Hard drive recovery in Houston

Why hard drives fail in Houston

Hard drives in Houston face two particular enemies: water and power. A drive that has been in floodwater can still hold recoverable data, but spinning it up with mud or dried minerals on the platters can make the heads gouge the surface and destroy it. Surges when the grid comes back after a hurricane or freeze often burn out the protective components on the drive's circuit board, so the drive goes silent or will not spin. In both cases the data usually survives on the platters. Keep the drive unpowered and ship it with the free label.

Houston runs on hard drives that rarely get thought about until they stop. Medical practices and imaging centers around the Texas Medical Center keep local archives on desktop drives and small NAS units, energy and engineering offices store survey and project data on workstations that are years old, and plenty of shops, warehouses, and apartment complexes record security cameras to a DVR with a single spinning drive inside. Those camera recorders write around the clock, so their drives wear steadily, and they often sit in a hot back room or utility closet where nobody checks on them until footage is needed.

Gulf humidity is the slow problem. A mechanical drive is not airtight; it breathes through a small filter, and months in a damp garage or an office that shuts its air conditioning off on weekends can leave moisture and corrosion on the circuit board contacts. Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 and Hurricane Ike in 2008 also showed that water and long outages can hit the same building in the same week. If a drive starts clicking, beeping, or vanishing from the computer, shut it down rather than copying just one more folder, write down what happened, and keep it in a dry, cool room until it ships.

How it works from Houston