Will we ever see data centres where spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) have been replaced by flash hard drives (SSDs) ?

The answer is probably, but according to this news article it won’t be for time yet. The problem is multi faceted, but much of the big issue revolves around the cost of producing SSD flash media when compared against the same process for HDD manufacture. Hard drives of the HDD variety have been around a long time and they are mechanical devices that rotate – this means that to rotate them they have to have a constant power supply which keeps them spinning at exactly the correct speed. For data centres that have many thousands of hard disks this is a big deal as the costs of keeping the HDDs spinning is considerable. Then there is the heat issue too – thousands of rotating HDDs produce a lot of heat that has to dissipated – usually an elaborate air conditioning system is used to effectively transport the generated heat away from the the hard drives. This means more money is spent.

Helium hard drives have been developed that produced less heat and are able to store more and these are getting into data centres but their cost is higher than standard HDDs. SSDs are also made from rare earth materials so there is a finite supply which keeps the price high.

Of all the varying types of data recovery, the toughest is probably RAID data recovery, particularly RAID 5 data recovery. (For an explanation of RAID – visit the Wikipedia link here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID).

RAID 5 segments files and folders and writes their contents across all the hard drives in the RAID set. This makes recovering the data from broken RAID servers a complex task.

The thing with RAID is, that unlike conventional hard drive recovery services that recover the data from a single hard drive, RAID data recovery involves recovering data from all the hard drives present within a RAID set, and then piecing this data back together in order to form coherent files and folders. Files and folders are not stored as whole files on RAID 5 hard drives, instead the files and folders are split between all the hard disks in the RAID array. So for example, let’s take a 5 disk RAID 5 array, a typical file will be split into small pieces are stored across all the hard drives. Therefore should catastrophe strike, it is necessary to recover the data from all the hard drives in order to perform an effective RAID data recovery. RAID recovery is a tough business and there few companies that can actually provide a decent data recovery from RAID disks. An example company is http://www.emergency-raid-datarecovery.com/, who regularly recover data from all sorts of broken RAID equipment and are successful in RAID data recovery from all types of server whether it be Dell, HP, IBM or a custom built RAID system.

Many Network Attached Storage (or NAS for short) hard disks also use RAID and many NAS hard drives are found both in home and office environments. NAS RAID data recovery is also a highly specialist area and once again, because many NAS storage devices use RAID configurations, it’s necessary to find a decent firm that offer a NAS hard drive recovery service as well as have RAID expertise.

Storing data on a hard drive may appear quite complex to the normal person. Through a chain of comparisons, photos and simple to comprehend technical terms, I’ll describe just what a hard drive is, the specialized jargon associated with the parts of the hard drive and what occurs when data is saved to that hard drive.

Data recovery on Western Digital hard drives (http://www.wdc.com) often have a turnaround time of anywhere between seven days to a month (see http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/western-digital-data-recovery/). The fact that they frequently ask that you mail in your device limits the quickest turnaround time accessible. Recovery applications can work (if it works) in less than thirty minutes from download to recovery. Many of the businesses that advertise quick turnaround rates for hands on data recovery are still talking about days, not minutes.

A data recovery service that doesn’t deliver the files you desire back will be nothing but time squandered. Any quality brand of hard disk (eg. Western Digital or Maxtor) recovery program will do what it says it will. In case you go through the jobs of getting and installing the application and end up with nothing, it may be the instance you have to spend a lot more money to buy a data recovery service.

In the event your PC is not booting, you can try booting it in safe mode and try to disable or uninstall any lately installed applications that may have caused the problem. You can even try to see if running a System Restore solves the situation, but be careful as this will lose all the data on the hard drive.

When you’re successful with the Western Digital hard drive data recovery, then you will want to consider other data back-up alternatives. For personal computers, you can use an external hard drive or another small storage item. Office computers on a network will take advantage of a distant recovery data facility that can back-up all the files on their network and keep all the changes upgraded. It Is a paid service, but one well worth the cost. This way, you’ll be able to avoid needing to manage another close call with data loss.

