disk drive data recovery Archives - Memofix's Data Recovery Blog

Who Makes the Most Reliable Hard Drives?

May 25, 2026

After losing data, our customers tend be very dissatisfied with their present hard drive and they want to know what we think is the most reliable hard drive. As we diagnose every type of hard drive failure that exists and on a regular basis, we get to know the problem drives on a much deeper level then your average computer user. This month we give you our opinion on 3.5″ desktop internal hard drives. So what would we buy?

The Most Reliable Desktop Hard Drive

There was a time when there were over a hundred hard drive manufactures. These days, the herd has been thinned considerably and there remains only 3 desktop hard drive manufactures. Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. All three manufactures have made some very good hard drives during their history. And all three have also made some pretty terrible drives at times as well.

Back in 2012 Western Digital bought Hitachi’s hard drive business. This would have left only WD and Seagate selling desktop drives, as Toshiba at the time was strictly a laptop drive manufacture. The global anti-competition rules would not allow the resulting two company monopoly. Consequently, WD was forced to sell the Hitachi desktop hard drive division to Toshiba in order to have a 3rd competitor. WD retained the Hitachi name. Toshiba used the forced sale to jump into the desktop HDD market and began selling Hitachi desktop drives re-labelled as Toshiba drives. Toshiba has now weened itself off Hitachi’s technologies and makes it’s own unique desktop drives. WD continues to sell both Hitachi branded drives as well as WD branded drives. The two drive brands are quite different in design and it appears the Hitachi drives are continuing to use the original Hitachi designs.

#1 HITACHI - In our opinion WD’s Hitachi brand hard drives are the most reliable desktop hard drive at this time. Hitachi was the 1st manufacture to introduce helium filled drives and the reliability of these drives continues their tradition of making quality long lasting storage devices.

#2 WESTERN DIGITAL - In our opinion, the Western Digital brand makes the 2nd most reliable desktop hard drives. So in fact, WD makes the top two hard drive brands. Additionally, when it come to “recoverabilty”, we feel WD makes the most recoverable hard drives at this time. This is due to the drive’s high level of acceptance of “donor” head assemblies, and the layout of the drive’s own internal operating system.

#3 TOSHIBA - In our opinion third place would go to the new Toshiba desktop drives. We have seen a lot of these but what we have seen appear rock solid. Toshiba’s ranking may climb as we see more of them. Our opinion may also be influenced by our positive experiences with their laptop drives.

#4 SEAGATE - And in our opinion, stumbling along in last place is Seagate. Seagate has had some exceptionally bad hard drives in the last few years. 1.5TB Seagates of any model are very prone to failing. Additionally there have been high failure rates reported for the 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 and the 4TB Seagate ST4000DX000. On the positive side, the latest Seagate 6TB and larger drives appear to be very reliable!

Please don’t place to much trust in our opinions. We tend to mostly see the bad apples, while the good drives continue to hum along, almost unnoticed by folks like us.

In our next blog post we’ll offer our opinion on laptop hard drives and who we think makes the most reliable hard drive for this purpose. In the meantime, don’t forget to backup you data to a second hard drive as nothing beats having a backup. A backup a day keeps the DR away. ( Data Recovery)

For a free no obligation quote, click the Orange button ->

Need more convincing, read our glowing 5-STAR Google reviews ->

Memofix at iTech 2013 Toronto

April 30, 2026

We love talking about IT with our customers, particularly if it involves storage technology. We are a company of geeks who are always willing to share our technical expertise on hard disks, tape drives and data recovery with clients and business partners. And now we’re being allowed out in public.

Memofix will be at iTech 2013, at the Toronto International Centre, on Thursday, May 16th. For the past decade iTech has become known as Canada’s IT Infrastructure Conference and allows technology professionals to speak one-on-one with industry vendors, all in one place. The seminar sessions deliver information on the latest trends, cutting edge products and services and help them research solutions for their IT strategy.

We are excited to be at the show because it gives us an opportunity to meet with many of our past clients and discuss the challenges they have in the area of storage. More importantly we love meeting new customers who get to find out what we are all about. We think a face-to-face conversation allows us to convey our love for all things storage and build a trust factor based on our expertise and the fact that we love to help solve problems.

At the conference we will be focusing on 3 important services that generate the most interest from our customers.

