hard 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)

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How to Protect Your Hard Drive from Damage

February 16, 2026

If you’ve ever experienced a hard drive crashing before, you know how devastating it can be to not know whether your data is lost or can be recovered. In order to help you avoid this traumatizing experience, we’ve outlined a few things you can do that will help prevent damage to your hard drive.

Purchasing Considerations

When purchasing a new hard drive, there are a few choices you can make that can help increase the life of your hard drive. Before buying, make sure that you:

Choose a solid state drive (SSD): SSDs are more likely to save your data in the event of a crash because they distribute data across multiple memory chips. However, it can be harder—and more expensive—to recover the data with these types of drives.
Do not buy used: Most used hard drives are typically older. When you use an older hard drive, they are much more likely to fail sooner.
Research the history of a model: If a model is brand new, steer clear. Bad models will generally be discontinued after a few years. In addition, models that have been around for a few years will most likely have addressed any bugs or issues. A model that has been around for a while and has been tested is your best bet.

If you take care to do the above before purchasing, you’ll be less likely to experience problems.

Preventive Measures

If you already own a hard drive and are looking to prolong its life, there are a few things you can do to help keep it in working condition as long as possible. Keep it protected by taking the following actions:

Separate user data from OS installation: Before you begin using a computer or laptop, make sure to put the OS installation onto a different drive than the user’s home directories. Your device will be less likely to crash because the drive that has the OS installed on it will experience less reading/writing.
Protect it from surges: Prevent damage from electrical surges by using a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) or surge suppressor. If the power source is left vulnerable to interruption, you could risk damage to your hard drive, any open files, or the file system. While you may think this is common sense, you would be surprised at the number of people that don’t take this precaution.
Make sure it’s well ventilated: Without the proper ventilation, your system is prone to overheat. For this reason, you should keep your devices out of tight spaces and make sure the fans are functional. For extra protection, consider adding an additional fan, if possible.
Use an antivirus program: Not only should you install an antivirus program on your computer, but make sure to regularly run scans and keep it updated.
Be careful when moving your device: You should always be careful whenever you decide to move your device. Make sure to turn it off and wait until the hard drive has had a chance to stop spinning before you pick it up. If you are using an external hard drive, take extra care not to knock it over while in use.
Defrag the drive: If you defrag your device on a weekly basis, you can ensure that your machine doesn’t have to work harder than it has to for optimal operation.
Monitor the device: You can use the Windows chkdsk program to check for any errors that the hard drive may have. In addition, you can download an application that can monitor the condition of your hard drive and send you alerts when there is a problem.

By taking the proper precautions, you can ensure that your hard drive has a much longer life.

Experiencing issues with your hard drive? Memofix Data Recovery Services can help! We can recover data when other companies choose to throw in the towel. Create a case today to obtain a free diagnostic evaluation. We’ll provide you with a no-obligation quote based on the severity of your situation.

Deleted SSD Files … Gone Forever?

July 10, 2026

It wasn’t long after the introduction of the PC that computer enthusiasts figured out that if you deleted a file on your hard drive, it could generally still be recovered. This was possible because deleting a file only deleted its index entry while the file itself remained intact and undamaged. Armed with this knowledge, many IT professionals rescued deleted files and won the accolades of their panicked customers in the process. But the rules have changed with the modern SSD or Solid State Drive and in most cases, if a file is deleted from an SSD, the file is deleted forever!

To understand why, it helps to understand a little more about SSDs.

Unlike a hard drive which can simply write over existing data, an SSD must 1^st erase existing data before it can write new data. The process of erasing a data block is very slow in comparison to writing or reading a data block, and as a result 1^st generation SSDs became considerably slower over time. To address this concern, newer SSDs started preemptively erasing recently freed blocks during their idle time. This process is referred to as garbage collection and is found in all current SSDs.