So it seems that Ebay is the latest site in a long line of high profile web sites of well know companies to by hit by a hacker attack.

From memory, we’ve recently had Sony and it’s PlayStation network as well as several online gaming forums being attacked. In my opinion this just shows how vulnerable on line data is. If you use cloud storage for example, you’ll know that all you need to login to your user account is a username and a password. Now a username can be something like your email address and how secure is your password really? Is it a long complex string that mixes alphabetic, numeric and other characters like ‘LFKGjsdjg3293@£$sdhfj’ for example, or is it something like ‘pencil’ ?

There are applications called brute force programs (see Wikipedia link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking) that will continually bombard web site pages where login details are added in an attempt to gain access to the system. A brute force program is able to attempt an unlimited amount of combinations in order to gain access. It all takes time, but brute force programs can try thousands of combinations a second. Scary isn’t it?

One of the most common passwords is the simple string ‘123456’. People will choose obvious passwords because they are easy to remember, but easy to remember passwords are also easy to break. 123456 became so popular and easy to break that in 2011 Microsoft banned its users using it as a password. So if you do use online services like cloud storage or ebay – make sure your passwords are secure and difficult break.

QNAP NAS Repair and Recovery

QNAP NAS and RAID set-ups are software and hardware systems that are capable of reading or writing data to and from numerous hard drives, in a modern system various levels of RAID systems may be nested or joined to provide more data redundancy & integrity or for more read/write speed, The level of a QNAP NAS RAID is always indicated using a number from 0-6 for instance RAID 0 or RAID 1 an instance of a nested RAID would be RAID 1+0 the 1 means a RAID 1 and the 0 means a RAID 0. QNAP NAS repair and file / folder recovery is central to UK services.

QNAP Hard Drive Recovery

A QNAP NAS RAID uses striping to offer fault tolerance in the event of disk failure also it supplies a better read speed, fault-tolerance is achieved through having data stored across the hard drives but with parity data stored as well, if a drive breaks the lost data may be rebuilt using the parity data stored on the other drives. QNAP NAS set-ups optimise storage space provided by RAID’s as there are no big quantities of data on a single drive, a RAID 5 has certain benefits.
QNAP NAS Benefits :
1. Optimise Storage use
2. Protection against disk drive failure
3. Quick read speed

If the data that is used by your company isn’t altered on a regular basis but is obtained and read by numerous systems, a RAID 5 is the perfect option. Yet the write speed is decreased in comparing with other NAS’s due to the fact that it must write the parity at the same time as the authentic files, although it has a fast read speed making it ideal for large quantities of users needing to get the data all at one time, additionally you will need to be aware of some possible failures that can occur.

QNAP NAS Data Recovery

QNAP NAS repair and recovery specialists RAID and Server Data Recovery (http://raid-and-server-data-recovery.com/nas-data-recovery/qnap-nas-data-recovery/ provide QNAP repair and recovery services in the UK. Additionally as a repair of QNAP NAS, isn’t a back-up solution it offers a definite level of protection against one drive breaking, if one drive does fail the system enters critical mode where the read and write speed is significantly slowed down, the failed drive must be replaced as quickly as possible because when the drive isn’t changed and another breaks the system will be unable to reconstruct itself and you’d be looking at a significant price to regain some of the data.

A QNAP repair has some integrated data recovery redundancy defence and is capable of fast read speeds if configured by Raid and server data recovery, it is best suited for a business which depends on quick access to data to be successful. Once a NAS has been set up you will notice a significant difference in the read speed of your system.

I’ve been supporting RAID and servers for longer than I care to remember… I think the earliest server (excluding ICL mainframes) that I worked on was an ICL Intel 486 system, back in something like 1992.

This was before Windows and as we know, things have moved on significantly since then. Servers were complicated beasts back then, now they’re even more complex. One thing that really annoys me is 1st/2nd line technical support staff who rather than admit they don’t know what they’re talking about will recommend the wrong course of action because they don’t know any different.