Data Recovery: A malfunctioning storage device can be a minor nuisance or severely disrupt your business operations. Unfortunately the failure of hard drives, RAID arrays, and other data storage technologies is a fact of life. Find out how Memofix can serve as your emergency support partner and how we retrieve or recover data from all types of data storage media. Businesses of all sizes across Canada put their trust in Memofix Data Recovery Services to recover data from hard disks, tape cartridges flash media of all categories and NAS, SAN, and multi-disk servers.

Tape and Hard Disk Repair: All the industry experts will tell you, “Tape is dead”. For companies that continue to use tape as their backup or archive strategy it is getting harder to find a support vendor and there are few service organizations in North America that specialize in tape drive repair. Memofix, with 25 years of experience, is among that select group and we provide direct support for some of the largest manufacturers of tape storage technologies. Our tape and hard disk repair services allow companies to extend their IT budgets by keeping existing devices running and avoiding an early replacement. We also offer extended warranties for tape storage devices that are very cost competitive with OEM alternatives.

Cloud Backup: The future of backup is not cloudy (sorry, bad pun). As companies cope with ever increasing amounts of information they realize that it’s critical to have a dependable backup solution that can scale with their business needs. Come by our iTech booth and find out how our Cloud Backup solution can prioritize files for backup and securely transmit an encrypted copy to an offsite Canadian-based data centers. The Memofix Cloud Backup service can save you money, simplify your IT operations and give you an increased sense of security about your data.

Since 1986 Memofix has been a Canadian market leader specializing in the repair of storage devices, data recovery solutions and partnering with manufacturers as their warranty depot. Our company takes pride in the professionalism of and experience of our technicians and our process of continual improvement. Come by our booth at the iTech conference and find out why we are quality obsessed and customer focused.

Need a Data Recovery Expert?

March 22, 2026

Please allow me to introduce you to MemofixMan, the creation of our own Rob Armstrong. Not only is Rob a talented artist, he also has an incredible flare for recovering data. Rob can be found most days recovering data in the Memofix data recovery lab. We hope you enjoy his drawings and we hope to publish more of his creations soon.

Data Recovery for Dr. Dell in Haiti

January 11, 2026

Data Recovery is often a thankless business. We can spend hundreds of dollars on parts and many late days attempting to recover someone’s critical data files. And in the end, if we are unsuccessful, we don’t get paid and rarely do we get a thanks for our efforts, no matter how hero like our recovery efforts may have been. So when we receive a great big thank you and some pictures showing the fruits of our labour in use, we really like to soak it up. 🙂

“Hi Bob,

you probably remember me from a few months ago. I had the hard drive from an X-ray machine in Haiti that had failed due to a power surge. I though you may be interested to know that thanks to the drive your company recovered the machine is now working again. I’ve attached some pictures for you from the mission in Haiti including pictures of the C-arm being used during a knee operation. The surgeon in the picture is Dr. Dell who covered the cost of the recovery. This surgery to implant a plate in a patient’s damaged knee would not have been possible without a working x-ray. I thought your team would appreciate seeing the results of a job well done.

Thanks and Blessings, Geoff “

The Real Doctor of Recovery, Dr. Dell doing his thing in Haiti

Back in August, Geoff, an associate of Dr. Dells asked if we could recover data from an old Quantum hard drive being used in an older X-ray machine in Haiti. It was a 52 MB hard drive, yes 52MB or .052GB or .0000052TB, small by today’s standards that’s for sure. As the disk drive was very old and few data recovery companies other then Toronto’s Memofix Data Recovery Services had the experience or parts to deal with it, we were asked to attempt the hard drive recovery in Toronto.

As it turns out the hard drive had been damaged by a power surge and it’s printed circuit board or PCB was fried. Additionally and more detrimental to our data recovery efforts, the surge damaged a small pre-amp chip that is located on the head assembly inside the sealed disk drive compartment. The chip is used to amplify the signals from the individual heads to the PCB and without its proper operation, no recovery would be possible.

On a current modern hard drive, we would simply replace the entire head assembly but this older Quantum hard drive used a unique hybrid positioning system for controlling the heads and it could not be simply replaced with a new one if the data was to be recovered. This hybrid positioning system used a combination of an optical encoder for rough head positioning and an embedded servo system for fine positioning. As a result the relationship between the two positioning methods was critical and could not be altered or replaced with anything but the original mechanical parts.

