Expert HDD and SSD Data Recovery
Storage devices come in all shapes and sizes. In this case, we have received the largest laptop we have ever seen and also the smallest. In the case of the large Acer laptop it had two hard disk drives (HDDs) installed which were in a RAID 0 configuration.
RAID-0 (Striped) Data Recovery
RAID 0 spreads data across two (or more) storage devices. This makes successful recovery much more complicated; it is necessary to make a full recovery of all the data on each hard disk drive, and the emulate the RAID controller to ‘merge’ the data back together to allow recovery of the files.
Data on HDDs in RAID 0 can easily be made unrecoverable if new data is written to either one of the devices. As such it is very important to ensure that the devices are accessed in a read-only mode and a full clone of each HDD is take before attempts are made to emulate the RAID controller. Consequently, DIY data recovery attempts are not recommended on RAID systems.
SSD Data Recovery
Next was the data recovery of a solid state disk (SSD) from an Apple MacBook Air. This laptop had suffered liquid damage to the motherboard and the SSD. With the correct replacement of components on the SSD it was possible to make a full recovery of the data.
Data recovery from SSDs is complex. In the most serious cases it can involve removal of the flash NAND chips on the printed circuit board (PCB). It is then necessary to emulate the processor chip using specialist hardware.
CDR – Manchester Data Recovery Services – offers a full range of data recovery services for hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state disks (SSDs).