drive firmware is diagnosed, if there are any issue here they are corrected and the drive is then taken to the image and cloning area to to cloned to a reliable destination.

The final part of the recovery is the file system reconstruction to its native format and a folder and file list sent to the client, a random amount of .jg, .raw.,tiff., nef files were launched as to check their integrity, all of which worked with no issues at all.

During the various stages of recovery the photographer was emailed and phoned with regular updates as to the progress and current position of the recovery, as he was very anxious to resolve this quickly, this we achieved in 5 days, to his immense relief.

Our advice if you accidentally drop or knock a hard drive, particulalry if the drive is on at the time please do not repower the drive as this will cause further issues and may compound the recovery at worst it may destroy your data.

If you are wedding photographer ensure that you have more than one back up in the filed so if you are using a Nikon and a Canon camera and have a decent size CF card, also it would be wise where time permits to backup to your hard drive and some other form of device such as an SD card, USB memory stick or similar, that way you should have a form of backup if your main drive fails.