Technology

We cordially invite you to get acquainted with some of the Technologies used in Data Recovery. We encourage you to visito our Lab Blog to discuss about the topics that our engineers love.

Data Recovery Technology

In order to better understand the Technologies that are applied in Data Recovery, we recommend you to do some research regarding the way the different types of storage devices work. Particularly, this Wikipedia article happens to be a great introductory piece.

Clean Room Engineer
Kepler - Santiago Lab

Clean Room
Hard Drives are manufactured within what is known as a “Clean Room”. The concentration and size of dust, smoke and other air pollutants’ particles is drastically reduced by the use of HEPA or ULPA filters. Generally, hard drives are very sensitive to the particles that are found in air, mainly due to the fact that the distance at which the head flies over the surface of the platters is very small, actually no more than just a few micrometers. Not using a decontaminated environment to open a hard drive can cause a very quick deterioration of the magnetic substrate and may cause total loss of the information in the drive.

Electronics
Digital storage devices are based on complex electronic circuits such as microprocessors, reading channels, DSP and others. Many times, these circuits store unique information (in the form of code, data tables, positioning information, etc.) for each drive in particular, therefore it is very important to understand in detail the way each electronic subsystem works in order to be able to repair it in case of failure. One of the main causes for unrecoverable cases is the attempt by inexpert users of replacing damaged electronic circuits disregarding the rest of the drive’s electronic system. Today’s high density storage requirements demand that each part of the drive is optimized and tuned with each other at an electronic and mechanical level, basically due to the fact that even the slightest geometrical or tolerance variations in some components may cause serious failures in the drive.

File Systems and Logic Failures
Rebuilding, manually or by means of specialized software, the file system of a hard drive is already a complex task. Now, imagine rebuilding an uncommon file system stored in a RAID array of unknown level composed by multiple damaged drives and then we have an exponentially more complex task in our hands. This type of specialized knowledge is very hard to acquire. Generally, the previous experience of the human team addressing the problem becomes crucial at the moment of finding a solution.

Other Technologies.
For further reference about the technology involved in hard drives and data recovery, please contact us. We will gladly respond to your inquiries to the extent of our knowledge and experience.