So called “Ultra small form factor” PCs have never been so popular for their compactness, versatility and low power consumption. You can hold them easily with one hand and most are lighter than a dictionary. In fact, during the pandemic, some organisations were able to dispatch these book-size PCs to their home-working employees in the post. All the employee had to do was connect the system to a monitor cable (HDMI, DPI), mouse and keyboard and they were up and running in no time.
While all this sounds great, but here at Drive Rescue we’ve noticed one thing. Some of the disks inside these ultra small form factor PCs, seem to experience higher-than-average failure rates. This is not surprising. While very convenient, most of these systems do not offer the same level of airflow as their more internally capacious brethren. Even with sophisticated heat sink designs, lower levels of internal airflow, mean that inside, the components (such as northbridge chip) and disks inside these systems can get hotter than a Tokyo metro train during rush hour during a heatwave.
And that’s not good news for HDDs or SSDs. Conventional hard disks (P-ATA, S-ATA) never liked the heat. They have too many metal components (such as platters, spindles, sliders and voice-coil motors) inside which expand when exposed to heat. SSDs (such as M.2 NVMe) on the other hand, actually run better when hot, but after a while this heat-induced performance boost begins to take a toll on the disk’s controller. Too much heat can cause the controller to execute failed bad block management operations, failed logical block addressing and eventually the thermal stress can culminate in complete failure of the controller IC itself.
How to recover data from a Lenovo small form factor PC?
Take last week for example, we were recovering data from a Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180. The disk inside a WD Blue 500GB S-ATA (WD5000LPVX) had a failed head-disk assembly (HDA). More specifically, the head-gimbal assembly at the end of the HDA had “lifted” from the fly zone. Damage in congruence with thermal stress. Anyway, we replaced the HDA in our clean-room, we then imaged the disk enabling a full data extraction from it’s NTFS partition table.
Drive Rescue (Dublin) offer a complete data recovery service for small form factor PCs such as Fujitsu Esprimo E420, G5011, G5010, Q520, Q910, Q958, Intel Nuc, Lenovo ThinkCenre M700, M900, M710s, M710q, ThinkStation P350, Dell Optiplex 780,790,3020,3050,7010, 7040,9020m and Asus PN50, PN60. We recover from most disk types used in these systems including M.2 NVMe (SSD) disks, m-SATA and S-ATA disks.