Archive for April 2010
When it comes to storage of data, users may not be sure what is the best choice in selecting a hard disk for their specific needs. As Seagate is the biggest manufacturer of hard disks after they acquired Maxtor in 2006, we decided to provide you with details on the range of hard disks they have on offer. In this post, we have examined different versions of Seagate hard drives which have been specifically designed to satisfy a certain need. Clearly, each series focuses on what it was made for and therefore they vary in quality, performance, speed and price. In the following list, we have introduced each Seagate hard drive type and the purpose it is meant to be used for.
External Hard Drives: External USB hard drives are designed to connect to any computer with USB port, making it convenient for the user to use without any need to intall or configure it or fit it into a computer, No screws or technical knowledge is ever required. Here are some Seagate USB external hard drive families to consider:
FreeAgent® Desktop and Portable Drives: They can be used for PC or Mac or desktop or laptop. FreeAgent drives give you the good data transfer rates available and a relatively sleek design. They designed for storing photos, music, videos or other data. The FreeAgent family has self-powered portable 2.5″ laptop and non-portable 3.5″ desktop versions. They come in various designs and sizes.
Laptop Storage: Momentus® Hard Drives: Seagate® Momentus® hard drives provide the a combination of performance, capacity and mobility in a 2.5-inch form factor. They are also a good in certain non-PC applications, including external storage, copiers/printers and entry-level blade servers. Designed for applications requiring robust performance, including laptop PCs, small form factor PCs and non-mission critical blade servers.
Desktop Storage: This type of Seagate hard drives are used in mainstream and high-performance PCs, workstations, gaming PCs, RAID systems, external storage and low-cost servers.
Barracuda® Hard Drives Seagate offers both mainstream and high-performance, high-capacity desktop drives suitable for a broad range of applications. Barracuda hard disks are designed for for mainstream PCs, high-performance PCs, gaming PCs, workstations, desktop RAID and personal USB external storage devices
Maxtor® DiamondMax® Hard Drives: Maxtor® DiamondMax® hard drives provide a value solution for applications that require a balance of most-popular capacities, basic performance and reliability. Good for entry-level PCs, home desktop PCs, business desktop PCs, non-traditional ATA storage applications and USB external storage. They are considered the basic Seagate range of hard disks which is adequate for entry-level data storage and usage.
Consumer Electronics Data Storage: Pipeline HD™ Hard Drives: They operate with low power and low vibration. Thy are bedroom quiet and are designed for constant use such playing hundreds of hours of blockbuster movie content, all with relatively high performance. Good for video streaming applications such as digital video recorders (DVRs), video surveillance systems, home media centers, karaoke and audio jukeboxes, music recording studios and other multimedia streaming applications.
EE25 Series™ Hard Drives: Seagate® EE25 Series™ 2.5-inch hard drives with RunOn™ Technology are designed to work in extreme temperatures and tolerate high levels of vibration and shock. These hard drives are specially designed for use in automotive systems, military aircraft, commercial aircraft, industrial controls, mobile surveillance, marine transport and shipping industry. Although they are fully shock-proof but they have been made to withstand tough conditions constantly moving systems with relatively high temperatures.
DB35 Series™ Hard Drives: Seagate® DB35 Series™ hard drives are specifically designed to meet the requirements of DVR applications and also offer continued support for applications requiring a PATA interface. Good for digital video recorders (DVRs) and home media servers.
Server and Enterprise Storage: Constellation™ Hard Drive Family: Seagate® Constellation™ portfolio includes the world’s first 2.5-inch hard drive for Tier 2/nearline environments with very good power efficiency and 3.5-inch high-capacity hard drives with up to 2 TB of storage for data-hungry applications. Constellation drives offer a good combination of performance, enterprise-class reliability, low power consumption and high capacity. Good fo high-density, multi-spindle Tier 2 storage purposes including servers and NAS, SAN and RAID storage environments.
Savvio® Hard Drive Family: Seagate® Savvio® 2.5-inch enterprise 10K and 15K drives are 70 percent smaller than 3.5-inch drives, enabling more drives per system and providing higher performance and reliability while providing ultra-low power consumption. Good for mission critical 2.5-inch enterprise server storage applications that demand high reliability, performance and the lowest in power consumption.
Cheetah® Hard Drive Family: Seagate® Cheetah® drives are the standard for 3.5-inch 10K-RPM and 15K-RPM hard drives used in mission-critical server and storage solutions, where system availability and reliability are of utmost importance. Desined for large form factor, mission critical enterprise storage applications, in demanding network and server storage environments.
