Our data recovery team took possession of the 12 Seagate Constellation drives at our secure data recovery lab and conducted a thorough examination to determine the cause of data loss and the scope of work required to successfully restore access to the lost files. Our full diagnostic report found multiple problems with the hard drives. Three had metallic debris within the drives and extensive scratching on the top surface of thedrive platter. Several others produced clicking sounds when spun up, and another had a failed read/write head. In addition to severe physical damage on several of the NAS hard drives, our expert engineers also determined that the RAID configuration – Level 10 built from six stripe components comprising pairs of drives – had been lost and would requiremanual reconstruction.

Upon approval for emergency datarecovery service, we first addressed the physical damage to thedrives. This required invasive techniques to replace the failedread/write head and to carefully clean all metallic debris from inside the drives. Next, our technicians used proprietary tools to manipulate the drives’ service areas to make it possible to clone the data from the severely damaged platters. Then each drive was successfully imaged in a certified Class 10 ISO 4 cleanroom. Our developers then reassembled the RAID configuration to restore the original volume architecture and examined the full copy onwrite Btrfs file system and extracted all available user data to our secure storage servers.

Severe platter damage often results in permanent data loss, butour engineers specialize in media damage data recovery cases. We were able to restore access to the failed drives and transfer the recovered data to a SecureDrive KP FIPS-validated and hardware-encrypted external portable DAS device for secure return shipment to the customer.