When do you need this service?
- A hard drive making a clicking noise, or not powering up at all
- An SSD or NVMe drive that the operating system no longer detects
- A partition that disappeared or became corrupt after an update
- Files deleted by mistake, or a drive that was formatted
Technical process
- Technical evaluation of the drive to establish the cause of the failure. This stage has a cost, because it takes specialist diagnostic time.
- A technical report and a quotation based on the lab hours and the specialists your case requires
- Work in a clean room (laminar flow chamber with positive pressure) when the platters or the head assembly are physically damaged
- Recovery of access to the data and extraction of a binary copy of the device
- Extraction and rebuilding of the file structure
- Delivery of the recovered data on the medium you prefer
Frequently asked questions
Can I keep using the drive while I decide?
We would advise against it. Every additional read attempt lowers the chances of recovery, and that is especially true when there is physical damage.
What happens if my storage devices were exposed to fire?
It depends on the temperature they reached. Hard drive platters have a very thin lubricant layer over which the head flies, and that layer withstands less heat than the magnetic layer where the data is stored, which is only lost to heat at much higher temperatures (the Curie temperature). If the drive did not exceed what the lubricant layer tolerates, there is a real chance of recovering the data. If it did, the data may still be on the platters, but recovery becomes much harder. That is why it is essential not to power on the drive and to bring it to the laboratory as soon as possible.
What if it is an SSD or flash memory?
An SSD has no platters and no lubricant layer: it stores data as electrical charges in memory chips. Heat speeds up the loss of those charges, and if the temperature was high enough to melt the solder, components can come loose or be damaged. Even so, if the memory chips survived, in some cases the data can still be recovered. Every case is assessed in the laboratory: do not power it on, and send it to us as soon as possible.
Which drive types and interfaces do you recover?
Hard drives (HDD) with IDE (PATA), SATA, SAS, SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces; SATA, mSATA, NVMe and M.2 SSDs (both M.2 variants, SATA and NVMe); external USB drives, USB sticks and SD cards. Server SSDs (U.2, U.3, PCIe and EDSFF) are covered under enterprise storage. Every case is evaluated in the laboratory before we quote.
How long does a recovery take?
The technical evaluation comes first: it takes 5 working days under the standard service and 48 hours under the emergency service, weekends and public holidays included. Those times can be longer if the device is severely deteriorated or depending on the availability of spare parts. How long the recovery itself takes depends on the fault, and we state it in the report together with the quotation.
Do you recover data from external drives and USB sticks?
Yes. We work with external hard drives, external SSDs, USB flash drives and SD cards.
What does the initial evaluation cost?
The technical evaluation has a cost, because it involves specialist diagnostic time. Based on its findings we give you a report and a quotation covering the lab hours and the personnel your case requires, before any recovery work begins.
Has your hard drive or SSD stopped working?
Write to us and we will get back to you straight away, 24/7/365.
We answer in English by email and WhatsApp. Phone calls are answered in Spanish.
Related services
Is this for you or for your organisation? For businesses and institutions we work with a signed confidentiality agreement, formal invoicing and priority 24/7 support.