Here’s my response to an email from a customer of ours with a 7 disk RAID 5 server that has significant bad sector problems across several of the disk in the volume. The customer has been told by his tech support to rebuild the array and everything will work fine… WRONG, the rebuild will fail because of the bad sectors across multiple drives. This will cause a huge amount of irreversible data loss for the customer who is a professional video editor.

Hi <X>,

My colleague <Y> has just informed me you’ve been in touch after speaking to tech support regarding your RAID.

The rebuild procedure they suggest will unfortunately not complete successfully due to several of your hard drives having bad sectors issues. Rebuilding is an automated software task that relies on all the drives involved being free from bad sectors. Rebuilding is unable to cope with bad sectors – which are a physical problem. This is why drives with bad sectors have to be recovered using hardware rather than software. I wrote a blog post about this sometime ago, titled something like ‘5 things you mustn’t do if your RAID fails’. – take a look at all of it – especially the last point: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/raid-or-server-failure-the-top-5-things-to-avoid/

As you know, we’ve been doing this long enough to know what we’re talking about, so may I suggest two possible courses of action –

1. We complete the recovery as planned.

Or

2. We first clone all your hard drives (effectively copying them) before returning them to you so you can then try the rebuild. Us having cloned your hard drives means we can go back to the data and perform the recovery when the rebuild doesn’t work.

Rebuilds that are unsuccessful result in massive data loss across the entire RAID and are irreversible due to the old (good) data being overwritten by the new (corrupt) data. It’s one of the largest causes of data loss on any type of RAID 5 system, and we wish tech support companies would stop recommending it as they are assuming all the hard drives in the array are free from bad sectors (which is the reason your RAID fell over in the first place).

Please let us know how you’d like to proceed.

I’ve just emailed this to the customer and await their response.

Data Clinic Ltd, the well know UK hard drive repair and data recovery specialist has announced a new data recovery service for Microsoft Exchange Server.

Exchange keeps all its data in a large EDB file which can become easily corrupted by a server crash, RAID error, or software corruption. Remember as well that the most common cause of data loss – human error, can also result in EDB files being deleted.

Inside the EDB file are often many individual PST files – one for each user, the Data Clinic service is able to extract these from the EDB file and repair individual PST files where necessary.

On a RAID 5, if one drive fails then it is vital the broken drive is replaced with a new drive as quickly as possible. When one hard disk drive fails the system enters a critical state running in a mode often described by server manufacturers such as Dell and HP as ‘degraded’. The read & write rate is reduced significantly, nonetheless it’s still possible to read and write files and folders to and from the RAID 5.

Additionally, if another drive should fail before the 1st broken drive is swapped out the server will crash and you’ll need to speak to a UK recommended RAID and Server recovery specialist to bring the server back up online and recover the data. Remember that even though RAID 5 have an amount of fault tolerance, they are not a backup solution and are mostly designed for a business that depends on quick access to data to be successful. Once a RAID 5 has been put in place you will see a substantial difference in the read speed of your system.

I don’t know about you, but these days the family environment is a busy one when it comes to IT and computers. My eldest daughter has her own laptop and my youngest daughter has an IPad. They both have smartphones too. As well and texting and all the other things teenagers use their mobile phones for, they also take a lot of photographs that want to save.

Saving this data on the family iMac was fine – there was plenty os space and it was an easy thing to achieve but as time went by there was more and more data to store – more photos, more videos and now music too. Using the internet to search for an answer to my problem, my attention was drawn to Network Attached Storage, otherwise known as NAS. Basically these are devices that connect to the router in your house an allow anyone connected to that router to use them. Great I thought – I’ll get one of those !

So I did, everyone was happy. It came in a nice box with a link to Datlabs NAS Data Recovery Services, who I could call if I needed any technical assistance setting the NAS up and getting it working correctly. I just plugged it in, typed our password and it installed itself on our network. The first thing to do was to transfer all our photos, videos and music data from our family Mac onto the NAS. That was easy – a simple drag and drop operation saw that completed without any problems. There was a lot of data – some 50GB or so… How do teenagers make so much data?? All of which was of course, essential to them.

