External Hard Drive Recovery

In the past five years, the price of data storage, from USB keys to RAID, SSD Cards to external hard drives, has come down markedly. The average user, in fact, has more gigabytes of capacity than ever before. And it is despite this that the need for external hard drive data recovery services is greater than ever. It sounds like an idea that goes against proper logic.

After all, wouldn't the popularity of portable hard disk drives, combined with their low dollar per gigabyte costs, make external hard drive recovery services a thing of the past?

Reasons Why External Hard Drive Data Recovery Is Necessary

Technically, yes: if users were leveraging the power of USB and eSATA external drives to ensure their backups were scheduled and consistent. But surprise, surprise, not only the casual user, but the professional often fails to have a backup plan. Or if they do use a portable disk drive for backup, they typically don't "backup the backup". Backup is especially necessary because external hard drives can be dangerous for a few important reasons:

The Bricked-Drive Syndrome - The key issue with many portable storage drives, especially those with the larger, 3.5 inch footprint, is that they obey gravity. Sounds ridiculous, yes, but the average external hard drive recovery job is necessary because of one reason: it's been dropped. And because it's a mechanical device with complex machinery running extremely hot and fast, it's open to severe damage when dropped, even from as little as three feet. One drop, and your external HDD is a brick. Useless for data storage, and just about anything, frankly.
Medium Term Wear - Despite the sleek designs and often ultra-portable size, it's important to remember that most portable storage drives are still set up based on the classic head and platter system. Meaning that when they are plugged in, they are spinning at 5000 to 7200 RPM (professional level drives perhaps even more). This generates heat, of course, and wear over a longer period. The fact remains that this is a mechanical device, and will inevitably fail. Just because you can plug it in to 30 different systems in a day doesn't change this point at all.
Unshielded Electronics - A hard drive inside of your desktop PC is naturally shielded by its case. It can run for one to potentially ten years without any problems. By their very nature, desktop PCs stay where they are, and outside of flood or fire, don't really face much exposure to the elements. This is where a laptop or external hard drive differs markedly. Being portable, these devices are far more subject to damage by dirt, oils, water, and gravity.

Water is a particularly harsh killer of laptops and portable drives, and because the wiring is typically detachable, it can short the drive if not properly plugged in.

The best way to treat external hard drives (and laptops or any other portable data storage product) is with kid gloves. Buying an extra external hard drive that is used rarely and only to backup your PC, laptop and portable devices is a great idea as well. But until these drives become completely invincible (read as: never), external hard drive recovery services will always be necessary.

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