If you’re an everyday PC or Mac user, the harddrive where you save your files every day might seem a little mysterious. If you don’t understand how a harddrive works, it can make it even more frustrating when a harddrive crash whisks your data away to never-never land. Understanding how a hard disk works can really help you navigate the process of harddrive data recovery, and help you stay sane in the process.
A hard disk drive, or HDD, is the kind of storage you probably use every day on your laptop or desktop. Solid state drive (SSD) are becoming competitive when speed or durability are the main priority (for instance, MP3 players and iPhones), but HDDs will stay on top in data storage technology for a while. That means there will demand for harddrive data recovery for a long time to come, since the way a harddrive is designed makes it vulnerable to failure in a lot of different ways.
Harddrives aren’t as fragile as they used to be, but the way they’re built means they are vulnerable to failure. A harddisk is mainly made up of a spinning demagnetized disk, with a very thin layer of magnetic metals stuck to it. A read/write head at the end of a moving arm, kind of like the tonearm of a record player, moves as the disk spins extremely fast and magnetizes or demagnetizes tiny spots on this dust to represent digital data. The same moving head reads and writes data. With this much speed and precision involved, you can imagine how easy it is for delicate moving parts getting together in the worst way, leading to the need to use harddrive data recovery.
If the read/write head comes into contact with the spinning disk surface – say, if you drop the thing at the wrong moment – it doesn’t just destroy the little bit of data directly impacted, but damages the relatively delicate head itself, making all of your data invisible. Even worse could be if the harddrive ended up in water, being hooked to an ungrounded power source during a surge or lightning strike, or even covered in smoke and heat during a fire in your home or office. Believe it or not, harddrive data recovery services can probably help you in almost any of these scenarios.
But that’s just the raw data. Hard drive problems can also occur inside the programming or microchips that control the hard drive, such as the PCB circuit board, or even in the software from your operating system that interfaces between your hard drive and the rest of your system. Because so many different things might be going on when you suddenly can’t find the data you need, you’re probably best off finding a trusted professional service to help with your ‘harddrive data recovery’ (http://www.dtidata.com/hard-drive-recovery).