While better known for their flash memory devices, the Taiwanese company storage company Transcend also makes a limited range of 2.5” external hard disks. Typically, they use Samsung Momentus disks – in 500GB (ST500LM012) or 1TB (ST1000LM024) sizes. As mechanical hard disks go, these are fairly robust models. Their head disk assembly is tried-and-tested and they use fairly stable firmware.
So, what could possibly go wrong? Well, there is the perennial problem of users dropping their disks. Often, accidentally dropped disks don’t happen out of carelessness just unexpected events. Like, for example, a customer who delivered a disk into our office recently. On his commute home, he had his Transcend external hard disk attached connected to his MacBook Air. He was seated in an aisle seat. His fellow passenger in the window seat had dozed off. As the train was pulling into one of the stations his neighbouring traveller suddenly woke up, looked out the window and discovered to his horror that it was his stop. Our customer, being a gentleman, MacBook-Air-in-hand quickly jumped up from his seat only to suddenly hear the clatter of an object fall onto the aisle of the carriage. It was his external hard disk. His fellow traveller alighted successfully from the train. Our customer gingerly went back to his seat to re-connect the disk only to hear it clicking.
Luckily, only one disk head was damaged, but the head disk assembly still needed to be replaced in our clean-room. The platters had escaped damage. We were able to achieve a 99.5% recovery rate salvaging all of his PPJ (Adobe Premiere) files.
How to prevent this happening? Well, if you plug out an external disk quickly from an OS X (Apple) operating system without going through the “eject” procedure – you risk corrupting the “catalog” file of HFS+ (the file system) which can also lead to data loss. Or, you could use a “wireless hard disk” but I dread to think of the security implications of these especially when used in public places. So, it all goes back to having a robust back-up plan. Or, maybe just not sitting on an aisle seat on a train…
Drive Rescue Data Recovery are based in Dublin, Ireland. We recover data from all brands of dropped external hard disk including Transcend, Adata, Toshiba, Seagate and WD. Phone 1890 571 571 www.datarecoverydublin.ie