An example of an area Gillware was able to achieve significant cost savings was in the selection of flexible ISO-5 certified horizontal flow class-100 workstations. Traditionally hard-walled class-100 cleanrooms are used by data recovery organizations to perform invasive recoveries. These cleanrooms can cost millions of dollars to construct and are expensive to maintain. They also make expanding cleanroom operations disruptive and costly. Gillware's clean flow benches cost significantly less than traditional cleanrooms, are easy to maintain, and can be purchased, delivered, and installed in Gillware's lab in less than two weeks. As Gillware's reputation has grown, so has the number of clients using Gillware for their recovery needs. The use of clean flow workstations as opposed to hard-walled cleanrooms allows Gillware to easily expand operational capacity while maintaining tight cost controls.

Gillware performs all engineering functions related to data recovery in-house. We rely heavily on our team of software developers to provide the tools our recovery engineers require to perform their work. Hundreds of new hard drive models are released every year. Each model represents new hard drive firmware, and mechanical and electrical designs, all of which can result in new hard drive failure modes. Producing our recovery tools in-house means Gillware can react quickly to specific hard drive failures as they occur. If Gillware receives a hard drive with a particular problem that a tool has not yet been developed for, a cross-functional team of electrical, mechanical, and software engineers is assembled to address the issue. Although developing proprietary tools is costly, it's an expense that Gillware proudly accepts, and is one of the many reasons for Gillware's emergence as an industry leader.

The solid-state drive (SSD) industry has an opportunity to address the issue of data loss and recovery from failed SSD devices relatively early in the market and product development cycle. The elimination of moving parts in SSD's should increase the mean time between failure when compared to hard disk drives (HDD's), however still maturing technology and unpredictable operating conditions is already resulting in SSD failure. A certain percentage of these failures will involve the loss of critical data and require data recovery services. The paradigm shift from magnetic to semiconductor-based storage required the development of a completely new set of data recovery techniques. These techniques produce varying degrees of success and are expensive and time consuming to perform. In addition, certain implementations of SSD technologies have been identified that can complicate the recovery process and adversely affect the ability to recover data. By choosing to take a proactive approach and assisting data recovery professionals, the SSD industry will help to ease public concern and increase data recovery success rates while minimizing recovery costs and turn-around times.

Click here to check out our whitepaper on SSD drives.