Recently, we came across a user who accidentally wiped important folders from their 2TB PNY SSD. Realising their mistake, they popped open the lid of their Dell desktop system and disconnected the PNY 960GB S-ATA SSD from the motherboard. This was a very good first step to take. Because a data recovery application should never be installed on a drive which you intend to recover from. The user then placed the PNY SSD inside an 2.5” disk enclosure. He then downloaded EaseUS, a popular data recovery application, to his laptop.  He then connected the enclosure containing the disk to the lapt ..read more

A customer recently contacted us. The had a 4TB WD My Passport USB (wdbyft0040bbl) external drive which they accidentally dropped. When they connected the drive to their PC, they could hear a noise sounding as if the “drive arm” was stuck.  They asked us “maybe if I just opened up the drive and moved the arm that sounds stuck. Do you think that would work?”. The customer’s query was totally understandable. Because let’s face it losing data is not a pleasant experience. And most users just want to get their data recovered quickly. Is it safe to open up my hard disk with a stuck head? As y ..read more

The Problem: Users and IT admins who format a hard disk using Windows Explorer or Disk Utility (MacOS) even when there is important data stored on it. This data would not be backed up onto any other medium. The Result: When the damage is self-inflicted users will be absolutely kicking themselves. They will rebuke themselves for being so careless…This is especially painful if they’ve just bought a new drive and formatted their old one by mistake. Ouch! However, accidental disk formatting happens to IT admins just as frequently. The IT admin will usually have to do a lot of explaining to a some ..read more

At the recent Embedded World 2023 conference and exhibition, the “Great Tesla Recall” of 2021 was still being talked about by speakers, exhibitors, and attendees. Given that Tesla is such a high-profile company, it’s probably no surprise. Now you might be wondering, “What was this recall all about?” Well, most electric vehicles now have their own digital storage device installed. This is essentially the car’s hard drive. Tesla installed an 8GB eMMC module in their “S” and “X” models. It failed prematurely, prompting the manufacturer to instigate a massive recall. What went wrong with the hard ..read more

Last week Drive Rescue attended Embedded World 2023 in Nuremberg, Germany. This is one of the biggest convergences of Asian, European, and American disk manufacturers in Europe. Some of the latest NAND-based storage devices were on display. Moreover, it was a pleasure to discuss the latest storage trends from teams all over the world. How the EU’s Right to Repair legislation might influence computer manufacturers’ choice of storage disk in the future The European Commission is expected to implement Right to Repair legislation which will impact manufacturer component choices in devices such as ..read more

We came across a rather interesting case recently. One of our customers, a videographer for a Dublin-based marketing agency, was on assignment in Parma, Italy. The video footage for a multinational food company took two days to shoot. After the first day of filming, the SD card inside their Sony Alpha camera was running a bit low on space. Luckily, they had brought a small portable Seagate One Touch external drive with them. So, after the first day of filming, they were able to transfer their footage (XAVC-S, a proprietary Sony video format) to the external drive. Before they wiped the card ..read more

One of the system administrators of a healthcare organisation recently contacted us. They were decommissioning around 18 of their Dell laptops. For data security purposes, he removed all the Crucial MX500 S-ATA SSDs from the systems and attempted to use Crucial Storage Executive software (hosted on a desktop PC) to perform a SecureErase function on them. The only problem was SecureErase was not executing on any of them. This left him with in a bit of a pickle because even just formatting the SSDs using Windows Disk Management is not considered secure. This is because, there is a high probabil ..read more

A fire damage hard disk with extensive burn marks on label. However, the label in this case is still partially readable. Surprising facts about disks and fires… Successful data recovery from a hard drive which has been exposed to a residential, office or industrial fire depends on a number of factors. These include factors such as the level of exposure to the fire. It depends on the level of smoke particle ingress. It depends on whether the label has been burnt or not. It depends on whether the disk is a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD). And recovery can also depend on how much ..read more

HP Proliant servers are a very common on-premise server in Ireland. These systems come in two main form factors – blade or tower. Their blade series includes models such as the DL360, DL380 and DL385. While their tower series includes models such as ML10, ML110 and ML350. Recently, we recovered data from an HP Proliant ML350. This Windows Server 2019 server running VMware virtualised machines. Using 4 X HP SAS disks, it’s RAID 5 array had gone into degraded mode. While this can be very frustrating, “degraded mode” is actually like a self-protection mechanism of the server. It occurs when unre ..read more

Without an encryption key, if threat actors or intelligence agencies cannot access an encrypted storage device such as a laptop HDD, contrary to popular belief, they will not try to brute force it. Nor, will they use a quantum computer. If it’s really important, more likely than not, they will deploy what is known as a side-channel attack. Such an approach does not endeavour to “break” the encryption of the storage device, but rather, gain access to the protected volume by side-stepping it. One of the most common side-channel attacks exploits DMA ports. But what are DMA ports? Well, first som ..read more