False Capacity Flash Drives
A few weeks ago, a case came through Gillware’s doors related to a flash drive that was reading as 64GB in size, and yet would only save up to 8GB of data. After greater than 8GB had been written to the…
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Degaussing and Sanitizing: Intentional Data Destruction
Degaussing a hard drive is the process of using a strong magnetic field to erase the data from the magnetic substrate of the hard drive platters. That basically just means taking a hard drive and holding it against a big magnet.…
Spotting Email Scams
This morning, our Technical Lead sent out a rather concerned company-wide email related to a potential malware threat delivered via email. The email in question was sent to one of our data recovery engineers by the address “admin@gillware.com,” which isn’t…
Common RAID Performance Killers: Consistency Checks
Updated 1/1/2022 Here at Gillware, we use many LSI MegaRAID controllers, some of the more popular controllers out there. Although LSI Technologies was acquired by Avagotech in 2014, everyone still refers to them as LSI controllers, so we will too. Semantics aside,…
A Very Dangerous Hyper-V Check Box
First Off, Why Virtualize? For those of you familiar with Hyper-V or virtualization, feel free to skip ahead. For anyone else, this section will provide some context to the issue at hand. To begin, Hyper-V is Microsoft’s version of virtualization…
SSD Form Factor Buyer’s Guide
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]We’ve been writing a lot about solid state drives lately. To be fair, so has everyone else. SSDs have been gradually ascending the rungs of technological relevance for over ten years now, culminating in their current status as the greatest…
Cloud Computing and the $67 Billion Dell-EMC Deal
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Last week we mentioned the potential acquisition of EMC Corporation by Dell, with EMC reportedly being valued at around $50 billion. While previously just rumors, the talk has been substantiated in a mutual announcement from the two organizations. Valued at…
Drive Handling Guide for IT Professionals
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”4025″ img_size=”1200×600″ alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Originally posted June 27th, 2011. Updated Oct. 6th, 2015.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Clients who suddenly lose access to their drive’s data may come to you in a panic. They may expect that you will have some simple trick to get…
Are SSDs Replacing HDDs in Enterprise Storage?
The short answer is that for now, no. Many organizations still use traditional spinning media in their data solutions and tend to be slow to change their infrastructure when it seems costly upfront. The long answer is that when we…