Toshiba Canvio Basics

Seagate Backup Plus Slim

ioSafe Solo G3 4TB

Our verdict

So, the files are properly gone? Ostensibly yes, the average or even intermediate computer user won’t be able to recover these files. However, the world of cybersecurity and indeed cybercrime is pretty mad, meaning it’s very tricky to actually make sure your data is gone for good. Almost impossible actually.

Of course, if the computer with the files is literally expendable, you could opt to physically destroy the drives. Luckily hard disk drives and SSDs can both be baptized in fire, so to speak. This is pretty much your only solution physically speaking, as some talented data recovery people can literally reconstruct cracked and snapped hard drive platters.

So, in the quite likely event that you don’t feel like setting fire to your PC, what are your options? In the advanced technological period in which we live, it’s worth being absolutely sure that your files are gone, especially confidential, personal stuff.

Luckily, PC-Doctor has a solution that passes muster both in terms of cyber security and user-friendliness, the PC-Doctor Service Center Drive Erase USB flash drive.

The drive allows you to skip the costly step of taking your drives to a technician for a professional erasure, allowing you to do it yourself, from the comfort of your own home, without sacrificing security or efficacy.

How does PC-Doctor securely erase your drives?

As mentioned earlier, PC-Doctor has passed some very stringent certifications for secure drive erasure. Most importantly, PC-Doctor is NIST 800-88r1 compliant, which is the current gold standard for media sanitation.

This certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) means that PC-Doctor has been verified as capable of erasing drives to the highest standards of cyber security. The official guidelines are extremely long and very comprehensive, so if you really want to know, you can read them here.

Anyway, what you need to know is that the PC-Doctor drive erasure USB stick will totally clean any type of drive, be it an HDD, SSD, SAS, or NVMe m.2. This means that the drives are returned to the same state they were when they left the factory - totally empty.

It might sound odd, but fully erasing drives is very tricky. This means that it's hard to be sure, as you can’t necessarily see everything via the file explorer.

OK then, but how can you be sure that PC-Doctor Drive Erase has completed its operation successfully? Well, a certificate verifying the erasure is created after the fact.

This certificate, provided in convenient PDF form, proves the extent of the drive erasure, even including a cryptographic fingerprint. Furthermore, it provides additional information too, for example:

The report also functions as a signable form for those using the PC-Doctor Drive Erase in a professional, enterprise scenario, allowing for proper accountability too.

How to use PC-Doctor Service Center Drive Erase

You may initially be apprehensive about inserting such a powerful data removal tool into your precious PC. However, the drive won’t brick your PC as soon as you plug it in, as there is a specific process.

That’s about it, for how to use PC-Doctor Drive Erase. For an easier breakdown and additional information, see our Q&A section below.

PC-Doctor FAQS

Here you’ll find some of the more common questions about drive erasure, and PC-Doctor specifically.

Will the PC-Doctor USB stick start as soon as I plug it in?

No. You have to go through a few menus first, so there’s no chance of accidentally erasing anything before you mean to.

What systems does PC-Doctor work on?

PC-Doctor runs on any x86-64 PC, including Windows or Linux PCs, and Intel-based Macs. 

What languages does PC-Doctor work in?

At time of writing, PC-Doctor runs in English, but can save report certificates in English, Danish, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish.

What type of drives can be erased by PC Doctor?

PC-Doctor currently works on HDDs, SSDs, ATA, NVMe, eMMC, and SAS drives.

What methods does PC-Doctor use for drive erasure?

Depending on the type of drive in question, different methods are more effective than others. PC-Doctor uses whichever method will result in the most complete erasure. A full list of methods can be found here.

How much does PC-Doctor cost? 

You can purchase a PC-Doctor Drive Erase USB stick from their website here for $59.99, or for rapid simultaneous deployment on multiple systems, you can also buy Drive Erase in packs of 3 for $149.99.

Additionally, there are no license fees or maximum uses. Once you buy the drive erasure stick from PC-Doctor you can use it an unlimited amount of times. This provides a preferable alternative to erasure software subscriptions, as once you invest in PC-Doctor, it’s yours to keep.

It can be a real headache, but we are here to help and let you know all that there is to know about USB 3 connectors.

We also provide a useful comparison guide to help you understand the differences between different types of USB cables, which will hopefully help you next time you need to go rummaging to find a specific type.

