Terminology

Areal Density What is Areal Density? Areal density is the number of bits per square inch of storage surface. Areal density is commonly used as a defining measure of potential storage density in hard drives. In...

Clicking Hard Drive My Drive Is Clicking What Should I Do? Hard drives can make a very interesting collection of noises depending on the problem and the make of the drive but invariably the prognosis is not good. ...

Data Conversion Services Data migration requirement could arise for a number of different reasons but principally data migration or  data conversion is necessary when companies decide to change the way in which they...

Data Recovery Expert What is a data recovery expert and when should you use one? Although there are many people who may claim to do data recovery the have a go data recovery practitioners and data recovery experts...

Defragment Hard Drive How Do You Defragment A Hard Drive? Hard drive fragmentation is one of the prime causes of slow computers an a major contributor to unnecessary hard disk wear and tear and head usage. Unfortunately...

Degraded Drive What is A Degraded Hard Drive? Hard drive failures account for nearly 40 percent of data recovery requirements and one aspect of drive failure is hard drive degradation. Essentially a hard drive...

Fragmented Hard Drive What is A Fragmented Hard Drive? A hard drive consists of a number of different blocks and sectors and this is where your data is actually stored. When you write data to the drive rather than place...

Hard Disk Drive What Is A Hard Disk Drive? A hard disk drive is known as a hard drive, hard disk or fixed disk drive. Hard drives have platters with magnetic surfaces that rotate rapidly. Digitally...

Hard Drive Fragmentation Is A Fragmented Drive Bad? Hard Drive Fragmentation - A partially fragmented hard drive in itself is not a severe problem but it will slow down the performance of both writes to and writes...

Hard Drive Head Crash Is A Head Crash Bad? When it comes to your hard drive a head crash is a very serious matter and if you think you my have had one cease using the drive immediately if the drive contains valuable...

Hard Drive Platters What Are Hard Drive Platters? A hard drive platter is essentially a disc made from aluminium or glass and ceramic substrate.  During the manufacturing process of the disc, a thin coating of...

Hard Drive Speed Are Larger Capacity Hard Drives Faster? Generally all other aspects of one drive compared to another being equal and no drive fragmentation the answer would generally be yes. If you can imagine...

Hard Drives Overheating Overheating computers are a sure way to test even the newest hard drive and a principal cause of hard drive degradation. Even in the cleanest conditions and workplaces computers do tend to draw in a...

Head Crash What Happens When A Disk Head Crashes? A head crash can be one if not the most destructive of hard drive failures, but what happens when a disk head crashes? Inside your drive there are a number...

Logical Drive Failures Data recovery jobs tend to fall into two distinct camps called logical and physical. The term physical is used to describe hard drive and media failures that can be classed as a mechanical failure...

Maxtor Hard Drives Maxtor like many computer technology companies is relatively young and began its life in 1982 and was founded by James McCoy, Jack Swartz, and Raymond Niedzwiecki who notably where all ex IBM...

Online Data Backup What is online backup? Anyone who uses or in particular works on a computer is going to need to understand about data backup, what it is, and why it is so important. When you backup your data, you...

Physical Drive Failures Hard drive data recovery services tend to fall in the main into two very distinct categories which are often expressed as physical and logical. Physical categories just as the name implies are...

Ruggedized Hard Drives Computer systems of one shape or form are utilised in a number of different areas and although most of us will be familiar with our desktop or laptop computer systems which in most cases are used in...

Seagate Hard Drives Seagate was first founded in 1979 by Alan Shugart and Finis Conner and was originally called Shugart Technology and the companies first product was a 5mb hard disc which proved very popular at the...

Servers What Is A Server? A computer which runs a server program and connects to a number of computer over a network is called a server.  CPU speed is not normally critical to a server, but high I/O...

Solid State Drives What Is A Solid State Drive? Solid State Drives (SSD) are a storage medium for data which uses non-volatile NAND flash memory. And come in mainly three sizes :- 1.8 inch, 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch...

USB Flash Drives What Is A USB Flash Drive? A USB flash drive is a storage device which currently holds between 64Mb and 64GB of data. The type of memory used is NAND flash memory and connects to the computer via...

What Are Bad Sectors Before trying to explain what is a bad sector it would be useful to understand what a sector is or how a drive is structured. In simplistic terms a drive platter or disk is divided into what is known...

What is a SAN What is a SAN? Storage solutions tend to come with a variety of acronyms and unless you work in the IT industry these can sometimes be a bit confusing to say the least. SAN stands for storage...

What is Data Deduplication What Is Data Deduplication? In any IT infrastructure over time a business will generate a huge amount of duplicate data in the form of e-mails, word files, presentations and so on. Whilst this is...

What Is Data Recovery Data recovery is necessary when the secondary storage media on which data is stored has failed or the file system prevents it from being mounted by the operating system. Hard drives, storage tapes,...

What Is Hard Drive Smart What Does Smart Do? Data on a hard disk is stored in a magnetised layer effectively on one of the drives internal platters. The internal platters are extremely sensitive and due to a number of...

What is NAS What is NAS? NAS stands for network attached storage (not to be confused with SAN which is an external storage network). Unlike SAN NAS units are physically attached to a local network and are...

Why Do Hard Drive Sectors Go Bad We all like to think of the good old days when all mechanical devices where over engineered and sometimes lasted a life time (and beyond) but hard drive do have a limited life expectancy and this...