Irony and Perspective
Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2017 3:06 pm
One of the hardest things to convey to clients is that flash and solid state aren't usually faster or easier to recover than traditional hard drives.
Got a Seagate 2TB (ST2000DM001) with 4 heads, 1 of which would only read within the first 1% of the drive and gradually read less and less until it doesn't read any sectors at all shortly after that. But, with a head change, the full recovery of 700GB of data is done the next day with only 8 unread sectors on the full drive...none of which affect the data.
Got an Apple Samsung 256GB SSD with firmware issues and bad blocks. It takes about 2 days to image with 1-2GB of unreadable sectors, which means that we will need to take some extra time to do a full file system scan and the file system recovery will not be 100%.
Meanwhile, a 128GB USB thumb drive can take 1 day to get all the NAND chips and channels dumped, another day or two to calculate bad blocks with ECC, a few weeks to re-read the bad blocks and another few days to figure out how to merge the dumps and reconstruct the file system to rarely get a perfect file system recovery.
Clients tend to be baffled when they find that we charge the same rate for a chip off thumb drive recovery as we charge for hard drive head changes, when in reality, we should be charging more for thumb drive recoveries than we do for hard drives, based on the amount of time, resources and knowledge needed to recover the files.
What are your thoughts?
Got a Seagate 2TB (ST2000DM001) with 4 heads, 1 of which would only read within the first 1% of the drive and gradually read less and less until it doesn't read any sectors at all shortly after that. But, with a head change, the full recovery of 700GB of data is done the next day with only 8 unread sectors on the full drive...none of which affect the data.
Got an Apple Samsung 256GB SSD with firmware issues and bad blocks. It takes about 2 days to image with 1-2GB of unreadable sectors, which means that we will need to take some extra time to do a full file system scan and the file system recovery will not be 100%.
Meanwhile, a 128GB USB thumb drive can take 1 day to get all the NAND chips and channels dumped, another day or two to calculate bad blocks with ECC, a few weeks to re-read the bad blocks and another few days to figure out how to merge the dumps and reconstruct the file system to rarely get a perfect file system recovery.
Clients tend to be baffled when they find that we charge the same rate for a chip off thumb drive recovery as we charge for hard drive head changes, when in reality, we should be charging more for thumb drive recoveries than we do for hard drives, based on the amount of time, resources and knowledge needed to recover the files.
What are your thoughts?