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...
We and numerous other companies within the data recovery and tech-spheres have written about how, in the age of big data, we’re producing files at such a rate that there is an urgent need for media to offer far greater storage density than is currently possible. Several potential solutions for this problem have been posited by scientists throughout the last decade. One, though, has captured the imagination like no ot...
It’s clear that smartphoneshave revolutionised the way we live. We’re only ever a few clicks away from the latest news or discovering what’s happening in our friends’ lives, but all this increased connectivity comes at a cost: low-battery anxiety. Research has shown that an astonishing 90% of us feel anxious when our smartphone’s battery drops below 20% (considering how anxious many of our clients are as a result of ...
Following on from our post explaining how HDDs work, we thought we’d follow it up with a piece on how SSDs – and all flash-based storage media for that matter – works. As we’ve stated previously, hard drives store data by writing it onto a thin layer of magnetic material. The data is translated into a series of ones and zeroes that is known as binary. This is then translated back into the piece of data you stored whe...
SSDs are quicker, are growing in popularity and are viewed - amongst those with an interest in technology, at least – as being significantly sexier than HDDs. So much so, that some have predicted that SSDs are to HDDs what Netflix is to DVDs or, perhaps more accurately, what DVDs where to VHS: a superior piece of technology that will render its competitor obsolete. With the emergence of big data, cold storage and clo...
For those of us looking to keep our most sensitive data safe, storing it on a drive that was unnetworked went a long way towards ensuring it was secure. The logic behind this principal was pretty straightforward: data held on a piece of unnetworked storage media can only be accessed by those who can physically access it. In other words, hackers could not remotely access it and retrieve data held on these drives. Now,...