We have started to see an increase in cases for Western Digital’s equivallent of Seagate’s LaCie product line, the SanDisk Professional G-Drives coming in for data recovery services. Inside the enclosure, we usually find helium filled Western Digital hard drives built on Hitachi drive technology which have limited support within the world of data recovery labs.
Data Recovery Limitations
With these newer helium filled drives, there are a couple key challenges preventing most data recovery labs from providing advanced data recovery services on them.
The first issue is the helium filled drive that is sealed in a way to prevent the helium from leaking. In order to open the drive, the top seal needs to be cut off, which is a lot easier said than done. Once the seal is removed and the cover is opened, the helium is released. One now needs to figure out how to deal with the internal issues, free up or replace the heads and so forth and then figure out how to put the drive back together with the correct amount of helium put back into the drive and resealed. Special custom clean chambers and tools are still being designed and tested before they hit the market.
On top of the aforementioned challenges, those who work hard to find back door ways to access and fix firmware issues on hard drives have yet to find ways to overcome the levels of encryption used by Western Digital to prevent access to the firmware. This essentially means that most common firmware issues found on modern hard drives cannot be corrected, making cases that are technically recoverable, unrecoverable.
Cases Recoverable by Recovery Force
While we have not been able to recover every case we get with these drives, we have started to notice a trend of a couple of physical symptoms with which we do have a high success rate in recovering. Obviously, logical issues like formatted drives and deleted files are handled just like any other case.
- Completely unresponsive drive
- Drive detects, but sectors cannot be read (UNC errors)
In most cases, even with a recent 22TB drive, we were able to recover the data for less than $1000 CAD and the only reason it takes several days to complete the recoveries is because it just takes time to clone the patient drive and save the recovered files to a new hard drive.
What To Do If Your SanDisk G-Drive Has Failed
If you want to ask questions before you send it in, you can give us a call toll free at 866-750-3169, send an email to info@recoveryforce.com or post a question in our data recovery forums.
Our data recovery prices are posted on our website for you reference.
If you just want to fill in the forms and get your hard drive into our lab for the assessment, click here.