However, initially SSDs did not understand or communicate with operating systems like Windows, consequently when Windows deleted a file and marked the space as free for re-use, the SSD knew nothing about it. As far as the SSD was concerned, this space was written to and was thus in-use. To overcome this build-up of unknown and thus unavailable space, SSD manufacturers introduced a feature called TRIM. TRIM allows the operating system to communicate and inform the SSD of free data blocks as they become available. The SSD will then add these blocks to its list of blocks to be preemptively erased. Unfortunately in the real world, these blocks are erased and prepared for re-use almost immediately. Consequently, a deleted file is now totally unrecoverable within moments of being deleted.

Even if you do a quick format on an SSD, the data will be gone almost instantaneously and forever! Previously with hard drives, it was still possible to recover the original data files even if you formatted your hard drive. See our Recovering Data After a Format blog post for more information on that topic.

There are exceptions where deleted SSD data can still be recovered. This is usually because the SSD, operating system or storage configuration does not support TRIM. Below are some examples where TRIM is not supported and hence, deleted files may still be recoverable:

Using an older 1^st generation SSD or Solid State Drive
Running Windows versions before Vista and MAC OSX versions prior to 10.6.8
Using an SSDs inside an external USB or Firewire enclosures, and most NAS boxes.
File system has become corrupted and the volume is no longer recognized or accessible.
SSD formatted with FAT16 or FAT32
PCI Express SSDs generally do not support TRIM
Encrypted volumes do not usually support TRIM
SSD RAID arrays do not typically support TRIM.

Solid Sate Drives are becoming much more common as the prices comes down and their benefits become apparent, but as always, there are tradeoffs, and understanding the implications is always important. If we can help resolve your data loss situation or if you just want a second opinion, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 1-800-MEMOFIX or [email protected].

Hard Drive ECC Errors!

January 16, 2026

Recovering data, whether it’s important engineering data for a Hydro Electric company or the family pictures for a young family, is very rewarding on a personal level. Of course there is the enjoyment of helping someone in need. But the real reward for a good data recovery technician comes from the satisfaction of solving problems others can’t.

However, not all data recovery cases are solvable and that’s hard for my techs and our clients to hear. One of the most frustrating data recovery scenarios involves uncorrectable read errors. We see a lot of these cases.

In this typical scenario we receive a small 2.5” laptop hard drive for data recovery. We evaluate the hard drive and deem it functional enough to start creating a sector by sector image. But as we image off the drive it encounters more and more Error Check & Correction or ECC errors; to the point that there is at least one unreadable sector for every 5000 sectors we read. When a disk drive encounters a read error it will attempt to read the same sector at least 10 times. This slows the imaging process to a crawl and as a result it’s not uncommon for the imaging to take months to complete. Besides the time delay, the image is also riddled with unreadable sectors located randomly across the entire data area and in close proximity to each other, making it difficult to find large contiguous blocks of error free data. This means many larger files may be damaged beyond being use-able and often the majority of the good data will be restricted to smaller sized files. Depending on the size of the files the client needs, this may be acceptable or not.

What is most frustrating is the fact that there is little that can be done. These errors are the result of data not being written properly to the drive in the first place. Bad in equals bad out!

It helps to understand where these errors are triggered. When a hard drive reads a sector of data, it also reads a 50 byte ECC code that resides just after the real data. When the data was 1^st written to the sector it ran a sophisticated algorithm on the 512 bytes of sector data and this resulted in a unique ECC code which can only be replicated by reading the exact same data. When a sector is read later, the drive attempts to validate the data by running the same algorithm on the data and comparing it to the previously stored ECC code. If the code doesn’t match, the disk drive produces an error code and prevents the transfer of the data. The hard drive will normally attempt to re-read the data up to 10 times as it tries to match the ECC code and this process slows the drive down considerably.

With our hard drive expertise we are able to disable the retries and other housekeeping chores that slow the drive down. But even with these shortcuts, it is not uncommon for hard drives with this problem to take weeks or even 2-3 months to completely read off every readable sector, especially if the drive is 1TB or larger.

