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The following article was published in our article directory on February 4, 2013.
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Recovering Data From An External Hard Drive

Article Category: Computers and Technology

Author Name: Greg Duffield

In today's world, one of the most popular ways people back up their data is on an external hard drive. It's obviously good to have a backup, but what do you do if your external hard drive crashes? Do you have a backup copy of your backup hard drive should it crash?

What we are seeing more and more of these days is people are doing what they are supposed to do. They are taking their important data and saving it to their external hard drive. Unfortunately we see an all to common trend of people backing up their data to their external hard drive, only to later delete the data from the source drive. So the user is not really "backing up" their data, they are simply moving it.

External hard disk drives can be exceedingly difficult to recover data from. Not only because they are large capacity in most cases, (now reaching into the 7TB zone through Hitachi Global helium filled drives), but also because of the complex configurations. It's not uncommon to actually have multiple hard drives in a single enclosure that are run as a RAID or JBOD. When you begin to have data spanned across different hard drives you begin to increase your chances for data loss substantially.

Common problems that present themselves can be a single hard drive failing in a RAID that doesn't use parity, which results in the entire array being inaccessible. In a RAID 0, this problem is amplified, in that if you have a single drive fail and the platters are damaged, you end up with a 0% chance of a successful recovery even if the other drives in the array are perfectly fine. This is due to data being striped. In most of these external hard drives a single file is split up among each hard drive. Take a picture file for example, the file might be 3MB in size, but you could have 128K of the file on one drive, the next 128K on the following drive, etc. etc. The file continues being partially written back and forth to each drive until it is completely saved. So if the external hard drive crashes due to a single hard drive in the array failing, and if the damage is severe enough that it cannot be recovered, you would only be left with fragments of the original file. You won't have a complete file.

An additional problem we see with external hard drives is that they tend to be mishandled. External drives get dropped, they get bumped, they get knocked over. There are instances where the damage is not too severe, where maybe the heads just become unparked and seize to the platter. This is still a serious issue, but not as bad as it could be. In more serious cases the spindle bearing itself is damaged, and the motor becomes permanently seized. This occurs quite often in Seagate hard drives. All you hear is a low buzz buzz buzz when the drive is powered on. When this happens a full platter swap is the only real option. There are some rare instances where you can free up the bearing so that the drive will spin up again, but it's not often. This is MUCH easier said than done however, since platter alignment is absolutely critical. You cannot lose the alignment between the platters on either the vertical or horizontal axis. You have nearly ZERO room for error here. Any shift in the alignment will cause permanent data loss. The other concern is a shift in the rotational alignment, which may cause a slight wobble to the platters. If the platters aren't perfectly centered on the spindle hub, you will get a vibration that throws the track alignment off, and the heads won't be able to read.

It should be clear the implications of not backing up your data properly, especially if your only copy is contained on an external hard disk drive that has failed. The best solution is redundancy in your backup plan. Keep multiple backups of your data over multiple drives, and if possible keep at least one copy in a separate location. Doing so will help you rest easy, knowing that your data is safe and secure.

Keywords: data recovery, raid data recovery, hard drive data recovery, hard drive crash, data retrieval, data recovery services, data recovery company, data recovery reviews

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