Common Hard Drive Failure Modes

R3 Data Recovery Hospital operates one of the few high capacity data recovery labs in North America and Europe.

Our team of engineers are long term industry researchers and leaders, developing new solutions for each generation of drives. Each failure is actually unique, the life of the drive, the type of data, environmental factors and user interference all influence the failure and chances of recovery. With hundreds of millions of drives in circulation world wide, many drives that come in for recovery have seen a long and productive life, which generates a steady flow of work for our engineers on a daily basis.

It is not unusual for clients to come to us with hard disk drives 10-15 years old, and recently we have had drives from the late 80’s and very early 90’s. Equally we have drives come in for recovery which are literally hours into their first use, but it is why they need recovery that is key and can be a combination of the following:

• Accidents: Dropped or Knocked. Mostly external drives and laptops.
• Power Interference: Mostly over voltage from wrong power supplies, failing UPS or batteries, local substation outages and lightning strikes.
• Liquid damage: From flooding of a data center, factory, office or home. To spillage of a glass of wine or coffee on a laptop or even dropped into the sea, swimming pool or washing machine.
• Harmonics: Vibrations at a frequency that the hard drive picks up and become amplified, especially when there are multiple drives in a computer, Server Rack, NAS, DAS or SAN – see Also Gas Drop – Air Shock .
• Temperature: Hot weather failing air-conditioning, poor airflow can all contribute to overheating or direct heat from a fire.

Our team has helped thousands of clients recover data from all these scenarios, so please contact us today for a free assessment or request a free online quote .