Barracuda® ES.2 Hard Drives: The Seagate® Barracuda® ES.2 is a 3.5″ drive with SAS or SATA interfaces and provides high-capacity, 7200-RPM nearline storage for situations where dollars per GB and GB per watt are primary metrics. Multi-spindle high-capacity applications such as nearline, NAS, SAN, RAID and multi-host applications (SAS) and, clustering (SAS). Visit Data Recovery London Lab for more information.
Data Recovery Lab specialises in recovery data from all types of Seagate and Maxtor hard disks as described above. If you have one of these hard disks and it has failed, do not hesitate to call 0207 516 1077 or visit www.datarecoverylab.co.uk.
What a calamity! I have lost my data! What do I do?
Data Loss: Recovery of Data From A Faulty Hard Disk
Imagine a situation where you have been working on a university, business or school project and exactly at the time you want to put the finishing touches onto your completed projects, you get the dreaded blue screen on your computer and every goes bang. You desperately try restart the PC but you find no joy in getting the beast to restart! How disappointing! How heart breaking! Now it is time to cry out loud and blame yourself why you did not fulfill your promise of doing a backup. Certainly need someone get you out of this misery. It is devastating to find out that your deadline will come to an end in 3 days’ time and your hard disk has just failed and your data has vanished. Don’t panic and just keep cool. You are not alone in big trouble. Unfortunately there are many people like you who have lost their data and your situation is not unique. The good news is that all is not lost and data recovery specialist can indeed help recover all your data. It is reassuring to know that in such a terrible state to know someone can help you retrieve all your lost data. Data recovery technology has made massive progress since 1998 when the first specialist data recovery companies began operating in the UK. Now it is possible to recover data from any faulty hard disk no matter how bad the damage is.
Logical vs Physical Data Recovery
Internal components of a computer hard disk
Generally, your hard disk may have failed in several ways. Here are some of the possibilities:
- Your dropped your external hard disk or your laptop:
This most probably will cause serious physical failure which may lead to read/write head seizure; this is analogous to human cardiac arrest. In order to recover the data from a hard disk which has suffered from a physical failure, it has to be taken apart in a dust-free environment and read/write heads have to be replaced. In addition to this, the the motor, which spins the platters, has to be re-aligned. In prectice, this means athat a temporary repair of the hard disk is required in order to keep it alive enough to clone or image it bit by bit. Once we have the image, data can be recovered from the image. The repaired hard drive is no longer required and it may even fail after it has been imaged.
- Your hard drive has been damaged as a result of a power surge:
Unregulated power, wrong polarity or power surge is a major cause of hard disk failure. This normally results in the burning out of the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) on the hard drive. Sometimes a chip on the PCB may be fried and it can be visibly detected. The common misconception among most users is that if you buy an exact match of the failed hard disk from eBay or some other online shop and swap the PCB, the hard disk will work and data can be accessed without any further action. This is wrong!This can be potentially dangerous because if you do not have the correct PCB with the exact firmware version, you may even damage your hard drive and render your hard drive completely inaccessible. In most cases, a data recovery technician would repair the original circuit board and the replace the faulty chip or power component using special tools. This requires a special hot air gun to be blown onto the faulty chip or electronic component so that the data recovery technician can replace the faulty parts without damaging the adjacent miniature components. Quite often, even after the hard disk PCB has been repaired, the data stored on the partition, is not yet accessible because the original electrical fluctuation and wrong polarity may have corrupted the partition. Therefore when you mount the disk after the repair, it shows up as “unallocated” in the disk management utility. In order to recover the data from the corrupted partition, the disk has to be edited manually using a hexadecimal editor by a suitably trained data recovery technician.
- Logical or soft hard disk failure:
This happens when your hard disk becomes inaccessible as a result of a virus infection, partition corruption or multiple bad sectors. A more serious failure in this category is when the SMART- Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology -which is responsible for recoding the bad sectors and error correction, fails. This can extremely slow down access of the data on the hard disk and in some cases, will completely render the disk inaccessible. Recovery of data from logical or soft failures is less complex and data can recovered more quickly and cost-effectively.
Data loss can break your heart but not necessarily your back:
If you have lost data in any of the above ways, you must seek help as soon as possible because hard disk failure is progressive and the hard drive can degenerate quite rapidly. Data Recovery Lab specialises in data recovery services including hard drive recovery, RAID data recovery, PC recovery, Mac recovery, laptop data recovery, USB external hard disk data recovery and computer forensics. Recovers data from faulty or damaged hard drives and computers. It provides free data recovery analysis and free quotes. Operates a no-data, no-fee guarantee. Data Recovery Lab has ISO-certified data recovery lab facilities employing highly experienced data recovery technicians equipped with advanced data recovery tools. Data Recovery Lab has been serving business as well as private customers since 2001. For more details, visit datarecoverylab.co.uk or call 0800 840 21 31.
Data Recovery Lab Blog: Data recovery and computer forensics 
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