A very large UK University recently contacted our labs for data recovery, a Seagate hard drive which contained a considerable amount of modeling data over a large period of time had failed, after a brief telephone conversation a free courier collection was ordered to collect the failed hard drive.
Here is the case study of the Maxtor STM3500320AS hard drive:
This case was an external Maxtor hard drive and contained specialist software models for wave modeling and study.
Diagnosis of Maxtor STM3500320AS:
The failed hard disk was sent to our specialist clean room where it was immediately obvious thet a serious internal issue has arisen, the heads had crashed into the disk surface or platters and caused much damage, the initial report to the client did not look good, however after replacement parts were located and installed in the failed hard drive a full clone of the drive was made, from this the file system was rebuilt and a full folder and file listing sent to the client for approval, this process took many hours to complete was complex.
Spec of this Maxtor STM3500320AS hard disk drive:
500 GB total storage capacity
Manufactured April 2008
7200RPM
Interface SATA
Transfer rate: 3GB/s
32MB cache
What was the outcome?
All client user data area was cloned successfully to our secure 256BIT AES encrypted server, this was despite the serious issue that the failed hard drive had initially, the client approved the folder and file list and to say he was relieved is an understatement, the work was created over many years, in fact due to the urgency some of the data was FTP over to the client so that they could have access to the data immediately.