We do have the capability to use special read commands to bypass the ECC error checking but the data is usually garbage or at the very least, it can never be trusted 100%. We will do this for a few key sectors of data if the situation warrants it.

So what cause these ECC errors to proliferate? ECC errors can be the result of many different causes.

If a weak head is having problems writing data, ECC errors can often be created. The head appears to be stable when it writes the data and even passes the ECC check initially. But when it attempts to read the same sector later the ECC check fails and the request is aborted.

lf a hard drive is running under extreme heat conditions, for example if a laptop gets extremely hot while you are working from home by the swimming pool, the hard drive which is a mechanical device made of many sorts of metals will expand. Writing data while the drive is in this state may cause problems later when trying to read the drive in a cooled down state as the positioning will affected ever so slightly. This shouldn’t normally cause problems but extremes of operability are always unpredictable.

BUT the number one reason for the proliferation of ECC errors in our opinion is a bad memory chip whether on the hard drive or more likely inside the desktop or laptop.

If your storage device is riddled in read errors, we can help and are usually successful in recovering the majority of a user’s data. Costs for these types of cases are typically in the $400-700 range depending on the severity of the errors and the capacity of your hard drive. Please give us a call today to discuss your data loss situation.

What is a CRASHED hard drive?

December 12, 2025

We hear the words “my hard drive has crashed” at least a hundred times a month and yet it is seldom what we discover when we open the lid of someones “crashed” hard drive. The picture below shows two Seagate 500 GB hard drives we recently received for data recovery. Both drives were declared crashed by their owners! However only one appears to be physically crashed.

The drive on the left is in pristine condition. The disks are extremely shiny and consistent across the entire surface of the disk surface. The clients problem was determined to be a bad PCB or printed circuit board.

The drive on the right is not so pristine and has physically CRASHED! The smooth shiny disk surface has been scored and ringed by constant contact with the heads while the disks were spinning. This amount of damage could only occur if the drive was left running for a long period after the initial contact damage. Click on the picture for a closer more shocking look.

The drive on the left should be recoverable. The drive on the right is NOT recoverable.

If you require a price estimate on our data recovery services, follow this link for a quick reply … Canada’s Data Recovery Experts

Kindness Changes Everything!

August 13, 2026

Memofix was recently asked to help out a fellow Canadian who had lost the latest pictures of his deceased wife after his computer became submerged in the recent Calgary and High River, Alberta floods. Memofix’s expertise with water damaged hard drives was invaluable in recovering the data and putting a smile on a saddened face. Here’s a letter of appreciation we recently received for our gratuitous assistance.

Despair to HOPE!

This is a story of how a few acts of kindness can build hope in a person’s life

My name is Rick Ellis and I am one of the thousands of displaced citizens of High River, AB after the floods of 2013 but I consider myself lucky to have met a few “angels” during the anguish of these times.

