What is the future for data recovery business?

[jag17]

With new technologies like SSD is it true data recovery business will shrink in size in future?

With no mechanical parts I believe SSD will have less crashes than HDD. Though SSD's will have their own problems, generally I feel it will be more rugged and after couple of years with new technology the failure rate will be less than HDD. And with all the things we do to recover data from HDD like platter swap, head swap, board swap will be a history.

I believe by 2012 all the laptops and portable drives will switch to SSD.

A successful data recovery company getting 5 to 10 disks per day now, may only get 1 or 2 SSD in future seriously affecting the business. It is good for customers that they don't lose data, but bad for DR business

So is it true that DR business is not a good business to be in the near future say after 3 to 5 years?

[hddguy]

I believe it will be a little while longer than 2012 before all present hard disks will be phased out. Also, I believe there is a higher failure rate with SSD drives at moment that there are with common mechanical devices. Also, the only main difference will be mechanical faults. Problems such as deleted data, electrical damage, firmware failure, user error, OS error etc will still be a big factor.

I highly doubt it will affect the DR business as seriously as you seem to believe.

Maybe sombody else has an opinion?

[jono-ats]

All businesses have a product life cycle, and mechanical hard drives are no exception. Medium or long-term prospects aren't good. By the same token, we still get in drives that are 10 years old . . .

Jono

[jag17]

All businesses have a product life cycle, and mechanical hard drives are no exception. Medium or long-term prospects aren't good. By the same token, we still get in drives that are 10 years old . . .

Jono

Yes it is true we still get drives that are 10 years old, but don't you think the volume of SSD disks for DR will be less compared to HDDs?

[BlackST]

SSD drives won't replace actual HDDs.
Many people wish it will, but it is not in near future. Maybe in 2030.

Want to try ? use a common flash drive, PCMCIA style with common OS like XP or even win 98... you'll be amazed how fast it will go tits up due to write cycles, especially at paging file / temp ....

All these discussions, beside venting mouth and teeth, or better, fingers and monitors, are of no practical utility : we have 500 GB drives, crap or slightly better according to what perople demand and are willing to spend, for about 50/60 EUR. Calculate the cost per MB/GB and compare. And make a serious technical analysis (not the bullshit read on other forum or "I have a friend that heard that....") : for the next 10 years, I think HDDs will be unbeatable.

About DR, until people will drop their drives, it will last.

PERIOD !

[snowengineer]

for the next 10 years, I think HDDs will be unbeatable.

lets make a bet..

the performance of your ssd's depends on the used cell-technology and the speed of the used controller... imagine that also the wear leveling algorithm are becoming better and better (but making it harder to recover the data)

[jag17]

Want to try ? use a common flash drive, PCMCIA style with common OS like XP or even win 98... you'll be amazed how fast it will go tits up due to write cycles, especially at paging file / temp ....

That may not be true for up coming operating systems which may be optimized for SSD's !!

: we have 500 GB drives, crap or slightly better according to what perople demand and are willing to spend, for about 50/60 EUR. Calculate the cost per MB/GB and compare.

After 2 or 3 years performance may increase and cost will come down. This all depends on how big the market for SSD becomes. If after three years all the portable devices and laptops are of SSD then seriously that will shrink HDD market and subsequently for DR business. Given the complexity of SSD I think the reverse engg method we did for HDD for so many years is of no good. it will be interesting to see how DR business will come up for SSD challenge

And make a serious technical analysis (not the bullshit read on other forum or "I have a friend that heard that....") : for the next 10 years, I think HDDs will be unbeatable.

I am sure that HDD will be around for more than 10 years, but my point is SSD will be more prevalent in the market shrinking the HDD market and eventually affecting DR business

[quote="BlackST"
About DR, until people will drop their drives, it will last.
[/quote]

That is true for HDD and not always true for SSD, there you miss one more customer for DR business

[jono-ats]

I think that the technical challenges of swap space wear, speed, etc. will be solved over time. Just like LCD yields and costs . . .

We're definitely going to see more of them, and as far as I can tell, there are probably going to be more instances of unrecoverable drives. And quite different tools and techniques will be needed.

[gtd4242]

A successful data recovery company getting 5 to 10 disks per day now....

There are probably only a very few companies getting that many drives in per day.

[BlackST]

Very few...

P.S. "incoming" is different from "jobs to do"

[jag17]

A successful data recovery company getting 5 to 10 disks per day now....

There are probably only a very few companies getting that many drives in per day.

Well it depends on the country. In singapore that is what top DRs are getting 5 to 10 disks per day. And may be recover one or two per day.