What Is USB 3.0?

USB 3.0 is the second-latest version of the Universal Serial Bus standard, or USB. The first USB was released many years ago in 2008. Still today, most new devices, computers, and technical gadgets support this standard.

Data Transfer Speeds

The USB 3.0 is often referred to as the SuperSpeed USB due to its superior performance to previous designs. It can transmit data at a maximum speed of 5 Gigabytes per second, or 5,120 Megabytes per second.

On average, it is believed that people would be transmitting up to 3,200 Megabytes per second.

Previous USB standards transmitted data considerably slower, with the USB 2.0 standard transferring data at 480 Megabytes per second, on a good day, and the USB 1.1 standard at its optimal performance could transfer data at a maximum of 12 Megabytes per second.

WIthin the USB 3.0 standard, there are three different designs, which transfer data at different speeds.

When they were initially released they were simply referred to as the 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 but they have since been renamed officially as the USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.

The 3.2, or USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, is the latest version of this family but it has now been replaced by the USB4 as the latest USB Standard. The USB 3.2 had a theoretical speed of 20 Gigabytes per second or 20,480 Megabytes per second.

This was an update from the USB 3.1 which transferred data at 10 Gigabytes per second or 10,240 Megabytes per second. In a world where everyone wants access to everything within moments, these speeds will continue to get even faster.

Hardware

Older USB cables, adapters, and devices work with all USB standard cables, the difference between these cables only lies in the speed at which they transfer data. Their hardware and fittings continue to remain the same.

In the picture above you can see the USB 3.0 Type A and Type B cables. These are explained below:

There are also micro versions of the above cables, they are often used for smartphones and portable devices. While the mini cables look similar, they are not compatible, similar to their regular-sized counterparts.

Cable lengths can vary with the maximum being 10 feet. The length of a cable will not impact the transfer speed, as mentioned earlier it will be the type of USB standard that you use that will influence the speed that the data transfers.

How To Identify USB 3.0 Cables

USB 3.0 specification recommends that a blue-colored cable or coating is used to distinguish these cables from previous USB standard cables.

While not all manufacturers adhere to these specifications, they may have nods of blue somewhere within the cable design, for example, the plug.

Final Thoughts

Since the first USB Standard was used on Windows 8, USB cables have developed greatly in how they can transfer data. As technology continues to evolve we can expect more USB standards to continue to be produced to adhere to the need for instant data in the world today.

But, part of being aware and educated about data privacy can often require the understanding of the relevant bits of hardware to understand how to truly protect ourselves.

Moreover, many people simply want to learn about a hard drive if they are making their own computer or are just interested.

Here’s our simple guide to what a hard drive is, read on to learn more about computers and data.

What Does A Hard Drive Do?

Put simply, a hard drive is a piece of hardware that is a physical and non-volatile form of storage.

Basically any file you create on your computer, any application storage, or information contained in your operating system is physically contained within the hard drive.

To understand how this works you need to understand the operation of the physical components.

A hard drive has something known as a platter, which is a large, thick, metal wheel that looks like a small CD.

Like a vinyl player, there is an arm above the platter which writes and reads all the information on your computer.

The platter rotates while the arm also moves in order to read this information at lightning quick speeds, this is often referred to as ‘processing power’.

Advantages Of A Hard Drive

Hard drives are pretty ideal pieces of hardware. Their physical function allows them to work at great speed and also makes them much more durable than certain bits of software.

Large amounts of data can be stored effectively within a hard drive and they remain fairly cheap in comparison to other physical components.

Disadvantages Of A Hard Drive

In a logistical sense, a hard drive can be at a disadvantage as they don’t write data sequentially.

An indexing system allows the arm to find data even though it is fragmented. This can take longer than if data was written sequentially.

As data is not written sequentially this can lead to issues further down the line when data can become fragmented thanks to the physical operation of the hard drive.

The physical nature of a hard drive can make them fairly durable when used properly. However, even minute physical damage can lead to incorrect operation.

Hard drives can often overheat when working too hard as the power they use can turn into heat.

This often occurs in laptops, as they are a portable device if you drop your laptop even a little while the hard drive platter is spinning this minute physical damage could cause some irreparable damage to the hard drive.

Moreover, all your data is physically stored on the hard drive, even after you are done with a computer.

