Tag Archives: drives
When Software Cant Help: SSD, Cloud and Online Services
In the first part of the article, we took a look at programs for recovering data from traditional hard drives. In this second part of the series “When Software Cant Help” well talk about flash-based (solid-state) storage, cloud storage systems and online storage services.
Solid-State Drives (SSD)
Solid-state drives are often used in place of traditional hard disks. SSD drives offer smaller capacities but much higher speed, especially when random access speed is concerned. With no moving parts, SSD drives are more robust mechanically. They can withstand higher shocks, which makes them particularly great for portable applications. Another laptop-friendly feature is a much lower power consumption compared to magnetic hard drives.
SSD drives do come with their share of issues affecting data loss and data recovery situations. These issues are highly dependent on the ways SSD drives record information. With SSD drives, recovering a file deleted a few minutes ago is far from a given. Same goes for formatted disks; however surprisingly, corrupted SSDs may be recovered just as well as traditional hard drives. But lets elaborate.
Why Recovering Deleted Files from SSD Drives May Not Work
All fairly recent SSD drives implement a special set of procedures allowing them to optimize their writing performance. These procedures include background garbage collection and TRIM.
Why do SSD drives need garbage collections and magnetic hard disks dont? Because flash chips have much faster clear writes compared to erase-then-write times. In other words, flash cells that contain information need to be erased (emptied) before new information can be written in, and that erase process is very slow compared to plain write operation. In order to speed up the writes, solid-state disks erase flash cells occupied with deleted information in background. When the system needs to write anything on the disk, the write operation then has enough empty cells to complete quickly.
How does the disk know a particular sector becomes available? The operating system tells the drive via the TRIM command. The TRIM command is issued every time the system deletes a file or formats a volume. The drive will then add released sectors into the garbage collection queue, wiping their content with zeroes slowly but inevitably.
Remember why data recovery works? Windows itself does not wipe or erase the content of a file being deleted, but simply marks its disk space available. Well, this is not the case with SSD drives anymore: SSD drives will wipe available disk sectors in just a few minutes after a file is deleted.
When SSDs Can Be Recovered
SSD recovery may still work if the TRIM command was not issued. This could be the case if any one (or more) of the following is true:
Old version of Windows. Windows versions before Vista did not support TRIM, so SSDs behave pretty much like magnetic hard drives, and can be recovered.
Corrupted data. In a case of corrupted data, damaged file system and similar things, the TRIM command is not issued, and the files remain recoverable.
External SSD drive. SSD drives connected via a USB, FireWire or Ethernet port do not support the TRIM command, and can be recovered with data recovery software.
RAID arrays. TRIM is not supported in RAID configurations.
File system other than NTFS. At this time, Windows only supports TRIM on NTFS-formatted SSD drives. If your SSD drive uses a different file system, the TRIM command is not issued, and the drive remains recoverable.
Tools for Recovering Data from SSD Drives
In order to recover information from an SSD drive, you can use data recovery tools such as Hetman Uneraser, Hetman Partition Recovery, or Hetman Photo Recovery depending on your exact needs. Try Hetman Uneraser if youre recovering from a healthy drive that has not been formatted or repartitioned. If you did format or repartition your SSD drive, or if you have an inaccessible device with corrupted file system, use Hetman Partition Recovery.
Cloud Storage and Online Services
Cloud storage systems are gaining popularity among all kinds of users. Online backups, online photo albums (Flickr, Picasa), online file sharing and online document processing (Google Docs) are all over the place.
They are great as “Desktop”, “Mobile phone” or “My Documents” backups, perfect as redundant storage, and absolutely irreplaceable for sharing information and socializing. However, cloud storage systems are not exactly great as your primary storage. In other words, if you want to replace a big hard drive with an Amazon cloud storage account take a second look.
Granted, cloud storage systems are not susceptible (or much less susceptible than single-hard-drive solutions) to hardware faults and virus attacks. They are usually quite redundant and have excellent self-backup facilities. Your data may be safe there for a while.
Relying exclusively onto a cloud-based storage means giving up complete control over your information. Your data will be subject to someone elses policies (which may change without notice). The amount of storage space available may be limited, while plans allowing larger than a single hard drives worth storage space may cost you more than the cost of a similarly sized hard drive, per month.
Finally, if you delete a file, or if your entire account is compromised and wiped by a hacker, there is no recourse. No data recovery tool can restore deleted information from the cloud. This is a classical case where data recovery tools do not help.
When Software Cant Help: SSD, Cloud and Online Services
In the first part of the article, we took a look at programs for recovering data from traditional hard drives. In this second part of the series “When Software Cant Help” well talk about flash-based (solid-state) storage, cloud storage systems and online storage services.
Solid-State Drives (SSD)
Solid-state drives are often used in place of traditional hard disks. SSD drives offer smaller capacities but much higher speed, especially when random access speed is concerned. With no moving parts, SSD drives are more robust mechanically. They can withstand higher shocks, which makes them particularly great for portable applications. Another laptop-friendly feature is a much lower power consumption compared to magnetic hard drives.
SSD drives do come with their share of issues affecting data loss and data recovery situations. These issues are highly dependent on the ways SSD drives record information. With SSD drives, recovering a file deleted a few minutes ago is far from a given. Same goes for formatted disks; however surprisingly, corrupted SSDs may be recovered just as well as traditional hard drives. But lets elaborate.
Why Recovering Deleted Files from SSD Drives May Not Work
All fairly recent SSD drives implement a special set of procedures allowing them to optimize their writing performance. These procedures include background garbage collection and TRIM.
