Admittedly, when the temperature is approaching 35 degrees C in your office and you’re wearing a jacket and tie, your priority is likely to be keeping yourself cool and comfortable rather than attending to the comfort of your computers and storage drives.

You should always ensure that your computer is placed in an area where there is a good flow of air. Don’t relegate it to that snug area between your desk and the partition wall. Don’t place your external storage devices on a bookshelf, squeezed between “Marketing Techniques” and “Roget’s Thesaurus” or inside that convenient little cabinet next to your desk.

Heat is the primary cause of failure for hard disks. They need to be nurtured, especially when temperatures reach the levels they did at the end of July.

We’ve had plenty of hard drives in for data recovery in recent weeks – and we’ve taken pictures of some of the resulting damage caused by overheating, and also of an external hard disk that appears to have been constructed with the single purpose of providing a fireworks display.

Laptop drives themselves generate far less heat than their full-size desktop computer counterparts. They are generally quite content running at slightly higher ambient temperatures. However, laptops, and especially the latest models with dual-core CPUs, can themselves run extremely hot. Most of us have seen photographs or video footage of a laptop computer on fire – although this is typically battery failure.

Whilst I cannot confirm the validity of this, apparently a laptop user in the USA successfully sued the manufacturer as the laptop (which she had rested on her lap) burnt her leg. However, having worked on a number of these recent models, I can confirm that they do get incredibly hot.

As a rule, they should only be used on a hard, flat surface – such as a desktop. This allows at least some heat dissipation. Don’t place the laptop on a cushion so you can “see the screen and reach the keyboard more easily” – this is asking for problems.

Whilst the commonest cause for hard drives in general is heat, with laptop drives, as well as heat, there are other issues such as fundamental manufacturing flaws or anomalies. In spite of this, because of the portability of laptop computers, users tend to be unaware of the damage that can be caused to a hard drive by moving the laptop whilst it’s powered on. I’ve witnessed users casually dropping (from only a few centimetres, obviously) their laptops onto a desk, which results in high G-forces and which can adversely affect the hard drive.

Those of you familiar with our stance on external drives – here is a typical scenario.

We were sent an external drive for recovery. It almost certainly failed due to shocking overheating.

This is the storage device, with the cover removed.

There are some glaring problems with this setup.

Firstly, the drives are mounted right next to each other. There are mere millimetres separating them, and millimetres separating the drives and the housing cover.

Secondly, the hard drives they have used are what we would call “of questionable reliability.”

Thirdly, and it gets worse, the drives are configured in a striped array. Also known as RAID 0, if one drive fails, all your data disappears.

Lastly, at the rear of the housing is about the only ventilation in the entire unit. You can see the tiny aperture in this picture:

This minuscule opening would normally be used to house a 40mm fan, which would have to spin at incredibly high speed to cool the interior of the housing. Only in this case, as with so many others, there was no fan installed.

I removed the PCB from one of the drives (unusually, they had both blown; normally with these units, one will blow and the user will quickly power down the unit before the other fails.)

This is the damage to the PCB.

….and here are the scorch marks on the housing.

Bearing in mind these drives have their PCB mounted with the chips facing inward, you can imagine the ferocity of the scorch, having blown straight through the PCB, and the resulting fumes and smoke.

Yet these storage units are marketed as (and I quote directly) “To help you efficiently manage your data, [company name deleted] offers a full line of desktop devices with impressive speed, power and reliability.”

I contacted the manufacturer of this unit. This is how it went:

Retrodata:

“This unit has failed. Both drives have burned logic boards. The reason is that there is inadequate ventilation within the unit. There is no active ventilation cooling the drives. I believe the drive temperatures probably exceeded 75 degrees Centigrade.

I would appreciate it if you could send me two similar hard drives in order that I may try to recover the client’s data.”

Them:

“Thank you for your email and comments, they have been forwarded on to Management. Our [name deleted] range is designed so the casing dissipates heat away form [sic] the mechanism(s). They have been thoroughly tested by our R&D department prior to being put on sale so as to adhere to European and US standards.

We have been selling these 500GB models for over two years and had very few returns for units getting too hot. I believe our overall returns rate is also below the industry standard.

I’m afraid that we cannot supply parts or spare mechanisms for our drives. If the drive is reassembled complete with all parts and undamaged we will happily inspect the unit and as long as nothing is missing or damaged ask our repair centre to repair the unit. Please note that as part of the repair process drives are formatted and in this case the mechanisms would be replaced so any data on it would be lost.”

We have serious issues with their approach. Just because their R&D department test the drives prior to marketing them in order to adhere to European and US standards does not necessarily imply they are of merchantable quality. It is preposterous to assume that the casing dissipates sufficient heat in order to keep the drives cool – especially in high ambient temperatures. Active, real air flow is necessary.

Lastly - accidents do happen…

USB drives. Fantastically useful for all sorts of reasons. But they have a major flaw. They are rather delicate.

I find it amusing that one manufacturer is boasting about one of their models, which will survive being driven over by a car.

Ultimately, though, one of the biggest problems we come across is damage caused by walking into (or swinging a chair into) a USB drive plugged into your computer, snapping the connectors and the area of the PCB to which the connectors are attached. I wonder if the previously-mentioned manufacturers have taken that into account?

This is the result of an unfortunate accident in which someone walked into the USB card whilst it was plugged into a computer’s rear USB port. The PCB snapped, and buckled sufficiently to cause a component to break off.

Repairing these, on the face if it, appears simple; but modern PCBs tend to have more than one layer, and it is more than likely that the traces between the layers were damaged, making it far more complex than a simple soldering job.

If at all possible, try to get yourself a USB card that has the connector separated from the main component by a cable. They are infinitely more resilient to this sort of accident. Alternatively, use a USB extension cable and keep the USB card somewhere safe and out of harm’s way.

