Friday, December 23, 2011

[ggaoegjp] Hard drive data recovery for dummies

Consider the operation of disassembling a broken hard drive, installing its platters into another empty drive, then reading the data off of them.  Make this process cheap and easy to do for regular people.  (Currently a specialty shop, hundreds of dollars.)

The general idea is hard drives have many single points of failure, with which nowadays a consumer would simply consider the data lost, despite the data is still existing on the platters.  With wonderful error-correcting codes, it is in fact very difficult to accidentally destroy the entirety of data by mechanical failure. The goal is a change in mindset: once you write data, it really is permanent, short of the drive becoming completely destroyed.

One possible implementation is standardized construction of hard drives.  A vending machine-like kiosk accepts the hard drive down the chute.  A internal robot disassembles and carries out the operation in a clean environment.  Twenty five cents.

Another implementation is, of course, cheap labor.

I think we might need to increase the amount of error correction so that data will more likely survive even imperfect disassembly and reassembly.

Repeat for solid state drives.

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