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Restoring Data from Failed HGST Ultrastar Drive


Restoring Data from Failed HGST Ultrastar Drive

In addition to his work as a Project Officer with Ottawa Public Health in Ontario, Canada, Darren Brown has spent more than two decades as a professional editorial photographer and videographer for several Ottawa-based newspapers and as the proprietor of his own photography business.

Like many other creative professionals, Mr. Brown uses G-Technology hardware to store and manage his extensive image and video archives. G-Technology drives and servers are optimized for the Apple ecosystem and feature high storage capacities and fast read/write speeds.

One of the two HGST Ultrastar HE6 Enterprise helium-filled hard drives in Mr. Brown’s G-Technology DAS system recently stopped mounting on his MacBook Pro laptop. The drives, configured as a RAID 1, would power on and spin up, but one of them was not visible to the computer.

Mr. Brown replaced the power supply and cables in an effort to troubleshoot the problem but still could not access the unmounted drive. Eager to resolve the problem without permanent data loss, he contacted Secure Data Recovery Services in Ottawa to see if access to the drive could be restored.

G-Technology Product Specialists

The expert engineers at Secure Data Recovery Services are Apple Macintosh Certified Technicians and specialize in successfully recovering lost data from G-Technology’s full product line. They also have advanced experience with current and emerging HDD device technology, including the helium-filled HGST Ultrastar drives.

A thorough examination of Mr. Brown’s drives revealed extensive corruption to the file system. This can often occur as a result of frequent computer crashes or accidental shutdowns. In fact, Mr. Brown indicated that he had a problem with repeated crashes of his MacBook Pro laptop leading up to the failure of the Ultrastar HDD to mount.

Restoring the Volume Architecture

After receiving authorization to proceed with data recovery operations, our technicians successfully imaged the failed drive on a sector level in our industry-best Class 10 ISO 4 cleanroom. Once a clone of the drive’s file system was acquired, the case was handed to our development team.

Our developers were able to successfully repair the file system corruption and manually rebuild the original volume architecture. Then, they used custom utilities modified specifically for this case to repair any damage to the user data before extracting the drive contents to our secure storage server.

Resolving the Ultrastar HDD Data Loss

Our expert engineers have the most industry-specific credentials of any professional data recovery provider. They also maintain a documented 96% successful recovery rate, the highest in the industry. They restored access to more than 5.5 TB of Mr. Brown’s lost image and video files. All missing data was transferred to a new drive for secure return shipment.

Secure Data Recovery Services has built a reputation as the most trusted name in professional data recovery services for more than a decade. We specialize in successful data recovery from any digital storage device, from HDDs and SSDs to iPhone/Android smartphones, microSD and other NAND-based flash storage, RAID and NAS systems, and complex virtual servers.

Call us at 800-388-1266 for a free consultation or to open a data recovery case. Our customer support team is available 24/7 to help you choose from one of our flexible data recovery options, including emergency services, onsite data recovery, and remote recovery operations for particularly sensitive cases.

Our data recovery engineers have extensive experience in photo data recovery and video data recovery. Creative professionals worldwide rely on the quality and efficiency of our recovery services. If for any reason we can’t recover your lost data, you pay nothing. That’s our “no data, no recovery fee” guarantee.

Download this customer success story as a PDF.

Philip Bader, Content Writer
Article by

After more than a decade in Southeast Asia as a reporter and editor for magazines, newspapers, and online media organizations, Philip Bader now serves as a freelance content writer for Secure Data Recovery Services. He writes blogs and web content about data storage technology, trends in enterprise data recovery, and emerging data storage technology.

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