Well, he got it wrong. He should have said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and the catastrophic failure of your hard drive the day before you were going to back it up.”

I remain amazed at the number of recovery jobs we receive, where the user has no backup whatsoever – let alone a recent offering. Typical reasons we hear are:

• “I have been meaning to copy my data to DVD for months.”
• “I thought hard drives were guaranteed to last for five years. This is only two months old and it has failed.”
• “I have too much data to back up.”
• “My Windows installation became corrupted so I used the laptop manufacturer’s utility to reload it – but it deleted all my data in the process.”
• “We had a power surge and it killed the file server. Our tape backups didn’t work.”
• “I don’t have time to spend backing up.”

Being in the data recovery business, I get to hear myriad reasons for data loss. Some are just plain bad luck, yet others are situations that could have been avoided with a little planning.

Users are simply not backing up their data as regularly or as securely as they were fifteen years ago.

Of course, there will be additional reasons for this phenomenon that I will miss in my analysis, and the reader is invited to enlighten me!

Now, a 400GigaByte hard drive costs £100. In 1990s terms it would equate to over £4million!

Similarly, a backup device (tape) now costs over £1,000 – 10 times the cost of the 400GB hard drive – and £2-3,000 for a top-specification unit.

Small wonder, then, that the average home user / small business user doesn’t automatically install a tape backup unit as a matter of course. “It’s just not worth the expenditure.”

In recent years, there has been a growing trend for users to save their data to their local hard drives, connecting to the main server primarily for email, internet access, messaging and printing facilities, and to access the company database. I couldn’t possibly hope to cover all the psychological and technical reasons for this, but the main factor that springs to mind is that because network throughput speed has not matched the exponential increase in hard drive capacity, saving large multimedia files to a centralised location can take a frustratingly long time; it’s easier and quicker to save these large files locally. When you bring laptop computers into the equation, the potential becomes even more serious, due to the portability factor in laptops.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, fifteen years ago, users’ data files were measured in kilobytes. Now, 300MB is not uncommon. Bring video editing into the equation, and it becomes Gigabytes.

There are many backup solutions on the market that will backup the server data, as well as any computers connected to the server. However, in reality this practice doesn’t materialise, as many companies don’t back up during the day and at night, when the tapes are running, the users have left for the day, with their data on their laptop.

Almost invariably, though, (and I have also been guilty of this) all the images will be saved to a folder on your local hard drive “to be sorted at a later date.”

Before you know it, you have 5,000 images on your computer – of which perhaps 500 will be pictures you’d really hate to lose. One hundred of those will be your wedding pictures. Another hundred, your honeymoon. The rest will be made up of your baby’s first few hours, their first steps, the first time they fell asleep at the dinner table, face-down in the spaghetti bolognaise. All utterly precious, and they simply could not be replaced.

The pictures remain on your computer’s hard drive, and you keep adding to them. There’s no need to have them printed – you can always view them on the computer; there are loads of free downloads for creating photo albums and viewing pictures. Besides, any day now, you will sift through them. You’ll get prints made of the best, and burn the lot to DVD.

But that never happens. One day you switch your computer on. Only it doesn’t boot up – the hard drive has failed. Or you have an electricity surge. Or a burglary. Whatever the reason – the only existing copy of your photographs is on your hard drive, and you never quite got around to backing them up to DVD or having them printed for posterity. It takes about twenty minutes to burn a thousand images to DVD.

Times have moved on to the point where computers are treated as part of the furniture. (Even worse, actually; no-one punches their sofa if it misbehaves, whereas a computer can find itself the focus of an insidiously violent assault.) Instead of the crowd gathering around to catch a glimpse of the inside during a repair or upgrade, it’s more a case of “can’t you make a mess somewhere else?” Little wonder this disdain leads users to treat computers with derision, and assume that the ugly box under their desk should simply work – and work forever, without failure.

For example, between 1992 and 1995, we had one single drive fail in a server. However, because the array was fully duplexed (two controllers, two hard drives in RAID 1) there was little downtime and absolutely no loss of data. (By the same token, controllers seemed to fail fairly regularly in those heady days, hence the popularity of drive duplexing as opposed to simple mirroring.)

We have monitored the heat produced by hard drives in different environments, and have found that the temperature of a standard, 7200rpm 250GB hard drive in an external enclosure with no active cooling can rise to over 70 degrees Centigrade. Some of the chips on the logic board exceed even that. We discovered that some manufacturers’ drives ran consistently warmer than others.

With proper cooling, however, this temperature reduces to a few degrees Centigrade above ambient temperatures. The ideal solution would be to install a fan that blows across the length of the hard drive, cooling both logic board and the drive casing. Not always pretty, especially if the fan has to be mounted at the front of the case, but very effective. Some factory-manufactured server cases have extractor fans, with carefully thought-out designs so that, when the computer is closed up, there is a healthy flow of air across the drive arrays. The trouble with this is that every orifice in the computer tends to clog up with dust and airborne detritus. Not a problem if the orifice is a tiny gap where the lid has been slightly bent, but awkward if the orifice in question is a DVD or tape drive. Besides, if you’re hot, you don’t stand behind the fan.

External drives tend to be moved about considerably more than the average computer, sometimes quite vigorously, which further compromises their integrity. The worst external unit we ever saw (we still have it in our “Museum of Design Diabolicalness”) had two large drives in a Raid 0 array. The drives were fixed within about a millimetre of each other, and had less than 5mm clearance all round. The unit was sealed, was made of some kind of plastic, and had no active cooling whatsoever. It was manufactured by a very well known company. Unfortunately, they are still in business, and still selling products that a local community tip would refuse to take.