Will Ascenzo
Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.
Formatted Crucial SD Memory Card Photo Recovery
Formatted SD Card Recovery – Small Change, Big Consequences A reformat is a small change with big consequences. Whether you do it to a hard drive, an SSD, or an SD card, it tends to play out in the same…
When Your Hard Drive Heads Can’t Shake Hands
The client in this data recovery case study came to Gillware with an unreadable hard drive. When they went to plug the hard drive into their computer, the drive would spin up without any trouble. But the real trouble came…
An External Hard Drive Cat-Astrophe
In this external hard drive recovery case study, the client came to us after catastrophe had befallen their Western Digital My Passport Ultra. The drive had taken a tumble off of their desk, clattering to the floor. When the client…
Unallocated SSD Recovery Case Study: Liteon mSATA SSD
When you first plug in a pristine hard drive or solid state drive, the drive starts out as unallocated. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of a totally new solid state drive (although, sorry, there’s no “new SSD smell”). There’s no…
VMFS RAID-5 Failure
In this data recovery case study, the client had a failed RAID-5 array in their server. The array consisted of four enterprise-grade Seagate Constellation hard drives inside it, providing 12 terabytes of storage space. While the client could still mount…
RAID-1 Data Recovery Case Study: Seeing Double
In this RAID-1 data recovery case, the client had been storing their critical documents on a mirrored RAID array as a form of local backup. When they upgraded their desktop PC to Windows 10, they found that after a reboot…
Seagate Data Recovery: HDD Failure, What a Drag
Hard drive failure happens. Sooner or later, no matter how often you use it, your hard drive will stop working. After all, a lot of very delicate processes work very hard to bring your hard drive to life. And not…
Recover Deleted Photos from SanDisk SD Card
What Makes Flash Different From Disks? Obviously, your memory cards do not store data the same way your hard drive does. The mechanical components necessary to store data magnetically simply cannot be miniaturized to the point where a hard drive can comfortably…
Synology DS411 DiskStation RAID-5 Crash
RAID-5: Fault-Tolerant vs Failure-Proof When you link up three or more drives using RAID-5, special parity data is spread across the drives. Thanks to the parity data, if any one hard drive in the array fails, the RAID controller can…