The price of SSDs has been unprecedently low in recent months with sales of the flash-based storage spiking as a result. We’ve seen the effects of this in our data recovery lab recently: the steady growth of SSD data recovery jobs we’ve witnessed over the past few years gathered pace towards the end of 2018, and continued into 2019. This trend, though, may not continue if recent reports are to be believed.In the midd...
As a society, we’re creating data at a truly unprecedented rate. For some, the reasons why are plain to see; for others, it’s much less obvious. Here, in Fields Data Recovery's opinion, are the five main reasons why we desperately need more room for our data. 1. The internet We’ve started with the internet because absolutely no one can dispute that it’s played a key role in our recent data explosion. Following its la...
‘How much does it cost to recover data?’ is one of the most common questions Fields Data Recovery’s staff are asked. In fact, it’s likely that each individual public-facing member of staff is asked it at least once each day! Sadly, this is a question that cannot be answered with any reasonable degree of accuracy before an engineer has analysed the drive, diagnosed it and determined both the problem and solution. A qu...
With the weather getting warmer, many of us will be making a beeline for the beach. Our phones will inevitably go with us in order to capture that perfect family portrait or, possibly, a selfie with friends. Whilst the reasons for taking our phones to the beach are obvious, it’s not a particularly tech-friendly environment. Sand can clog up small entry points, mobile devices don’t usually like the heat and last but b...
We regularly recover accidentally deleted data here at Fields. Usually, though, we’re trying to retrieve the odd file – not the entire contents of a hard drive. Still, if you’ve wiped your hard drive and really wish you hadn’t, it’s entirely possible that your data can be recovered. Why a wiped hard drive can be recovered When data is deleted from a hard drive, it’s not erased. Instead, the locations of the bytes tha...
As you can imagine, data recovery companies receive multiple drives – and therefore a truly enormous amount of data – on a daily basis. A significant portion of this data could be described as personal and/or sensitive. This is precisely why any company that deals in the act of recovering data from failed hard drives, phones, PCs etc. must adhere to the data protection act (soon to be replaced by the GDPR) and ensure...
We’ve recently written about how SSDs work and how, due to their lack of moving parts, they are far less likely to suffer from mechanical faults than HDDs as well as offer faster read/write speeds.Lower costs aside, it would seem that HDDs have no real advantages over flash-based media, but this is not entirely true: as the cells of devices that utilise flash technology can only be adjusted (to either prevent or allo...
It doesn’t matter how large your house is, you’re gradually going to accumulate enough possessions that it’s no longer big enough; the same is true of data storage. The storage capacity of all widely-used media may have increased significantly in recent years but we’ll always seem to find a way to fill them. Just as a house overloaded with items results in its owner needing to dispose of some, store them elsewhere or...
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives – this should give you a pretty good idea of how a RAID differs from your normal hard drive. Yes, you’ve guessed it: a RAID is comprised of multiple drives rather than a single one. Thanks to something called a RAID controller, though, any device connected to an array knows to treat the drives contained within it as a single entity rather than a collection of sepa...
Often, when we discuss the capacity of a type of storage media, we will refer to the amount of data that it can store as its memory. Whilst it would be perfectly clear what someone meant if they made such a claim and, furthermore, it is widely deemed to be an acceptable – if colloquial – description, the word ‘memory’ actually refers to something different. Similar, but different nevertheless! Storage media such as h...