hard drive recovery

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A hard drive contains several round, flat disks called platters. These platters are stiff and are often called “disks”. These stiff discs give hard drives their name (in the days of old, some discs were made of thin plastic; they were called Floppy Disks.) Platters, which normally measure 3.5-inches in size, are coated with a substance that allows data to be written magnetically. Mounted on a spindle, these platters are stacked on top of one another, separated by a cushion of air a scant millimeters apart. Within this space, the drive’s read/write head passes over each of the platters and reads and writes data on each platter using electromagnetic signals. Heads can read and write on either side of each individual platter, depending on the drive’s capacity; the more platters in a drive, the larger the capacity can be. Data is written in concentric circles (called tracks) that contain a number of sectors. Each of the sectors contains hundreds or thousands of bytes of data.

The platters sit on a spindle that is attached to a direct drive motor where the motor’s shaft serves as the spindle. The spindle spins the platters thousands of rotations per minute, depending on the speed of the hard drive. Most consumer-based hard drives have spindle speeds of either 5,400RPM or 7,200RPM while faster server drives support speeds of 10,000RPM and 15,000RPM. This spindle speed is considered the mechanical speed of the drive; generally, the higher the speed, the faster the data can be accessed and read.

Damage to the platters can occur if the hard drive is continually run in degraded state and at times can make data unrecoverable