Cheers
-Jag

[harddisk]

My opinion, I think the market for hard disk still will not last long we have many certainties as the SSD is going to behave on a daily basis, an assumption and if the burning of a memory of a ssd drive? to recover a memory chip burned? as it burns the pcb we still have the disc, everything is a guess, new tools will emerge would be the ideal hybrid hard disk, check out the Seagate launched the XT Seagate Barracuda 2 TB SATA and 6Gbps, plus a new hard drive that supports SATA III today is worth more data security than a very fast ssd at risk of losing everything very fast, let's wait for the scenes of the next chapter

[gtd4242]

My theory is, that you will see a dramatic shift to SSD. However, I believe that consumers may want to slowly start to revert back to hard drives. The reason I think this is that right now, most people who suffer a hard drive failure that is not catastrophic (i.e. no platter damage) are probably able to get their data back in most cases. Any reputable data recovery company with the proper experience and tools should be able to swap heads, platters, etc and recover the data more often than not. However, what are people's reaction going to be when they are told nothing can be done on their SSD when it is fried? I believe those people will want to ditch the SSD and go back to a drive that at least has a snowball's chance of being recovered if a major failure occurs. I think as time progresses you will probably see a more hybrid type drive become more common. Where you have a standard drive, and maybe the most critical data is backed up to an SSD or vice versa.

I just don't see people being receptive towards a product that is known to fail, with very few options for repair. Would you buy a new car if there were no way to fix it should even the smallest component on it fail?

I don't ever see corporations who store large amounts of data ever going to SSD. It seems like it would be the most foolish thing to do, unless you have redundant backups of your already redundant backup.

[jag17]

However, what are people's reaction going to be when they are told nothing can be done on their SSD when it is fried? I believe those people will want to ditch the SSD and go back to a drive that at least has a snowball's chance of being recovered if a major failure occurs.

I just don't see people being receptive towards a product that is known to fail, with very few options for repair. Would you buy a new car if there were no way to fix it should even the smallest component on it fail?

There will be always small percentage of people doing that. But given the nature of general consumer they do not always think to far about the possibility of failure and buy a HDD to be safe. They will always think of performance, cool and go with the crowd mentality. I am only referring to general consumer using portable disks and laptops, the companies may well do so planning and consider HDD.

And yes it is really scary to think that board fried and data cooked. And even with board intact with all these encoding and translation tables to remap the location of data constantly to safe gaurd cells, I think chances of recovering from SSD is pretty slim. With huge SSD market and slim HDD market the HDD DR business will be trickling. That is my opinion.

[maux]

HDD's are going to be around for a long while yet, and will be needing recovery for a while yet beyond that.

Think about it, a computer isn't limited to one drive, or one form factor of drive. Especially 3.5" drives will still be produced for mass consumer markets for years and years to come. You need to think of the prospective sizes of platter drives in the next 10 years and you might conclude that their goinig to be around the 10T - 50T range. You might also want to consider the increasingly massive demands of operating systems and media on storage, games used to be 250MB, now MOST games are more than 4GB, many more than 7GB, richer textures, more polygons, all equal more storage. Movies were compact formats, DVD,then DVD-DL, now BlueRay. All these will continue to balloon along with the rates of broadband availability, the speed of processors ect.
The recovery market also follows a few years behind the market and of course most drives need years before they may require recovery.

Anyhow, there are great arguments for both formats, both established and emerging. That said, I firmly believe that HDD's (and hence HDD recovery) aren't going to fade from the scene in the next 5-8 years in the consumer market and will continue to be used for mass storage operations for the foreseeable future. Debating what mobile devices will be using in the next 5 years is one thing (no small consideration, I'm not trying to belittle the impact of SSD) but for desktops and many applications I think HDD will be there.

Remember that of course a machine can use more than one type of drives and what I'm more convinced of than anything is that hybrid systems will flourish and many people will still have their larger storage needs met by HDD's and their faster data requirements filled by SSD's.

Thanks for this discussion, I think this is a great topic for us all to think on.

[learner]

it seems data recovery is in great danger.
disks are becoming complex day by day. we have success rate of 5 out of 10. seagate hitachi western digital diska are not recoverable even after wasting 3-4 heads. disks simply dont work.
flash drives are coming up without chips and are non recoverable.this is gloomy picture. after 5 years data recovery will be restricted to ontrack and topmost dr companies simply because smaller companies are not having technology to process complex recoveries

[HDD Spaz]

it seems data recovery is in great danger.
disks are becoming complex day by day. we have success rate of 5 out of 10. seagate hitachi western digital diska are not recoverable even after wasting 3-4 heads. disks simply dont work.
flash drives are coming up without chips and are non recoverable.this is gloomy picture. after 5 years data recovery will be restricted to ontrack and topmost dr companies simply because smaller companies are not having technology to process complex recoveries

If you are only able to recover 5 out of 10 then you are doing your customers a disservice.

Maybe you shoulda 'learner' morer abouta data recovery ah. (excuse more poor Italian accent) lol

[jag17]

after 5 years data recovery will be restricted to ontrack and topmost dr companies simply because smaller companies are not having technology to process complex recoveries

I don't think the top DR companies do anything different from the other DR companies now. I believe this will be the same for flash drives and SSDs in future. I believe with more complexity the cost of recovering from SSD is going to higher than HDD

[cakedi]

Any hardware, any problem , any problem any solution, dont worry

[pcrecovery]

Would someone do an experiment for us? I'd like to take a regular drive of each type (SSD and hdd) and put each in a fire. I am curious to see how well unmodified, regular drives withstand and which is more recoverable. Of course there are many readily available fireproof/waterproof hard drives (internal and external), but I am talking about regular drives of both types here.