In other words, you have to very carefully and purposefully dispose of a hard drive by physically wiping it through making the data unreadable.

Many people throw their computers away without knowing this, check out our article on how to dispose of a hard drive safely.

Final Thoughts

As you can see a hard drive is a complicated piece of physical hardware. There are other facets to a hard drive that can warrant explanation in a more in depth look at a computer’s workings.

However, to keep things simple, a hard drive can be explained as one of the main places where your data is stored within your physical computer.

Damaging a hard drive can be irreparable; damaging a hard drive can often be the only way to wipe your data from a computer.

Without doing so, If someone wanted to, they could take the hard drive and attempt to retrieve whatever information they wanted.

It certainly isn’t unheard of for hackers to go to the junkyard and see what they can claim from people’s hard drives which haven’t been disposed of properly.

So here’s a guide on how to dispose of a hard drive, without compromising any of your personal data.

Safety note

Make sure you have protective gloves, and protective eyewear ready. And also find a place where you can safely destroy your drive, where you will be able to gather all materials. You don't want to leave parts laying around.

Finally, take the appropriate amount of care to safely dispose of your hard drive.

Safely destroy a hard drive (and your data)

Final Thoughts

Once your circuit board is destroyed and platter scratched to high heaven, your data is safe.

We recommend recycling as much of any wider computer as you can, this also ensures it isn’t going to the dump.

Without following these steps your personal data stored on the hard drive is up for grabs in the junkyard - destroy both the platter and the circuit board for success.

Read on to learn all you need to know about wiping a hard drive and the steps you need to take to make sure that this task is carried out effectively.

Final Thoughts

Knowing how to totally wipe a hard drive and operating system is an important element of maintaining your cyber security, and will help you to secure your personal data and details.

The process is fast, simple, and effective- just follow the simple steps above.

To ensure that your hard drive continues working properly, you should perform regular checks on the health of your hard drive. There are a few techniques that you can use to carry out this task, and we will explore them in greater detail below.

Why Do You Need To Check Your Hard Drive Health?

Hard drives contain sensitive information, such as personal passwords, banking details, and other private information. If your hard drive is damaged or failing, it could be easier for hackers to gain access to this information, and, if they are successful, it can make it easier to steal your identity, or cause other issues.

In addition, hard drives tend to store large amounts of data, which can make them prone to failure. 

If your hard drive has failed, then you will not be able to access your data, so it’s essential that you take steps to ensure that your hard drive is healthy before it fails completely.

These tests include checking the temperature of the hard drive, the amount of energy used, the number of errors detected, and more. You can view the results of these tests through the Disk Management tool, which is included in Microsoft Windows.

Final Thoughts

If you notice that your PC is slow, taking longer to load, or not responding at all, then this could be a sign that you need to check the health of your hard drive, and one of the above techniques or tools can help you with this.

Why Format Your Hard Drive?

There are a number of reasons why you may decide to format your hard drive, and these include:

You want to make sure that all your files are deleted from your hard drive before a wipe or reset, and formatting allows you to achieve this.

Alternatively, you may want to free up space on your hard drive so that you can install new software or upgrade your operating system

You want to create a new partition on your hard drive to install a new operating system, programs, or software.

If you are moving from one PC to another, you'll need to reformat your hard drive before transferring your files

Formatting your hard drive will also help ensure that any malware (viruses) which has infected your computer cannot access your personal information.

What Does It Mean To Partition A Hard Drive?

A partition is a way to divide your hard drive into different areas. This means that you can store different types of files on each part of your hard drives, such as documents, music, videos, pictures, and more.

When you first set up your computer, your hard drive was formatted with just one big area called the C:\ drive. You could only use this area for storing files, but you couldn't split it up into smaller parts.

To do this, you'd need to re-format your hard drive using the tools available in Windows.

This guide explains what partitions are, how they work, and how to create them. We’ll show you how to create a basic volume, as well as how to add additional volumes to your hard drive.

Partitioning Your Hard Drive

The most common type of partition is a simple volume, which is used when you don't need to store very many files. It's usually created automatically by Windows during installation, but you can also create them manually.

Simple volumes allow you to store files on multiple drives at once, but they're not ideal for large amounts of data because they take up lots of space. If you plan to store lots of files on your hard drive, you should consider creating a second volume instead.