I lost my wife Chris AKA Princess on the 14th of June, 2013. Less than a week later, on June 20, we were hit by the worst flood in our history. I had gotten our computer, Ipod and cellphone out before the flood but left them at my place of work not dreaming that they would be in any danger there. More than a week later they let my employers back into the building to retrieve valuables and \my employers, Tony and Penny Marshall of Highwood Crossing Foods, who are angels in their own right, retrieved my bags for me, one that held my clothes , one that held our valuables,computer etc.and one of important documents. Upon arriving at the TIDE loads of hope caravan I opened my trunk to retrieve my bag of clothes that had been sitting in the flood waters for over a week. A volunteer came out to help me unload my clothes and when he grabbed my bag with the electronics in it I broke down and told him of my wifes passing and that I was going to try and recover any info I could off of them. This complete stranger then offered to make a few phone calls to see if he could help me. This truly caring person was David Brodie, vice president, Western Canada of Citizen Optimum. He was from Vancouver and yet he was out in the middle of this disaster helping people unload their few remaining clothes to be washed for free by TIDE.Within two days I received a call from Mr Brodie to take all my electronics into Future Shop in Shawnessy, Calgary, and they would see what they could recover. Please remember that these devices held all of our recent and last pictures, music and memories. He asked me to speak to Rob Kean, general manager for the Shawville Blvd store, When I went in Rob greeted me like an old friend and his IT wiz Andy said that they would do what they could to retrieve whatever info they could. Remember these devices had been sitting in flood waters for more than two weeks. From here my thanks go out to countless people that I have never met but their assistance has made a difference in both my and my children’s lives, three great sons, two and hopefully three great dauthers in law,and two plus three more on the way grandchildren. Larry Shulman@memofix.com, [email protected], and all the great people at FUTURE SHOP. On Jul 30 I got a call from Rob Kean saying that they had retrieved some of my lost data. I must say that I was a compleat puddle (my boys description of how I break down) when I went into the store and not only had they retrieved all the info from my old computer but also downloaded all the info onto a brand new laptop, complete with an emergency backup drive, a brand new ipod 5, I’m still trying to figure out how to run these, headphones, sony speaker system and A large part of my memories to share with my grandchildren. To all these people who have helped pull me out of my despair, THANK YOU. I think all of you must have seen the last piece of art my wife bought. “Kindness changes everything” I am going to try and attach it to this email but if it doesn’t work please email me and I will see if I can rectify this.

I know that there are still some prople trying to retrieve our last phots off of my wifes Iphone but even if you don’t, you are still part of Chrissy’s angels.

Thanks to all is not enough

The puddle man

Rick Ellis

The Challenge of Being Unique

November 27, 2025

Today’s blog features a guest post from Andrew Gotshal, one of the original founders of Memofix. – David Foster

Occasionally, when meeting with manufacturer partners or corporate executives, I’m asked what makes Memofix different in the marketplace. What sets us apart from other technical services organizations? What unique advantage or value do we provide to customers?

It’s easy for us to list all the important stuff that OEMs and customers want to hear. With over 25 years of experience we have a proven track record. The majority of our business comes from returning clients and word of mouth referrals, demonstrating our commitment to customer satisfaction and quality. We regularly pass performance tests and service level agreement metrics with our manufacturers; which means we deliver on our depot warranty commitments. Our technical expertise allows us to tackle tough problems and provide complete solutions. But most competitors who are focused on customer responsiveness and quality can provide those same attributes. So why are we different?

Our company is a family of individuals from different backgrounds and unified by one important characteristic – we’re Geeks. Capital “G” Geeks who want to understand the technology that we are working on, to figure out why a problem is occurring, how do we fix it and can we make recommendations to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Customers who throw us unique challenges tell us that they like our thought process. Instead of jumping to a conclusion we start running through the various scenarios that could result in the reported problem. Then we start our testing process to eliminate one or the other and focus on the root cause. Think of us as the child who takes apart the family computer so we can figure out how it works. Except when we put it back together again, we’ve made a few improvements and it runs a lot better.

Memofix loves storage technology, it runs in our blood. That’s not to say we are singularly focused – we are after all one of the largest national providers of depot services for a leading notebook OEM. But in the same way that you have a fondness for that first person you dated seriously, we look back on our start as the repair centre for the first Seagate drives that entered the Canadian market. This has led to our investment in specialized equipment to analyze and recertify hard drives. Because we have some of the brightest technicians in Canada we are one of a select group in North America that can repair hard disks and complex tape backup technology. Our membership in the Technical Services Consortium (www.tsc-ww.com) gives us global access to service expertise, parts and process improvement. After almost 30 years in this industry we continue to look for ways to improve our capabilities and provide more value to our business partners and customers.

