Hard drives are opened only under clean-room conditions. A single particle of dust between head and platter can scratch the surface and destroy data for good. Head swaps, platter transplants and work on helium drives are done there and nowhere else.
Our laboratory
We have been recovering data from failed storage in Berlin since 2007. A large part of our work is cases for which no ready-made procedure exists yet.
Clean room
Tools
To image damaged drives we use professional hardware systems that read unstable heads and bad areas gently: short read cycles, control of individual heads, access to the firmware service area. For SSDs and flash we add a soldering station, NAND programmers and software that rebuilds the controller's logic.
Donor stock
For a head swap the donor must match the failed drive – model, firmware revision, number of heads, often the factory as well. We keep a large stock of drives and boards for this; almost all parts come from it. That means we start at once instead of waiting for parts.
Research
Manufacturers release new drive families every year, with new firmware, encryption and recording methods (SMR, helium). For models no tool supports yet, we develop the procedure ourselves. The same applies to devices with soldered-on storage and proprietary connectors.
Qualifications
Our engineers have worked in data recovery for many years and hold manufacturer certifications, including from Seagate and Toshiba. For businesses we offer a GDPR data processing agreement.
From our archive
Drive failed?
Do not power it on again. Diagnosis from €90 net, then a fixed price.