Solid-state drives (SSDs) may boost the performance of servers and PCs, but it can be difficult to recover lost data from those speedy drives when things turn awry.
According to Kroll Ontrack, a data recovery specialist, the complexity of how data is stored on SSDs makes recovering data from damaged drives difficult and time consuming.
“SSDs are a newer technology, and very few data recovery providers have the ability to handle the RAID and SSD layers required to put the data together in the event of a failure,” says Jeff Pederson, manager of data recovery operations at Kroll Ontrack.
“Recovery requires specialised tools and software, and usually a significant investment in R&D, as data is stored in a different way on each drive. When evaluating SSDs against traditional hard disks, organisations need to make sure that they take into consideration the possibility of data loss and the subsequent need for a more time-consuming data recovery.”
Kroll Ontrack has teams of engineers to help businesses recover lost data with hardware information provided by disk manufacturers. It also reverse-engineers a gamut of file formats to piece together corrupted data, CK Lee, country manager at Kroll Ontrack Singapore told Techgoondu during a briefing last week.
Apart from SSDs, it is also difficult to recover data from mobile devices, according to Kroll Ontrack. Although more companies are turning to virtualisation technologies, such as virtual desktops, to keep corporate data off employee devices, most workers will still download data onto their devices to work offline, say on a plane.
Just two years ago, desktop and laptop hard drives accounted for an equal share of data recovery requests by Kroll Ontrack’s customers. This year, 80 per cent of requests involved mobile devices including laptops, tablets and smartphones.
And as more companies allow employees to use their personal devices for work, Kroll Ontrack says “organisations will need to find ways to accommodate this trend in a secure environment, with both data recovery and data destruction playing a key role in planning.”
Kroll Ontrack has also received more requests to recover data from virtual environments. This was partly due to user errors, where IT administrators deleted virtual drives by mistake.