With Memofix’s grey haired experience in repairing legacy hard disk drives we were able to replace the pre-amp chip on the original head assembly and restore the hard drive to an operating state. We then created an exact image of the entire original hard drive onto a new Quantum 52AT hard drive. Interestingly enough, we had a new Quantum hard drive sitting in our stock, still sealed in a bag we received directly from the now defunct manufacture in the early 90’s.

Sometimes it’s good to be a pack rat that’s been around forever! Especially when our efforts in Toronto help a good doctor spread heath and healing through a country that really needs everyone’s help. May the forces of good be with the people of Haiti!

Data Recovery after a MAC Format

January 4, 2026

In my last post we discussed the consequences of formatting your hard disk drive using Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 and whether data could be recovered after such an event. In this post we will shed some light on how Apple implements formatting on the MAC, and the implications of their methods on data recovery.

First it should be noted that Apple does not use the standard Windows terminology when referring to formatting a hard disc drive. Apple calls their format process “Erase”, but in essence it perform the same tasks as a Windows Format command. The hard drive is re-initialized to appear as a fresh and empty drive volume with all of the disk space free for use.

Mac’s Disk Utility can be invoked from the “Go-> Utilities” tab. A screen shot of the disk utility can be seen below. When a hard drive is selected you can then choose the type of Volume Format and a name for the new drive volume.

If you were to now press the Erase button, the drive would be formatted or erased according to the Security Options that are set. To see what options are selected, press the Security Options button and you will see the screen shot below.

By default, an Erase is set to the “Don’t Erase Data” option. This option overwrites all the directory information used to find and access a file. It does not however erase the actual data. In this case, data recovery should be possible. This option is equivalent to a quick format on a Windows based PC.

The use of any of the other options will result in permanent data loss. Whether you overwrite the data 1 time, 7 times or even 35 times makes no difference in the real world of data recovery. The data will be gone, so be careful.

Data Recovery Machine, Myth or Reality?

November 8, 2025

Vaughan, Ontario, Canada.

Some people believe that data recovery service companies have automated “data recovery machines”. Basically, a data recovery technician physically removes an individual disk or platter from the inaccessible hard drive, inserts the disk into the machine and automatically reads off the data. While several recovery companies have attempted to create such a data recovery machine, in reality there exists NO such device!

Even if such a machine existed it could’nt solve “all” the data loss situations. In many cases the physical damage to the hard drive’s discs prevents any chance of reading the discs and successfully recovering data. The drive’s disks are coated with an extremely thin layer of magnetic material and when a crash develops on the disks it physically removes this coating and turns it into a black magnetic dust. That dust is the actual data and nothing will ever be able to put it all back together …period.

But the real problem with developing a data recovery machine would be the customization required to support the overwhelming number of different hard drive families in existence. Each family shares similar hardware, architecture, and encoding schemes. When you send data to a hard drive to be written, it is typically encoded 5 different times before it is actually written on the physical disks. These encoding schemes are usually quite different between families of hard drives and are constantly being updated in pursuit of higher data densities. In my estimation there are thousands of different schemes that would need to be reverse engineered in order to decipher data from just today’s current drive models, let alone the equal amount of non-current hard drives still in use.

Back in the late 1990’s there was a Scandinavian data recovery company called Ibas that developed a data recovery machine called the Patan for Pattern Analyzer. http://www.ibas.com/technology/hard-disk-repair.htm Of course the company claimed, ambiguously that it could recover data from independent hard drive platters or disks, but in reality it

could recover data from just one family of Seagate hard drives, and even then it was a non-current family of MFM hard drives. (ST4000 series) MFM drives use an interface with 2 ribbon cable connectors and haven’t been manufactured since the early 90s.

More recently (early 2000’s) in my prior life at a leading data recovery company, we developed a machine to read data off the disks of a Western Digital SCSI hard drive and a few other similar PATA models. http://www.channelscience.com/files/Drive-Independent_Data_Recovery.pdf But again, the device took talented engineers many years to develop, could recover data from just a few specific models and required constant tweaking and attention. As of today, it’s my understanding that this dust gathering machine has been largely used as a slick marketing tool.

Due to the extreme and constant technical advancements in hard drive technology and the presence of several distinct and competitive hard drive manufacturers I doubt we will see any additional attempts at creating a drive independent data recovery device. And with many of the newer data recovery techniques we have developed, the need for such a machine is becoming a distant memory. So, once again don’t forget Memofix Data Recovery Services www.memofixdatarecovery.com for those occasions when you just can’t live without your data.

