External USB Hard Disk Drive Data Recovery
What is an External USB Storage Drive?
An external USB storage drive is essentially similar in nature to the storage you have inside your PC or laptop. However, rather than being directly connected to the inside of the computer, it is connected via a USB cable to a USB port exposed on the outside of the device.
The benefits of such a device is that it is portable, smaller drives are the size of a credit card with larger devices being roughly the size of an A5 notepad. These devices can be changed between different computers and the data be easily read.
External USB storage drives are great for storing personal photos as described in our guide to securely storing photos and videos. As described in the guide, they provide a medium-term solution as their optimal lifespan is around 5 years before they start to degrade.
What is a NAS Device? How does it differ to an External USB Storage Drive?
A Network Access Storage (NAS) device is similar in function to an External USB storage drive. Rather than connecting directly to the computer via USB, the storage device is set up on the same network.
This allows all devices on the same network to access the files and data stored on the NAS device.
NAS devices are usually set up to host a large amount of data, often videos because of their larger capacity over USB devices. They also have faster transfer speeds than a USB device, as transfer over the network is faster than a USB cable can handle.
Can my data still be recovered?
A common fault with larger external USB storage drives is that when taking physical damage, they can start clicking, which means they are failing to read the data correctly. NAS devices often contain this type of storage drive. We have a post going into detail on what to do in this situation.
For smaller external USB storage drives, these are often comprised of Solid State Drive or Flash Memory. As there are no physical moving parts in these drives, these will not experience the potential clicking sound.
But these smaller drives can still have their data recovered for many types of issues such as the ones below:
- Accidentally deleted/lost files or photos.
- Viruses and Malware corrupting data
- Blue Screen Due to Windows Corruption.
- Hard Drive not found on start-up.
- ‘This Hardware Device is Not Connected to The Computer
- The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error’
- Data inaccessible (Excluding Bitlocker)
- Hard Disk Read Error Occurred
- Hard Drive Error ‘0x80071ac3’ – Volume Is Dirty
- ‘The Parameter is Incorrect’
- The Request Failed Due to Fatal Device Hardware Error
How long will the recovery process take?
In general, most recoveries we carry out at Elite Data Recovery take between 3 and 5 days to complete. Starting with diagnostics to the end of the process where we send your recovered data back out to you.
The time it takes to recover your data is mainly down to the following variables:
- The size of the data being recovered.
- 10GB of data will recover much quicker than 10TB
- The current condition of the drive. A mildly damaged drive will be read easier by our equipment
- The time it takes to diagnose the problem with drive.
- Some drives will need to pass through a series of tests before we are confident in the recovery method to use
- The time it takes us to get the go ahead after we have done the initial diagnostics
- We will give the results of our findings to you, and only continue if you are happy.
- The age of the damaged media
- Drives near the end of their life will have a harder time being read by any equipment
- The type of the damaged media, SATA/IDE/NAS
- Each different type of media has a different read speed, so some will complete their recovery tasks faster than others.
