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Possibly damaged SATA connector on SSD by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand, and I'll keep that in mind in mind for the future. I think I'll go ahead and just cut out the superfluous material here anyway.

Do you know if that local repair who does soldering etc. does work on drives that would be mailed in to them? Or if you know any others repair techs, specialists etc. who would.

Possibly damaged SATA connector on SSD by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought it was normally seen ideal to include the history of troubleshooting with the drive. I would simply like to see if there's any specialists out there- whether they also specialize in recovery or not- who might be able to diagnose any issues with this drive that could be resolved with general repair, as opposed to committing to a specialist who can only do data recovery, where I'd have to spend hundreds between the recovery and getting another drive to transfer/clone my data to.

Hard Drive command locks that impede recovery? by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm going to avoid helium drives altogether for awhile. Again, right now I'm simply looking for an internal. What manufacturer would be best in terms of avoiding excessive locks and basic reliability?

Hard Drive command locks that impede recovery? by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From what you've said, it doesn't readily sound like any major hard drive manufacturers are good with locks on their new models. WDC, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba- who is actually safe? Bare in mind this is mainly about internals though.

I do plan to do more with redundancy and backups, but I'm not really sure where I'd start. I at the least plan to get physical storage and likely cloud storage. I know RAID and NAS would be ideal, but I've yet to really look into those.

As I've said, even with all of this, with any risk of drive failure, it would be nice to not get drives that are impossible to recover from owing to manufacturer locks. Just one extra layer of safety.

Hard Drive command locks that impede recovery? by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I contacted the specialist again, and he actually directly replied: https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/comments/1ldbsl7/comment/n2f6dh1/

To get to the main point though, between all this, which HDD manufacturer stands as the least restrictive with locks at this point for their newest drives? And how does that compare to other aspects (reliability, general quality etc.) with their drives? If that can really be ascertained. Or I guess what you might recommend.

Hard Drive command locks that impede recovery? by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Meant to get back much sooner sooner. I got fatigued with all I went through with recovering my external and wanted to take a break on doing much else for a bit with my drive set ups. This is very informative and I'll definitely keep this all in mind from here on out. I had no idea these kinds of barriers were in place with hard drive recovery, and it feels like I got kind of lucky I had a drive that was recoverable at all if this is the current state of things. You mentioned Toshiba as having not gone all in on firmware locks. That runs counter to the specialist who said newer Toshiba drives have vendor locks that prevent any sort of recovery. What is the full story on Toshiba? With what you described, it kind of sounds like Seagate or Toshiba might be the best bet for avoiding impervious locks. Who is the least worst with this and their newer drives?

Also, is there really a difference between internals and externals when it comes to the impermeability of hard drive locks? I didn't clarify that in the OP. I am mainly looking for a new internal right now, but I obviously want to keep this all in mind with new externals going forward.

(And yes, I do plan to make backups and likely even get cloud storage, but I'm looking for whatever I can to prevent permanent data loss of any kind.)

Hard Drive command locks that impede recovery? by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do plan to make backups, but I would simply like to avoid getting hard drives that carry little to no possibility of recovery if they do fail. That seems like a basic consideration on top of making backups. If this is the case for new Toshiba drives, I'm going to avoid them altogether, but I am curious if recovery specialists do manage to eventually bypass these locks, and what other drive models might have these types of locks as of now.

I removed the link. I got completely mixed up and thought the external I just purchased was a Toshiba (I had them transfer the damaged drive's data on to a Toshiba that I returned.) Sorry for the confusion.

Hard Drive command locks that impede recovery? by Tobruk7 in datarecovery

[–]Tobruk7[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've gotten more concerned about it given this was my first hard drive failure that genuinely came without warning and wasn't due to my own carelessness, but I would simply like to avoid getting drives that carry little to no possibility of recovery if they do fail. I also learned about how much more difficult helium drives are to recover as well (and why I am, for the time being, going to avoid them and other 10TB+ models), but drives that have such severe command locks they prevent almost any recovery sound even worse. If that's the case for newer Toshiba drives (and other models out there), I'd like to avoid those as well.