My Hard Drive Died #14 – DIY Hard Drive Repair

My Hard Drive Died - Podnutz

Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

Backup Solutions
DropBox
Carbonite
Mozzy
LogMeIn Backup
iDrive
Windows Live SkyDrive
CrashPlan

Racetrack Memory
Computer memory that’s 100,000 times faster.
We may soon have computers that boot up instantly, use less energy, and run much,
much faster.

Solid State Drives (SSD)
Data recovery requires relearning new technology, not software based yet.

NAND Flash
A type of Flash Memory technology.

Email question from Stevo:
Q: Using SpinRite to recover bad sectors compared to chkdsk.
A: SpinRite is definitely a much better tool than chkdsk.
The main purpose of chkdsk is to get your drive back to a bootable estate even if it has to kill
some data.

Email question from Mike:
Q: Recovering pictures from a dead USB drive using PC-3000 Flash.
A: This is a major project, you have to unsolder the memory, decode the chip, etc.
Cost of this device is around $4,800 which makes it impractical.

Q: If I buy an identical USB drive (same manufacturer, model & capacity) assuming the problem
is the controller chip; could I swap the memory chip and recover the data?
A: That would be the best possible choice but the problem is to confirm USB drive is indeed

identical.

Email question from Leaf:
Q: IDE to SATA Bridges recommendation
A: No particular brand, buy in bulk and choose a particular chip; will need to be more specific on
a next show.

Email question from Simon:
Q: Hard drives manufacturers recommendation
A: The main 5 manufacturers are: Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate & Western Digital

Toshiba is not commonly seen on US data recovery labs.

Not a fun of Samsung drives but they are taking over the solid state market.
Rumor is that Samsung may possibly buy Seagate.

Seagate has a lot of head problems and firm ware problems, board problems also and lots of
things getting fried.
Western Digital has a lot of head problems and also known board problems.

Hitachi is the one that reports fewer problems.

Upcoming Conferences

Dec-6 thru Dec-10/2010
Washington, DC
Jan/2011
DC3 Forensics Atlanta

Jan-28/30, 2011 ShmooCon 2010

Washington, DC

Notes by Jorge Hernandez of 123ComputerRepair.com