Anyway with that done I set about cleaning the Mac up and deleting files and folders. Another 30 minutes or so and this was completed. The first thug I noticed was the the machine began to run a lot quicker – which was a result I was very pleased with.

Next I took a look at the configuration of our new NAS device. It’s a 4 disk Linux based storage device that runs RAID 5. This means that the data it holds is spread across the whole 4 disks instead of one. That’s a bit odd I thought but after closer investigation I learned that this was infact a good thing. It allows one drive to fail and my data to still survive without being lost. RAID 5 also provide enhanced data read speeds too – something that was evident from the moment we began using our NAS file server concurrently. My daughters could watch their movies while I was able to stream music from it. This all worked fine – something that we could never do before on the Mac as it was just not quick enough.

So introducing a NAS RAID file server into our home environment has been a great success. Installing it was easy and I didn’t need to contact Datlabs for help in setting it up, I do think I’ll keep their link though just incase anything happens to the NAS that I can’t sort out myself.

As a contractor in the computer support industry I come into a lot of contact with servers and RAID arrays. In fact, my main job is looking after the data held on SAN servers and other form of Network Attached Storage. I work for companies and government institutions as a sort of freelance computer troubleshooter and mostly use IBM, Dell and HP server equipment. The Dell servers are typically Dell Poweredge series and the HP kit is mainly Proliant. Again the equipment is hooked up to a SAN data network.

Data redundancy is a big problem of mine, it’s what happens when I inherit old legacy systems that really should have been decommissioned years ago but because of budgetary constraints have continued to be used. I work on several HP Proliant and Dell SAN servers that I’d love to switch off and migrate the data onto something far more up to date like a Dell Blade or IBM X Server system. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any say in buying new equipment.

Older servers and computer equipment fails more regularly, it just does. It wears out, hard drive fail, memory goes bad and UPS’s fail. What greeted me when I came into work last Monday was a failed SAN server array – 12 disks running in a RAID 5 configuration with a hot spare. Analysis of the server logs showed that one of the hard drives had dropped out of the array on Saturday causing the hot spare to click in. This had seemingly worked fine – the hot spare should simply be ‘rebuilt’ back into the array, but instead the whole array had fallen over.

In the server room the SAN’s RAID BIOS reported that three of the hard drives had now dropped out from the array. Well, that would explain why the SAN server was no longer booting the array. What had caused the three drives to fail was at this point a mystery. The server in question was one that ran part of the council payroll so it was obviously important to get the SAN back up and running as soon as possible, but obviously this had to be done in a method that followed best practice. It became my task and no data could be lost in recovering the SAN either.

Now I’m good a IT and SAN server support I’ll admit but when I discover 2 of the 3 drives that had dropped from the array had mechanical faults, the problem was beyond my abilities. I used a data recovery company a few years back but they were no more. Searching online pointed me to a specialist SAN recovery company called RAID and Server Data Recovery, an online review or two told me they could be trusted and that they were recommended, so I called them.

I spoke to RAID and Server Data Recovery’s specialist SAN recovery team who confirmed what I thought already. Some of the drives had mechanical damage and would need clean room attention in order to progress the data recovery attempt. I got clearance for the costs from finance and loaded the SAN server into the car and drove it down to the recovery company.

Analysis showed 1 drive had a head crash while the other two had firmware issues. Firmware is code that runs the hard drive’s operating system. It can corrupt and when it does the hard drive fails. It seemed that this firmware problem was the cause of the SAN crashing and all that needed fixing was the firmware on the two failed drives. This was indeed the case and after the repairs to the hard disks were completed and the drives re-integrated back into the SAN RAID BIOS, the SAN came back online and the data was accessible again. Panic over. The data was fully restored which was the outcome everyone had wanted.