Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery Information
If you own a laptop computer, you need to rely on it to perform every single day and night and in every situation. You can't afford to have it go down. When it does and you need your valuable data recovered then ITS - Data Recovery will recover your lost data. Over the years, we have recovered data from just about every type of laptop or notebook hard drive ever produced. Back in 1987 we were recovering data from 20mb laptop hard drives. Like the Connor CP321 that was in the firstToshiba laptop computer. Today we routinely recover data from laptop or notebook hard disk drives ranging in size from 20mb. to 250gb.
So whether whether your hard drive just quit or you've accidentally spilled a soda on your laptop, dropped it, or it's suffered from a natural disaster such as fire or water damage - don't worry. ITS - Data Recovery will get your data back!
Practical Information on Laptop Hard Disk Drives:
(Listen to our expert data recovery engineers for advice.) If your laptop is making a strange sound and you think it is coming from the hard drive or one of the logical partitions has turned to garbage then the best thing you can do is turn off the laptop and turn in over to a true data recovery professional. You can try to recover the data yourself using off the shelf data recovery software but you are exposing yourself to possibly losing your data forever by relying on an automated process instead of recovering the data manually.
When most people buy a laptop computer they put complete trust in in it and don't even think about the risk of losing data until it is to late. The fact of the matter is that today's hard disk drives are highly prone to failure for a number of reasons. Hard drives keep increasing in capacity with the use of fewer and smaller parts. Today's average hard drive spins at around 75 mph and the R/W heads are flying above the media at a distance of about 3 nanometers. That is like a 747 airplane flying 4 inch's from the ground. A laptop hard disk drive is a very complicated software and hardware device.
Here's a few tips to remember.
1. If you are intent on attempting data recovery yourself then make sure you do it on a donor drive and not the original.
2. Never run ChkDsk or a defragmenter on your drive. It will not help and in fact it can and will only make matters worse. ChkDsk is the absolute worst piece of garbage ever written.
3. Never use a drive in your laptop that you think might be faulty. If you suspect something is wrong with your drive then backup the data and replace it. You can also send it to us and we will clone it to a new drive if it is possible.
4. Never on the advice of Acer, Dell, HP, Toshiba or Sony tech support (or whoever make your computer) should you use the restore disk that comes with the computer. This usually will reinstall Windows on your drive and erase your data. We cannot tell you how many times we get drives in for data recovery that have had Windows re-installed because of some stupid tech support person at the factory.
5. Calm down. Wait until the initial stress and shock of your data loss has subsided before you decide what to do. Attempting data recovery yourself or even choosing the wrong company for the job can cause you more damage.
What's is the best Laptop Hard Disk Drive?
This ia a question we get asked every single day. When you purchase a laptop computer you don't get to choose what brand hard drive goes into the computer. There is no way of knowing. In fact it changes all the time. It just depends on what the laptop manufacturer chooses at the time. So if you buy a Toshiba laptop there won't be a
Toshiba laptop hard drive in there.
When you are replacing your hard drive however you do get that choice. Our experience tells us that from a data recovery stand point that Toshiba laptop hard drives are the best choice. That is to say from a data recovery standpoint. They have the highest data recovery success rate. Seagate laptop hard drives have a high success rate of recovery and are reliable drives but require clean room service during data recovery quite often. Samsung laptop hard drives are reliable but the circuit board fails often. They are very sensitive to static electricity. We have seen a high rate of circuit board failure from older Fujitsu drives. Older Hitachi and IBM laptop hard drives have the lowest success rate on data recovery. The heads crash on the platters very often and scrape the metal oxide off (your data) making recovery impossible.
As a rule most hard drives are reliable provided you treat them with care and follow the manufacturer's instructions. Above all back up your data because no brand hard drive is immune from catastrophic failure.
What is Data Recovery going to cost!
Generally most laptop data recovery jobs run somewhere between $350.00 and $750.00. We currently charge a flat rate based on how much data is recovered. At this time we are not charging additional fees for clean room service or for drives that have a mechanical failure.
We may change that in the future as drives continue to increase in capacity and the cost of opening a hard drive in the clean room rises. Keep in mind that the nature of data recovery requires that 80% of the work be done just to get to the point of knowing if it is recoverable, so don't send us your drive for an evaluation if you are not serious about data recovery.
