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
PATAN Data Recovery Machine
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.
