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Reviving A Dead Hard Drive The Hard Way
An anonymous reader writes "This guy went to the trouble of swapping logic boards on a dead hard drive to get his NeverWinter Nights save games back and took photos." I would have just used a character editor to get my stuff back, but clearly, I lack the dedication this gentleman has. Regardless of reason, nice work!
It's interesting how he found that the same brand and model of hard drive can have a vast array of different firmware configurations. This seems like it is a bit dishonest to the consumer who assumes he/she is purchasing the same thing that was recommended to them.
Visualize the world of wine
I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..
But it totally kills the warantee..;)
But my 60 gig recently bit the dust, and the first thing people told me to do was stick it in the freezer... (just like he did in the article) Of course I naturall say "But that'll kill it."
theirs? "It's dead already, idiot"
He seems somewhat surprised that the price of repairing a hard drive is more than buying a couple of new ones. You are paying to get the data salvaged, not the physical disk back.
Having worked in technical support with a database company, I can tell you how upset people can get when you tell them it's going to cost almost $400/hr to salvage their database. Sometimes it could take upwards of 16 hrs to do it depending on the size and extent of the damage.
How far a little proactiveness and an occasional backup of important data will go.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
I've also had good luck pulling data off 2.5" drives by pulling the covers and simply running them through a hardware cloning box (about $120 now). The fact that you're reducing their MTBF to something like 10 hours is irrelevant if you get the job done in 20 minutes.
Oh, act lawyerish: only charge for successful recoveries. That way, the clients even sympathise with you if you don't succeed.
Kind of an afterthought to an earlier comment of mine paraphrased as "Doesn't MTBF mean anything anymore?"
Hard drives have warranties. Sure, these warrenty periods are shortening, but that's neither here nor there. Given that a drive is going to fail eventually, would it be beneficial for drive makers to offer 'data insurance'? Data recovery is expensive because it's not a common practice. If you paid some reasonable, optional $x when you buy a drive, and the drive goes down, and you could send it back to the maker for recovery (having paid 'insurance' on it), the practice would be more common and the price would decrease. The idea being, like most forms of insurance, you are paying less than what the recovery would cost because the rest is subsidized by the other people who pay but never need it. A third party recovery service could offer this as well.
There are a number of issues I can see with this arrangement (privacy, confidentiality of data, what happens when the drive can't be recovered, what if they just SAY it can't be done, etc), but it's something to think about.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
This approach seemed expensive, but as far as bringing a dead drive back to life through surgery, this seemed pretty easy.
"The hard way" would have been buying a new drive, taking it to a cleanroom and transplanting the platters! You'd more than likely lose the use of the 'donor' drive, and there's a higher chance of failure in this much more invasive procedure, but that would be much more article-worthy.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Someone has already mentioned cars, but in the context of a change that happens during different model years. In fact, cars change during a single year as well! It's not uncommon for people to consciously wait for a few months after the latest car model has arrived in dealerships before making an order. This gives the manufacturer time to "debug" the current model. Little things get fixed or changed here and there. So, on average, the later cars of the same model year are a little bit more reliable.