The Week of Hard Drive Crashes

Posted on: September 26th, 2008

This is Friday, Sep 26, 2008. This week I had a record number, three, hard drive crashes on my hands.

For two of these I was able to recover nearly all important files. One hard drive though was dead as a doornail.

When a hard drive is not communicating with the computer at all, or mechanically damaged (broken read/write head, not spinning, etc) the only way to recover data from it is to send it to a lab where, under extreme cleanliness, they replace the broken parts and get the drive working again – at least as long as they can save the data from it. As you can imagine maintaining a lab which can’t have the tiniest dust speck in the air, is expensive. So getting the data back from these “dead” hard drives cost at least $500 – this is the cheapest one I encountered so far.

Coming back to this weeks story: The guy who had the dead hard drive was anxious to get his data back but didn’t have a spare $500. I remembered that Fry’s electronics had a sign saying that they do data recovery. So I called them up after about 5 minutes waiting and 2 transfers between departments I got a guy one the phone who understood what I was asking. It turns out that they can’t do more than I do however they charge dearly for it. The guy said it’d cost $150 just to determine whether they can recover data from the hard drive, or they need to send it in to a lab. And their lab, with their “discount” was $1,700. I got really disappointed. They sell great selection of electronics and I recommend them to everyone but why rip off someone who is desperate to get his data back?

Let me put this in comparision with my usual charges (in-shop fees): I’d ask $20 to determine whether the hard drive needs a lab, or not. Recovering the data from a responsive hard drive runs in most cases $60-$80. That’s reasonable – it takes about half an hour to check the hard drive out and test it with different methods, it takes 1.5 – 2 hours (of my time) to get the data off. The data recovery might run for 24 hours because some hard drives get really slow when they get to bad sectors but I just need to let it run.

Another moral of this story is that hard drives do fail, frequently! Using your computer without a dependable backup system is just as “wise” as driving around without insurance. You might get away with it for a long time but when you get into an accident (hard drive crash) it will hit you hard. You might just have a fender-bender (hard drive that is still “alive”) but anything more serious than that will cost you either losing all your data, or a lot of money to get them back.

I can’t stress enough how important is to have a backup. And the good thing about it is that it’s not like insurance that you have to keep paying and paying but it’s a one time expense (except for online backups) of about $150 – that is if you don’t have an external hard drive already, if you have one it would be about $40-$60 (on-site). And you can have a dependable online backup for $5 a month – probably the best solution!

An update: I was too early in making the statistics. 2 more hard drive came in on the weekend. But sadly both were not recoverable by non-lab equipment. That puts the recovery rate well below 50%. The moral of the story is: don’t rely on your hard drive to store your data permanently.

Did you find this information useful?
Please consider donating.

You can leave a comment for the above article. Comments will not show up automatically but will be reviewed and incorporated into the article if they contain useful information.

cforms contact form by delicious:days