Why do SSD drives need garbage collections and magnetic hard disks dont? Because flash chips have much faster clear writes compared to erase-then-write times. In other words, flash cells that contain information need to be erased (emptied) before new information can be written in, and that erase process is very slow compared to plain write operation. In order to speed up the writes, solid-state disks erase flash cells occupied with deleted information in background. When the system needs to write anything on the disk, the write operation then has enough empty cells to complete quickly.
How does the disk know a particular sector becomes available? The operating system tells the drive via the TRIM command. The TRIM command is issued every time the system deletes a file or formats a volume. The drive will then add released sectors into the garbage collection queue, wiping their content with zeroes slowly but inevitably.
Remember why data recovery works? Windows itself does not wipe or erase the content of a file being deleted, but simply marks its disk space available. Well, this is not the case with SSD drives anymore: SSD drives will wipe available disk sectors in just a few minutes after a file is deleted.
When SSDs Can Be Recovered
SSD recovery may still work if the TRIM command was not issued. This could be the case if any one (or more) of the following is true:
Old version of Windows. Windows versions before Vista did not support TRIM, so SSDs behave pretty much like magnetic hard drives, and can be recovered.
Corrupted data. In a case of corrupted data, damaged file system and similar things, the TRIM command is not issued, and the files remain recoverable.
External SSD drive. SSD drives connected via a USB, FireWire or Ethernet port do not support the TRIM command, and can be recovered with data recovery software.
RAID arrays. TRIM is not supported in RAID configurations.
File system other than NTFS. At this time, Windows only supports TRIM on NTFS-formatted SSD drives. If your SSD drive uses a different file system, the TRIM command is not issued, and the drive remains recoverable.
Tools for Recovering Data from SSD Drives
In order to recover information from an SSD drive, you can use data recovery tools such as Hetman Uneraser, Hetman Partition Recovery, or Hetman Photo Recovery depending on your exact needs. Try Hetman Uneraser if youre recovering from a healthy drive that has not been formatted or repartitioned. If you did format or repartition your SSD drive, or if you have an inaccessible device with corrupted file system, use Hetman Partition Recovery.
Cloud Storage and Online Services
Cloud storage systems are gaining popularity among all kinds of users. Online backups, online photo albums (Flickr, Picasa), online file sharing and online document processing (Google Docs) are all over the place.
They are great as “Desktop”, “Mobile phone” or “My Documents” backups, perfect as redundant storage, and absolutely irreplaceable for sharing information and socializing. However, cloud storage systems are not exactly great as your primary storage. In other words, if you want to replace a big hard drive with an Amazon cloud storage account take a second look.
Granted, cloud storage systems are not susceptible (or much less susceptible than single-hard-drive solutions) to hardware faults and virus attacks. They are usually quite redundant and have excellent self-backup facilities. Your data may be safe there for a while.
Relying exclusively onto a cloud-based storage means giving up complete control over your information. Your data will be subject to someone elses policies (which may change without notice). The amount of storage space available may be limited, while plans allowing larger than a single hard drives worth storage space may cost you more than the cost of a similarly sized hard drive, per month.
Finally, if you delete a file, or if your entire account is compromised and wiped by a hacker, there is no recourse. No data recovery tool can restore deleted information from the cloud. This is a classical case where data recovery tools do not help.
Today's Threats and Solutions for USB Storage Devices
USB products have been in market since 2000. The ever-growing nature of personal and business data, has led to exponential demand of USB flash drives and external hard disks. From ordinary people to large organizations, all rely on USB drives to keep, transfer and receive documents, pictures, videos and so on.
The main reason for popularity of these devices is that they are light, small and inexpensive. A few years ago, it was hard to believe that with a piece of hardware half the size of a bank card, one could hold thousands of documents and pictures right in their pocket. It is worth mentioning that a typical 8 GB USB flash drive has enough space to keep more than 15000 photos (500 KB average photo size). In response to this high demand market, manufacturers strive to produce devices with greater storage space, faster transfer rates and lower costs. For example, a 1 TB USB drive will be available during 2013.
USB flash drives use a common standard, which is supported by all modern operating systems, called USB mass storage. As a result, anyone can connect one of them to a Mac, copy some files, and conveniently connect it to a Windows based machine to access those files.
So, are we going to conclude that they have no disadvantages? Absolutely not. They have a lot to offer, but they all have one problem in common: they are dangerous!
Antivirus companies report than the AutoRun feature in Microsoft Windows is still among top ten threats. This feature helps programs that are meant to run automatically when a USB drive is connected to a PC, but obviously a malware can be easily executed by it. Most computer viruses copy themselves to removable USB disks, and sometimes, this is their main method of spreading. When a virus, or any other type of malware gets onto a USB disk, there is a high chance that other systems using that USB drive get infected too.
Moreover, USB drives, because of high capacity relative to their small size, are the first choice if someone wants to steal valuable or confidential data. Companies and businesses are at risk when employees can duplicate corporate documents on USB drives and take them outside the office. One study showed that the average cost of a data breach, can be as high as $2.5 million. And this is not only for companies. Every individual has private files, or even projects on their computer, with doors open to intruders.
There must exist some sort of solution to avoid these threats. In today’s software world, there are a few applications that can help everybody secure their USB ports. But not every software solution, is eligible to increase the security of your PCs at home and work. You should be looking for a software that solves above-mentioned problems, has excellent technical support, and gets updated regularly with new features. There are free solutions around, but they all lack some point or another. They are usually written for hobby, and not from a ‘professional’ viewpoint.
A wise option is USB Security Suite. It has everything you need to protect your PCs from USB-related threats. USB Security Suite automatically scans any USB disk attached to a computer to prevent viruses from spreading. It can also vaccinate your USB drives, so that they never get infected by other computers. If you need to know what activities (copy, rename, delete, etc.) happen on USB drives of your system, USB Security Suite can monitor and log them. Data theft protection made easy.