Open drive recoveries become necessary when there is a physical problem with a hard drive rather than a data problem. If, for example, the read/write heads fail, or the drive motor fails, or there is a problem on one of the printed circuit boards en

closed in the hard drive, it then becomes necessary to carry out an open drive recovery. This means that the hard drive has to be opened up, and this can only take place in a clean room. This is because the smallest speck of dust settling on a platter will cause data to be lost through corruption. A clean room is pressurized through fine filters so that when someone enters through an air lock, air will only flow out and not in.

The time that it takes for data recovery and its cost to you will depend on several factors. To give an easy example, the recovery of a single file that you have accidentally deleted yourself can be so simple that it could probably be recovered by you, yourself, if you knew just a little about computers.

At the other extreme, if some physical element inside a hard drive has been damaged or broken, or if the surface of the magnetic media has been damaged, this would mean dismantling it in our clean room and this is usually a very involved and lengthy process.

The cost to you would be proportional to the amount of work carried out, whom it was carried out by, and the cost of any replacement parts. If you need a quotation or need further information regarding data loss, contact us on 083 415 5154

You probably want to know what a clean room is and why we may need to use it. Technology has advanced so far that the assembly of many delicate components has to take place in completely clean conditions – that is to say that there must be absolutely no risk of a component being contaminated by even a single microscopic speck of dust. In order to achieve this assembly takes place in a perfectly clean environment. Air pressure is maintained in such a way that if the airlock should be broken air will only flow out and not into the room. Small components such as read/write heads in a hard drive will find contamination if there is dust present. By the same token, if we have to open a hard drive it has to be done in a clean room in order to prevent any contamination from dust or other contaminants.