Creating a simple volume:

Follow these steps to create a simple volume:

Final Thoughts

Learning how to format and partition your hard drive is an important element of protecting your data, and is a process that can be achieved fairly easily by following the simple steps above.

Your computer’s hard drive is responsible for storing data, but when its storage space starts running low, you’ll begin to experience issues with your computer’s performance.

Finding out what’s taking up the space on your hard drive in Windows 10 can seem daunting if you don’t know what you’re doing; that’s why we’ve made this simple guide to help you through it!

In this step-by-step guide, we’ll walk you through the process of checking your hard drive to see what’s taking up space, as well as how to clear out your hard drive for better performance.

Conclusion

Checking the storage space on your hard drive might be intimidating at first, but once you know what you’re doing it’s as easy as a few clicks of a button.

Now you know how to check what is taking up space on your hard drive, you can start keeping track of your storage to help your PC stay running as smoothly as possible!

In this article we will show you how to partition a hard drive for Windows 10, but these steps can also be applied to Windows 8.1 as the process is pretty much identical. Let’s get started!

Partitioning A Hard Drive For Windows 10 In 10 Steps

Final Thoughts

Partitioning a hard drive is recommended if you want to install an additional operating system on your PC (say Linux), for security and for performance. Or, if you want to separate data to ensure it is safer should corruption occur.

Partitioning a hard drive in Windows 10 lets you split up your hard drives into specific portions that your PC will recognize. Each hard drive has at least one partition, and this is normally called ‘C.’ However, you can make more partitions on a single drive.

If you want to do something more complex than creating, deleting, or shrinking new partitions (let say, cloning a drive or partition) specific third-party hard drive partition tools, or having a professional partition your drives, may be easier.

In this article, we’ll be explaining what an external hard drive is and hopefully, you’ll go away with the information you need to be able to explain it to other people!

What Is A Hard Drive?

So to start off, let’s get into what a standard hard drive is.

A hard drive is a part of a computer that sorts the operating system (or OS for short), data files (such as documents), any applications found on the computer, pictures, and music. Basically, anything file that exists on the computer.

Hard drives can hold a great deal of information and your computer isn’t going to function without one. Most hard drives are quite cheap as well, so if you need to replace one, you don’t have to spend too much money replacing them.

There are drawbacks to a hard drive though. The biggest drawback is if they suddenly stop working and you haven’t backed up any of the data from your computer, you’ll potentially lose that data forever.

If the hard drive can be fixed, or data recovered, some of it may be saved. But it is always better to backup just in case.

Another drawback hard drives have is that they can be quite slow, especially when you’re opening very large files or applications, and particularly compared to SSDs (solid state drives).

What Is An External Hard Drive?

An external hard drive is pretty much exactly the same as a normal hard drive, but it isn’t connected inside a computer.

External hard drives usually come as a separate unit, can be quite small, and can hold a large quantity of data. They are usually attached to the computer via USB and can be disconnected and reconnected whenever the user sees fit.

External hard drives are great for extra storage or for keeping any important files on. If your internal computer hard drive ever fails or corrupts, anything that is stored on your external hard drive will be safe.

Because of that, if you have a lot of files that you consider to be important, it’s in your best interest to invest in an external hard drive. They are the best backup devices for a computer and you can save you a lot of time and hassle if anything ever happens to your computer.

But just like an internal hard drive, external hard drives do have their drawbacks.

Both normal hard drives and external hard drives can get hot and overheat, and this can sometimes cause issues to both your computer and your hard drives. Plus, because hard drives function mechanically, they are more prone to fault than SSDs.

Additionally, because external hard drives aren't part of your computer, and can be detached and moved, you can lose them if you aren’t careful. It's always best to keep your external hard drive in a safe, secure place when it’s not in use.

Conclusion

External hard drives are a good investment should you need a backup solution to be kept separate from your computer.

But remember, you need to look after an external hard drive and keep it safe and secure too.

Hard drives use magnetic storage to save and retrieve data that relies on rotating platters, surrounded by magnetic material which differs depending based on what hard drive you own.

Magnetic heads are used to read data from the platter surface. And they also write data onto the platters, so that you can retrieve and save information from your hard drive.

From this description alone you probably have a fairly good idea of what a hard drive looks like. But there are different types of hard drive: including external hard drives, and internal hard drives. And while both perform the same basic data storage function, they both look slightly different externally.

