hard drive experts Archives - Memofix's Data Recovery Blog

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

Let’s Get Green($): Redeploying old Hard Drives

September 17, 2026

This blog regularly focuses on the issues around data recovery and important considerations in maintaining your storage devices. But today I’d like to highlight an interesting service from Memofix through a guest post by our CEO, Chris Rathgeber. – David Foster

Memofix has more than two decades of experience in providing warranty depot service for technology manufacturers, computer resellers and businesses of all size. We provide solutions for a variety of devices but we have a particular focus and passion for all things related to storage. This has allowed us to build some unique customer programs that reduce risk and recover value for assets that have been deemed obsolete.

Hard drive shipments world-wide continue to increase with some 300 million delivered in the first half of 2012 (IHS.com). IT managers are replacing thousands of hard drives each month across Canada and we deal with the asset disposition process for a significant amount, either directly or through our partnerships with manufacturers or resellers. They may be upgrading to newer technologies, like SSD, or adding capacity or simply reducing the number of storage devices by relying on cloud based solution providers. These IT refresh or upgrade projects end up displacing an equal or greater amount older storage devices.

All IT managers should be exploring the possible trade-in value for any storage devices that are replaced in their environment. Many can be sold to other companies who are increasing storage capacity in a network environment that is standardized on older technology. Hard disks and tape drives, once audited and refurbished, can be sold as service spares to a wide variety of customers. Some may have more value to be broken down into key components and used as spare parts. Our team has been able to find customers for older hard disks of all capacities, tape drives, network drive enclosures, tape libraries, auto-loaders and other storage related components.

The most critical issue for any customer, when considering the re-marketing of hard drives from their facility, will be data security. There is always a concern that one of their hard disks will be resold with information that can be accessed by a potential future buyer. We believe that Memofix delivers a level of security that customer can rely on, that no data can be retrieved and they can extract full value for the re-marketed device. In the 25 years that we have been delivering data recovery solutions, hard drive repairs and data destruction services we have never had a single incident of a data breech. The manufacturing leaders in storage technology rely on us for this level of security as do some of the largest IT departments in Canada. Once devices have gone through our audit and data wipe process, they can be re-marketed and the recovery value can underwrite the replacement units or future operational costs.

We’re a bit obsessive about the details when we take on an asset disposition project for our clients. We establish a secure chain of custody that matches our customer’s need for security. All assets are received and detailed reports are created that allow us to track each asset through our various phases of audit, test, data wipe, refurbishing, packaging and ultimate payment to the client. These reports account for every asset and ensure that they can be removed from the customer’s accounting application. We utilize our data recovery division to random test devices during the data wipe process to guarantee that our procedures are working as expected. Approximately 25% of drives cannot be wiped effectively because the device does not function properly. These are degaussed and shredded to endure data security standards are met.

Memofix is known as a quality supplier of refurbished storage with all products backed by warranties that are best in the industry. A hard drive with a single bad sector will fail our testing process and will not be resold. This level of quality means we demand premium prices for our refurbished inventory which results in higher trade-in values paid to our asset disposition customers. All hardware that fails while in testing, or that has no re-marketing value, is recycled responsibly meeting strict Canadian ewaste guidelines.

We regularly manage the physical destruction of thousands of hard drives as directed by our customers despite our knowledge that many have value in the re-marketing and service channel. Some companies have no appetite for risk and will remove all storage devices for shredding and recycling and we follow instructions accordingly. But we will provide an analysis of the potential trade-in value of all devices so the client can weigh the benefits of pursuing that option. For several customers their confidence in our secure processing has resulted in valuable recovery dollars flowing back into their IT operations.

Please consider partnering with Memofix as a key supplier for asset disposition services focused on storage technology. Whether your project is large or small, or you deal with us directly or through a trusted computer reseller, we can provide data wipe solutions and re-marketing programs that give you peace of mind for your retired assets along with funds for extending your IT budget.

Chris Rathgeber, CEO Memofix

DataTalk with David Foster

January 6, 2026

Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The beginning of a blog …

As this will be my 1st ever blog and my 1st entry, let me start by introducing myself and then providing a brief overview of what this blog will be about.

My name is David Foster and I’m in charge of the Memofix Data Recovery Lab. I’ve been in the data recovery business for over 20 years. In the late 1980s I started a company that repaired hard drives. But within 7 years as hard drives were becoming disposable items, we sold the business and I thought my hard learned skills may never be put to use again. But of course the real value was now in the data which was only accessible if the drive could be resurrected and I soon started as a data recovery technician at a small data recovery company in Toronto. These were the early days of data recovery companies and we “wrote the book” on data recovery in many ways. With an initial team of 10 employees this company grew very quickly and was soon considered the most technically capable data recovery company in the world. Along the way I became the VP of Lab Operations and we opened 7 fully functional data recovery labs including labs in Canada, the U.S. and the Netherlands. As all good things do, it came to an end when the company was bought by a large hard drive manufacturer.

About a year after that I found my way to a warm new home here at Memofix and have gotten myself nicely settled in. Memofix is a fantastic storage centric company managed by real people with real integrity and I have been tasked to revamp the data recovery division into a real force. Memofix has been doing data recovery for quite some time now, but has largely provided it as a service to their existing client base as a result of client requests. But now we are launching a new phase of data recovery services aimed at all of Canada. Our goal is to provide superior data recovery services at reasonable prices with outstanding customer service for all types of media and operating systems. I am extremely excited to be able to take my vision of what a superb quality service offering should be and mold Memofix Data Recovery Services into just such an elite service.

Over the next months and years you will see some big changes at Memofix and many you won’t. I’m sure I will use this blog to boast about many of them. But besides the opportunity to promote Memofix, I really hope to use this blog to educate folks in all areas of data recovery. I hope to explain some of the techniques we use, discuss operating systems and hard drives, give advise on do it yourself techniques, maybe gossip a little about industry players, just about anything to do with computers and data and storage and of course hard drives. Perhaps you have a topic or question you would like answered. My email is [email protected] and I welcome your feedback.