DIY or Do-It-Yourself Data Recovery?

November 8, 2025

WARNING: If your data is absolutely critical, DO NOTHING but send it to the professionals. More data is lost by well intentioned recovery attempts than is ever lost from the initial problem.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In some situations it may be possible to access your lost data using simple procedures OR even recover your lost data using relatively inexpensive software. Knowing how to differentiate which situations call for a professional and which don’t, is the key.

Before considering if DIY data recovery may be an option for you, be aware that your efforts may cause the permanent destruction of your data, so please proceed with caution!

The stress and panic of losing your data can often result in hasty and unwise decisions. Take the time to calm down before making any important decisions. Try and determine what data is absolutely critical and what data you can live without. Can the data be recreated and if so, at what cost? Is it backed up elsewhere or have I shared copies with any of my colleagues? Often, much of your data can be re-assembled from other sources and the remaining lost data can be worked around.

If you’re a home user or even a budget minded business, the cost of the recovery must be compared with the value of the data. Data recovery on hard drives typically starts at $500 and can easily surpass the $1000 mark, while data recovery from USB flash devices and camera cards is typically $300 or less. Putting a value on last summer’s vacations pics or ten years of email is not always that easy. The value of the data is always in the mind of the beholder.

If you decide to attempt a DIY data recovery, you will first need to determine if your data recovery situation is a candidate for DIY data recovery. Data loss can be the result of the 2 distinct problems:

DEFECTIVE STORAGE DEVICE: Your data can’t be accessed because the storage device (typically a hard drive) is no longer functioning properly. Unless you’re a hard drive expert, there is little you can do.
DAMAGED FILE SYSTEM: the storage device is working but due to corruption or damage to the computer’s file system structures, the data cannot be seen or accessed. The fie system keeps track of where the files are actually store on the hard drive or storage device.

In the first category, the storage device or hard drive is NOT working properly. To self evaluate your hard drive, open up your computer and locate the hard drive. If possible remove the hard drive from the computer, but keep the connectors attached as illustrated in the picture on the right. Now place your ear as close to the hard drive as possible and power up the computer while listening. If your hard drive is making any strange or uncommon noises such as clicking, squealing, banging, clacking, ticking, scraping or other destructive metallic noises you likely have a defective hard drive. The louder the noises, the more likely your hard disk drive has begun to physically crash and there may only be a short window of time before the damage becomes insurmountable. If the data is mission critical, shut if off immediately, do nothing, and start shopping for a professional recovery service.

If you don’t hear any audible screams of pain, your hard drive may still be defective. To check further, monitor the screen as the computer is powering up for the post BIOS routines. In particular, there should be a message displayed when the computer is checking for the presence of hard drives. In the example on the left, there is one Maxtor 2F040L0 hard drive detected. If no hard drives are displayed, your hard drive is likely defective. However if no concerning noises are present, you can continue and attempt some of the additional procedures mentioned further on in this article.

In the second category of data loss, the hard drive is assumed to be working properly, and the data loss is likely the result of damage to the operating system files or to the “index of files”. However, this damage may still be the result of a hard drive perhaps failing intermittently, so be careful.

Many times a user cannot access their data simply because their computers will no longer boot up. Try attaching the inaccessible hard drive as a second drive on a good booting computer or install the inaccessible hard disk drive inside an external USB box and access it through a USB port. If the file system is still relatively intact you should be able to open up “My Computer” and gain access to the drive’s data files. For MAC users the inaccessible data drive should show up as an icon on your desktop.

If the drive’s data files still can’t be seen, there is one more tactic that can be employed. Running a commercially available data recovery program may recover the files you need, even if you’ve formatted the hard drive, deleted files or re-installed the operating system. Many of these programs can be purchased for less than $100 and offer a free trial period where you get to see the results before you decide to actually purchase the product. Be sure to attach an additional working storage device to the computer for recovering the data to. Data should never be recovered to the original storage device.

Hopefully your data loss is a simple issue and these procedures help you regain access to your data. However if your data loss situation is a more serious problem, please contact the experts at Memofix Data Recovery Services where data recovery is our passion and the tougher the case, the more determined we are to be successful. http://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/