Internal Hard Drives

Usually, if you want to see what an internal hard drive looks like, all you’d have to do is open your PC and it’ll be at the front and perhaps top of your pc tower. These internal drives have been in PCs for decades

Hard drives are also present in some laptops, now predominantly as media storage drives, and these are a smaller style. But we'd advise not opening your laptop to have a look - unless it is out of warranty and you're comfortable doing so.

Most internal hard drives look similar regardless of size, enclosed in screwed-shut metal casing, with screw-holes available along the sides to allow them to be secured in a system.

External Hard Drives

What do external hard drives look like? Well, slightly different from internal hard drives, external drives go on the outside of a PC case, and therefore look much cleaner and aesthetically pleasing.

They still do the same job on the inside of the hard drive, but the drive itself is encased in an outer material for ease of use and function. Of course, some external drives allow easy access to the hard drive itself, for easy replacement and upgrading.

They’re useful if you require extra hard drive space separate from your computer, and can be quite cost-effective for the amount of storage space you’ll be getting.

Inside Of A Hard Drive

So now we know what the outside of a hard drive looks like, what does the inside of one look like?

It almost looks like an old record player, with a platter that spins around the axis just like we described before.

Instead of the needle spinning around the record though, the read/write head hovers slightly above the physical surface of the disk, which is all the height it needs to function. Contact with the platter would scratch it, damaging the drive.

Size

The two most common measurements for hard drives are 2.5-inch, which are extremely common for laptops, and 3.5-inch which is seen much more often on desktop computers.

These sizes are standardized so repair or replacement is much easier if anything goes wrong with your drives. External hard drives use these two sizes too.

Final Words

What does a hard drive look like? Well, now you know, and you can find them at vendors like Amazon or elsewhere to have a harder look.

Losing data can not only be one of the most unfortunate events to experience, but it can also be detrimental to businesses and catastrophic for data-oriented infrastructures such as server farms. Introducing Stellar Data Recovery, which promises to prevent and even rectify events such as data loss, corruption, accidental deletion and, broken RAID arrays. Whatever your area or use case, Stellar Data Recovery keeps your servers, spreadsheets, and even your precious memories intact.

We got our hands on the Stellar Data Recovery Tool. We used the ‘Technician’ version. This package is very much geared towards businesses. However, Stellar has a range of products for individual users, which can be handy if you’re looking to rectify a case or two of accidental deletion or some pesky file corruption. 

What potential problems can occur with storage devices? 

Data, in a nutshell, is always the same. No matter where it’s stored, data ultimately is a series of binary ones and zeros at its core. There are different storage types and components that handle data slightly differently. Some even require the presence of a storage controller, which ensures the operating system can retrieve the files required correctly. 

Storage is intricate, and understanding it completely is a complicated endeavor. To put it briefly, the more components between your OS and the data, the more potential points of failure there are. USBs, Storage controllers, Hard drives are all examples of potential points of failure. 

Not only that, even reading and accessing data comes with its own dangers. The infamous “Bit-flip” happens when data in RAM is “flipped” from one to a zero or vice versa. The most common natural causes of which are Cosmic background radiation, power, and temperature fluctuations. The ”Bit-flip” subsequently causes problems ranging from minor to catastrophic. Data corruption being one of the most prevalent among them. 

It’s not a matter of if your data gets corrupted, it’s simply a matter of time. Don’t panic though, Stellar Data Recovery has the answer.

How does corrupt data recovery work? 

Data recovery software primarily utilizes two methods to recover lost or corrupted data. Metadata analysis in addition to raw data recovery. Metadata analysis is the easier and more successful recovery method by comparison. 

Metadata analysis 

Metadata is a secret hidden service that’s active within every file you have stored on a PC, phone, and even your games console. If it’s a file on a hard drive or storage device, it has metadata that is populated by essential details about the file itself. 

The metadata keeps track of a file, its location, how to access it, and its structure. This is imperative to recovery software, as the metadata can be analyzed for information about the file. Then, taking into account its structure in the metadata. The file can be rebuilt back to its original form. 

Metadata analysis is far more efficient and has much greater success than the ‘Raw’ recovery method, because metadata analysis is more accurate in nature and recovers complete, usable, and organized files as opposed to jumbled data, making it not only a preferred method but a superior one. 