We have tackled some unique challenges for our customers and the ones that we are proudest of generally were not the most profitable but they appealed to our Geek side. Here are some examples:

A clinic in Haiti relied on their 20 year old X-Ray machine to provide badly needed medical care. When the hard disk started to malfunction they searched extensively for a solution because replacement was not an option. We were able to supply the parts needed from our spares (largest spare parts inventory in Canada), recover the data and earn a big thank-you from the medical staff.
Customers regularly come to us with specialized production equipment that is decades old, with a similarly aged hard disk as an important component. In almost every case we have the parts and the technical expertise to keep this equipment running, including a 3.2MB hard disk that we provided to a data recovery customer just last week.
Where a replacement drive is not available for an older system, we have been successful in using newer drives and reducing the capacity so that it will be accepted by the legacy operating system or application (known as destroking). In some cases our technicians will also need to reconfigure the firmware on the drive, an important skill for us and rarely found outside OEM organizations.
During the recent hard disk shortage, caused by flooding in the Philippines, several OEMs approached us to leverage our expertise in firmware re-configuration, in an effort to use alternative drives for computers that had been designed for specific models and brands of hard drives.
We have been able to provide feedback to our OEM partners on their testing process, helping them to understand that perfectly good drives were failing due to their audit software. The result for our manufacturer partner was a higher yield and lower replacement costs.
Several retail chains rely on us to wipe personal data from storage devices returned by their customers. Wiping Xbox hard drives and flash drives presents a unique challenge because the operating system is embedded with the consumer data. Our technicians were able to create an algorithm which would detect where the OS is located on the HDD or flash drive. This meant wiping all data up to the OS, recognize where the OS is and leave it intact, and start removing consumer data immediately after.

Another important element of our uniqueness is attitude. We are never more important than the customer’s we serve. We customize programs to accommodate the customer’s process branding, financial models, and security. Manufacturers come to Memofix in order to reduce their costs and we approach each new project with that objective in mind, including pricing our services based on the OEM realizing those financial savings. We are willing to share the risk and create a partnership versus simply being a supplier.

The challenge of being unique comes from constant re-evaluation of what’s important for your partners and clients, and how we adapt to meet those changing needs. To be relevant to the marketplace you have to stay focused on the customer and not your competitors. You have to resist the urge to concentrate on revenue and expense reduction, and instead invest in skills, people, technology and process in order to be successful through long-term relationships. We try to meet that challenge every day and so far our customers are telling us that we’re doing OK.

Andrew Gotshal

Founder, Memofix

Helium Hard Drives?

October 1, 2026

Better not leave your hard drive just lying around, or it may just float away. Or at least that may be the case after 2013, when at least one hard drive manufacture, Hitachi Global Storage (now owned by Western Digital) has plans to start filling hard drives with helium.

http://www.hgst.com/press-room/2012/hgst-announces-radically-new-helium-filled-hard-disk-drive-platform

We all know helium as that “lighter than air” gas that has been used to fill and float party balloons for years. But due to it’s lighter then air composition, operating in a helium environment also allows mechanical devices like motors, to spin with less effort, produce less air turbulence, and to operate with less heat and noise. Hard drive manufactures have known of these advantages for years but the problem was keeping the helium from escaping the sealed internal chamber of a hard disk drive. Now that a solution has been found, it will be possible to install more disks on the same motor by spacing them even closer together. Presently, 5 disks can be used in a normal air filled hard drive. Using a sealed helium environment will allow 7 disks for a maximum capacity of 5.6 TB in a single hard drive! WOW!

Helium is harvested as a bi-product of natural gas production and Texas has some of the highest concentrations in the world but the demand continues to outstrip supply. Helium is mainly used in the medical industry to cool MRI machines, and in cryogenics, arc welding and wafer fabrication. It is still unclear how the hard drive industries requirements could effect this shortage but it will no doubt help drive up the cost of hard drives should it become common place.

As for data recovery, it could be a tough barrier to overcome. Assuming that the process used to seal in the helium is a one time affair it may not be possible to reload the hard drive with helium. Consequently we may not be able to replace damaged heads or open the sealed disk chamber in any way … or perhaps we will need to operate in a helium filled clean room .. I can hear the recovery techs speaking in high pitched chipmunk-like voices now … 🙂 .. is that you Alvin?