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Data Recovery and Hard Drive Components

A hard drive, to most of us, just looks like a rectangular device which stores our data. We don`t know how it works, just that all of our precious information is in there somewhere. To get a better understanding of what goes on inside, how they work, and how to recover the data when they stop working, let`s look at a hard drive from the inside.In order to make the article more relevant we will use a new 1TB Western Digital 3.5" hard drive and open it up. The main enclosure, usually black or silver, is what the everyday computer user will know to be the hard drive. It is actually called the hard disk assembly, or HDA. The top side of the HDA is covered by the top cover with a sticker detailing information about the hard drive such as manufacturer, capacity, model, serial number etc.The underside of the hard drive houses the printed circuit board, or PCB. This is the green electronic board which covers about half of the underside of the drive. The components of the PCB are usually on the inner side of the PCB, protecting them from damage. On the underside the cover for the motor spindle can also be seen.SATA drives have 2 connectors. The small connector carries data to and from the drive, whilst the larger is the power connector for 5v and 12v lines. On the PCB are 3 main components. They are the main controller unit, motor controller and onboard memory or cache. The MCU is equivalent to the processor (CPU) of your computer, essentially the brains and computing power of the drive. The motor controller performs the function of spinning up the platter/s inside the drive, and controlling the movement of the voice coil which directs head movement. The memory chip is like the RAM in your computer. It is labelled as `cache` in the hard drive world and stores data being written to, or read from, the drive. The contacts for the heads and motor can also be seen. The ROM information is also found on the PCB and is usually found on an 8-pin IC (chip), other times this information is stored in the MCU itself. The ROM contains a portion of the firmware required to start the hard drive recovery, with the rest of the firmware being read from the drive platter itself.From a data recovery perspective, sometimes the PCB will fail from a power surge or physical damage. To recover the data the PCB will have to be repaired or replaced, but this is not a straightforward process.

Server RAID Data Recovery Specialists

If you had to carry out RAID data recovery ever, you will appreciate surely that this is not something that can be done by your regular maintenance technician. And if it did happen, you would have surely not enjoyed the experience. When this happens, it means that at least one of the drives has failed, and most likely it contained crucial data that you must get back somehow. You can`t really take a chance in this situation. You have to turn to a professional RAID data recovery service. That`s because only experienced RAID data recovery experts will know what is to be done to get back the critical data quickly. If it`s lost forever, then it could cause business loss. What Your Knowledgeable Raid Data Recovery Pro Will Do If you have hired the right RAID recovery service, a professional from the company will always treat your job as the highest priority and attend to your needs quickly. The company will realize that you probably depend on the data a lot, and that it is an integral part of your business. First a free evaluation will be carried out and a full diagnostic report will be provided to you that will give details about how much data can be retrieved. This gives you the option to decide for yourself whether you want to proceed with the RAID data recovery restore service or not. Of course the company will perform the recovery process at your site only so that you can be sure that the critical data doesn`t go out of office. Expert RAID data recovery engineers from the company should be willing and able to work through the night if needed to recover the lost data as quickly as possible to reduce your downtime. And if for some reason the person is unable to recover RAID, the company should not be charging anything for the services offered.server data recovery allows you to recover the data that was stored on the desktops, laptops, SQL servers and also the exchange servers. How much data can be recovered will depend on the capacity of the disk. The person should be able to carry out a detailed analysis of all the drives to find out whether any physical damage has been caused or not. In fact, this is one of the most important things good RAID recovery services should be doing.

RAID Data Recovery

With the cost of hard disk falling, it is not uncommon for home desktop PCs to have RAID. In fact, most PC motherboards have a built-in RAID controller, even if it is not in use. RAID is short for "redundant array of inexpensive disks" and was developed to use smaller disks in an array for better performance, scalability, and data reliability and recovery. RAID achieves all these aims via several configurations. The most common nowadays are RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1/ RAID 10 and RAID 5. Each of these RAID types has their own method of redundancy. RAID 0 is simply striping the data across multiple disks. It`s like dividing the data into smaller pieces of fixed size, called the "stripe width," and writing the stripes across the disks. If the file to be written was 5KB in size, with a stripe width of 1KB and there are 4 disks to a RAID set, the first stripe would be written on the first disk, the second on the second disk, and so on up the fourth stripe, the fifth stripe is written to the first disk. This is a fast way of writing large files but if one disk fails, the whole set fails. RAID 1 is also called mirroring. That`s because the same data is written on two disks at the same time. In other words, one disk being the mirror of another. The reads are done on both drives as well. If one disk fails, there is still another disk which keeps the data safe and read-write operations continue. This is an effective solution at the cost of having two disks doing the job of one.RAID 0 + 1, is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1. The data is striped across disks first, and then mirrored across the same number of disks. If you have four disks, the data is striped across the first two, and then the pair is mirrored across the remaining two disks. This is a robust solution but very expensive.RAID 5 is like RAID 0, but with a parity write. A parity is an error correction which is a combination of the data on the other stripes. Additionally, the parity is written on different disks, and not on any single disk. Because of this overhead, raid data recovery is slower than RAID 1 or RAID 0 + 1.In case of a disk failure, the data can be recovered by calculating the parity contents of the failed disk from the contents of the other disks. In hot swap installations, the failed disk is taken out and replaced, and the data is rebuilt on the fly. There would be noticeable performance degradation while the data is being recovered automatically.