Raw recovery

This method can be thought of as the backup plan, It is still extremely sophisticated and complex. But, it’s far more of a broader gambit, in comparison to the metadata method. 

Raw recovery relies mostly on tracing file signatures and patterns that indicate the beginning and end of a file, this data is then collated and restored. However, the data will often still be incomplete and unstructured as the metadata may be corrupt or absent.

With the absence of the metadata, the files will be placed into folders named most likely by the software you’re using. This will make organization and locating a specific file a nightmare, as everything will have a new name. But, at least you have the data back.

How does deleted data recovery work? 

The process of recovering deleted data sounds complex, but is very easy to understand, it'll make you sound incredibly smart if you manage to work it into your next conversation. 

When a file is deleted, it’s not actually deleted. Rather the space that the file occupies is marked as available, the operating system will overwrite that file when it needs the extra space. 

If you manage to catch the accidental deletion before the file is overwritten, then you’re in for an easy ride. Stellar Data Recovery will just restore the file path and re-cement the file’s place on the hard drive. If the data happens to be overwritten, then it’s a little more tricky to recover. This ultimately depends on how many times it’s been overwritten. 

Thankfully, Stellar Data Recovery has got your data recovery needs covered. With the software using both ‘Raw’ and ‘Metadata’ methods in addition to few more complicated recovery tricks. Your files will be recovered, and back to normal no matter the condition. So long as you’ve not managed to somehow panic and accidentally smash a hard drive in half in the sheer onslaught of panic that you feel after you realise that the funny cat meme you loved from 2006 stops appearing in Windows Explorer. 

This can be said for almost all storage devices and configurations, SSDs, hard drives, USB sticks, even certain RAID configurations. Specifically RAID 0, 5, and 6.

What is RAID? 

We’ll only be covering one type of RAID configuration, RAID 0. With a brief mention of RAID 1 (two-way mirror). 

What is RAID 0? 

RAID 0 is a storage condition you can apply to two or more drives, often referred to as a ‘stripe set’ or ‘striped volume’ the data is split (striped) evenly between two or more volumes without redundancy, parity information or any fault tolerances. 

Since RAID 0 provides no fault tolerance whatsoever, this means that the failure or corruption of one drive will cause the entire array to fail. If the data is striped across all disks, you’ll be facing total data loss. RAID 0 is primarily useful for performance, large sets of temporary data and, creating large logical volumes out of two or more physical disks. 

RAID 0 can perform better than your average single drive by cutting write speeds almost in half but it’s far less reliable, and only considered as an option in applications that can tolerate lower reliability. Such as scientific computing and computer gaming. 

I’m sure you can see why recovery software for this RAID condition exists. 

How to use Stellar Data Recovery

We’ve got two identical hard drives set up in RAID 0. For us, it means that the larger volume can handle the large file sizes that video editing demands, and the speed of access that it also requires, making RAID 0 a perfect use-case for us to test out what Stellar Data Recovery is really capable of. 

Imagine, we’re editing a video, but suddenly a gigantic dog jumps at the PC knocking it down, and suddenly our lovely RAID 0 array appears to be failing. The RAID 0 array appears to be broken and all our data is lost… Or is it? 

As you can now see, only one of our two total hard drives is appearing in the Disk Management window. Meaning one physical drive is inaccessible, leaving only roughly 50% of my actual data intact. 

Those incredible photos of you and your gigantic dog growing up, with all of his lovely red fur is gone. But, don’t fret, because Stellar Data Recovery is here to save the day.

Where to download Stellar Data Recovery Tool 

Your first port of call is to head over to the Stellar Data Recovery website. 

https://www.stellarinfo.com/windows-raid-recovery.php

Select the big green ‘Free Download’ button, you can’t miss it. 

Your download should then appear in the bottom right corner of the window (If you are using Google Chrome)

With the file fully downloaded, be sure to run the program. After this, select your preferred language and hit “OK”.

Just follow the on-screen steps and agree to any license terms and conditions, please read all the information on the screen carefully so you understand the software’s terms of use. 

After those steps are completed, the software should begin installing. Stellar Data Recovery gives you a short tutorial during the installation process. This means you can get a sense of familiarity with the software right off the bat, which should hopefully sate some of the fears that you might have while recovering data off of a corrupted or deleted sector on a drive. 

