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Hard Drive

Hard Drive

Data Recovery for Samsung Hard Drives

Samsung offers a wide range of internal and external hard drives that have an excellent performance record. Despite this, occasionally hard drives do fail and when they do you'll need a data recovery specialist to help retrieve your important information.

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from a corrupted hard drive. The most common data recovery situation occurs due to operating system failure, but there are many other reasons why your hard drive could potentially fail.

If your hard drive stops working or begins to function erratically, it could be due to one of the following problems:

Physical damage: This can occur from impact (i.e. if the drive is dropped), or from other physical problems such as excess moisture, general wear and tear, or mechanical failure. These types of problems cannot be fixed by the average computer user. You'll need to send your computer to a data recovery specialist who has the facilities and knowledge to repair your hard drive sufficiently to be able to retrieve your data.

Logical or software damage: This type of damage can often be recovered by using data recovery software. There are a number of data recovery software programs available that can help you retrieve your data. You may also wish to contact a data recovery specialist for logical hard drive problems to give you a better chance at success. One of the problems with do it yourself recovery is that the more you use your hard drive, the more likely your key data will be overwritten and lost forever.

 

Signs of Impending Hard Drive Failure

When a hard drive fails, often you will get some subtle and some not so subtle signs that a failure is imminent. Some of the signs include:

1. Your computer freezes often. In this instance, nothing works and you have to restart your computer to get it to boot properly.

2. You start to notice that some of your files unexpectedly go missing.

3. Your computer frequently locks up during the booting process. This happens to all computers occasionally, but if it becomes a regular pattern, it may be a sign that your hard drive is heading towards a failure.

4. It takes an extremely long time to access your files.  Saving or opening files suddenly starts to take forever.

 

Signs of Hard Drive Failure

1. Strange clicking or grinding noises coming from your hard drive. This is often a sign that the read/write heads on your hard drive are no longer working properly.

2. The "Blue Screen of Death", also called stop error screen. Your computer screen turns blue and lists a long series of error messages on the screen.

3. A "disk not found" error message when you try to boot the computer.

 

What to do if your Samsung hard drive fails

With Samsung, any attempt to dismantle your hard drive will void your warranty, and in any case, the vast majority of computer users will be unable to repair a hard drive and recover lost data.

The first thing you should do is to power down your computer. The more you use your computer, the more likely it is that your data will be overwritten and lost forever. To pack up your hard drive to send out for repair you should:

1. Carefully remove the hard drive from your computer.

2. Place the hard drive in its original packaging, a freezer bag will do if necessary.

3. Pack the hard drive in its original box, or another box of similar size. The box should be at least twice the size of the hard drive to leave room for sufficient packing materials.

4. Make sure you use enough bubble wrap to properly protect the drive.

5. Send the drive to a data recovery specialist, making sure that you have purchased sufficient insurance on the package in case it is damaged.

6. Include as many relevant details as possible, including your contact information, the make and model of your hard drive, the type of problem you're encountering and the data (specific files, email etc.) you would like to recover.

7. Once the drive has been shipped, call or email the data recovery company with the tracking information so that they can be prepared to receive it and let you know if there are any delays in the shipping process.

 

Most data recovery companies can recover your data within a week depending on the volume of repairs they have scheduled at the time. Sydney Data Recovery can recover your data in as little as 12 to 24 hours. Not all data can be recovered, but many companies have a success rate of around 90%. If your Samsung hard drive does fail, there is a reasonably good chance that you can recover your data. Of course, the best option is to regularly back up your data so that you can restore it if the worst happens and your hard drive fails.

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How many movies can an external hard drive store?

Say I buy movies strictly off of iTunes and transfer the purchases to an external hard drive (I have Vista). Roughly, how many movies would you say could be stored on a 500gb external hard drive, a 750gb external hard drive, and a 1tb external hard drive (list them separately)? Thanks folks!

Well, a typical standard movie is around 700 mb while the same in HD would be 1.5 gb
So if you average them to be 1 gigabyte that would be 500 movies on the 500 gb drive.
Double that for the tb if you didn't know.
[blue rays 4 to 8 gbs.]

Computer Basics Terminology: What is a Hard Drive, What Is RAM