Damaged Hard Drive - Job Number 333330
Seagate 6TB Hard Drive, with damaged heads. The drive's owner reported that the drive has suffered a violent impact during a car crash.
We checked the drive's internals and determined that the heads were deformed. Additionally, the heads' sliders have been scattered around in several places inside the drive.
After we managed to collect the sliders, we replaced the heads and we began imaging the dirve.
Result: 97.8% of our client's data recovered successfully!
Damaged Hard Drive - Case 277510
This Samsung drive, with date of manufacture: September of 2006, came in for data recovery. However, the drive has been opened previously by someone else.
This drive is a PATA (Parallel ATA - the protocol prior to Serial ATA (SATA) ) and has a 120GB capacity.
After examining the drive, we discovered that it has been contaminated internally, while there were fingerprints all over the place, a souvenir from the "data recovery engineer" of some other "lab".
What's good about these drives is that they are pretty forgiving by having a quite big fault tolerance in regards of media damage. At the same time, they manipulate a relatively small read/write density, resulting in good behavior when it has to do with media damage, even those that can be seen with bare eye.
After we cleaned the drive's surface using special techniques, we replaced the hads and modified the firmware so the read retries parameter is as small as possible. This way, when the heads come across some unwanted finding, they will just ... look the other way.
That had a very good result. We managed to recover 95% of the drive's data.
Damaged SSD Drive - Case 654206
Samsung SSDs are famous for their reliability. However, this doesn't mean they're not at all prone to failure.
In this case, a Samsung 870 Pro drive came in for recovery. The drive was inaccessible.
Από έλεγχο που κάναμε, διαπιστώσαμε ότι ο δίσκος δεν ήταν δυνατό να αναγνωριστεί σε κανένα σύστημα.
We made the necessary checks, to find out that the drive's controller, namely S4LR020 was shorted.
We transferred the NAND chips to a similar donor drive and we were able to recover 100% of the data!!
Damaged SSD Drive - Sandforce Case 399111
This concerns a Kingston SSD that uses the notorious Sandforce controller.
We're the only lab in the world that can recover these drives with a success rate larger than 99%!
The reason that no other lab can recover these drives is that these manipulate a some sort of dynamic XOR to their controller algo. This makes the decryption practically impossible, unless it's us dealing with this drive :)
We were able to recover 100% of the drive's data, as we've done with nearly all jobs like this.