How to use Stellar Data Recovery

With Stellar Data Recovery fully installed, select any and all file types you wish to recover, for the maximum impact, we’d select  “All Data” to ensure that we get as much lost data back as possible. 

Our method of mimicking a total drive failure on a RAID 0 array was through disconnecting one of our identical hard drives. Due to this, one physical drive will not display in Disk Manager, leaving the other connected drive unable to compile the information it contains. This is because this data now belongs to a broken, incomplete array, and is just being displayed as unformatted, unallocated space. 

At least 50% of the all-important Metadata is stored on that drive, and we’d like to access the remaining connected physical drive without formatting it, as Windows would have you do. This means that for our RAID 0 array, we selected ‘Can’t Find Drive’ in Stellar Data Recovery.

We need to select the drive from the broken RAID array and in this case, it is the result at the top of our list. If you cannot find your drive, be sure to enable the “Extensive Search” slider,  which can be found on the bottom left of Stellar Data Recovery’s window. This will give you the best chance to recover your files. When you’re ready, just hit the blue ‘Search’ button.

Because the ‘Search’ function is extensive, it can take a while to search your drives. It took a grand total of 1h 18m to search a 500GB hard drive for lost partitions. So, be sure that you have sufficient time when you decide to use this tool, as it’s an in-depth and time-consuming process.

Stellar Data Recovery will now scan the logical disk you selected for missing or broken partitions. As we selected “Extensive Search”, the process will once again take a while to complete. It took Stellar Data Recovery 1h 18m to scan our 500Gb physical disk, but the speed and time taken will vary based on what type of storage media you are scanning. Go make a cup of coffee and let the software do its thing. 

With the lost partitions found, it will usually begin with sectors closest to 0 due to the way that drives and volumes are formatted. In our case, it’s labelled as Std Vol 1 under ‘Partitions’ in Stellar Data Recovery.

Click on the desired partition and select ‘Scan’ in the bottom right of the window.

Stellar Data Recovery will now scan the selected partition for the file types we selected at the start of the process. The software managed to complete this scan in around 1h 12m. The speed of your logical disk is a huge factor here. As we used a HDD, it’s not a speedy process.

After the scan has been completed, voila, Stellar Data Recovery will list the files and folders that it managed to detect. For us, it was “752.10Gb in 46439 folders”.

There is not actually 752GB of data present, as we know we only have a storage capacity of 500GB, but this is where the Metadata we mentioned earlier is hard at work. It shows the file structures and compositions for data that doesn’t actually exist on the disk due to the RAID 0 array’s composition.

We’re just looking for my photos and videos. To navigate through Stellar Data Recovery. So, use the dropdown menus to on the ‘Tree View’ to select files and folders that you want to recover.

With our search complete, and all of the files we want to recover selected, simply click the ‘Recover’ button on the bottom right. 

Choose a file path for your recovered files to save to, make sure the target destination has enough available space for files you’re recovering, then hit “Start Saving” 

The recovery process will take some time, this is governed largely by the amount of data you’re trying to recover in addition to the target destination drive’s write speed. Stellar Data Recovery only took around 31m 43s to recover 426 files (89.87Gb) in 3 folders, which is pretty speedy for a data recovery tool. 

A few hours later, we have 426 recovered files. It’s important to mention, many of them don’t work or are corrupted. However, around 10% of the video files do play and are of acceptable quality. 

Media is one of the more sensitive types of file to recover. Sometimes, a few bytes of misplaced data can render a video useless, and the fact that Stellar Raid Recovery managed to recover around 35 working videos from a broken RAID 0 array is nothing short of phenomenal. 

We gave Stellar RAID Recovery a nigh impossible task, and it pulled through, with usable files to boot. This is not representative of a simpler use case, as it’s likely that you’re not going to be running your home PC in RAID 0. We gave Stellar Data Recovery one of the biggest challenges you can throw at data recovery software, and it passed with flying colors.

If you need recovery software with no backup or two-way mirror to rely on, and everything has gone horribly wrong, consider using Stellar Data Recovery. Their simple and intuitive software takes advantage of the latest technology to recover what might have been otherwise lost forever.

Cache’s Effect on Gaming

Conclusion

Capacity

Speed

Access

About Western Digital

SATA Compatibility

WD Blue 1TB SATA Hard Drive Access

Speed limits

Final Verdict