When shopping for a hard drive on online marketplace platforms, if you encounter a deal that appears to be too good to be true, it most likely is not worth the “investment”.
Why might you ask? As a professional data recovery service company, we have seen such hard drives arrive at our labs. We nickname them the “Frankenstein hard drives” because while the chassis appears legitimate, the inside of the drive tells a different story. Inside the box are glued lead weights, including a USB stick that has a much smaller than advertised capacity (see the photo illustration). Furthermore, the firmware is manipulated to make believe the drive has a 4TB (terabyte) or larger capacity. The worst part of it all: the user’s data gets corrupted when stored on such a makeshift device because the data is overwriting itself in a loop to create the illusion it has bigger storage capacity than it actually has. The firmware easily allows the user to write on the storage device, however it does not allow the user to read the data once it is overwritten. This prompts people to contact us for help in data recovery. We of course can recover the data although the user is faced with the harsh reality that they didn’t have 2TB worth of data stored on the device but rather 100GB (gigabyte) of corrupted data we were able to extract and fix for them. The moral of the story is that the excessively low hard drive deals are not worth the hassles that ensue.
Here are tips that will sharpen your intuition on whether the low deal hard drives are genuine hard drives, or “Frankenstein” ones:
Always compare prices: if most merchants offer an average of $60 for a 1TB hard drive for example, don’t fall in the trap for the $25 drives.
If a hard drive manufacturer and model are not mentioned anywhere on the web, chances are, they are fake.
Research the hard drive capacity vis-à-vis the model and size. For example, we have detected promotions for 2.5-inch drives with a 6TB capacity when the current maximum capacity for that form factor is 5TB.
Don’t worry, if you made the mistake of wanting to save a few dollars but ended up with data loss, you can still get your data back. And if shopping for the right data recovery service provider is a daunting task for you, look beyond expert skillsets by confidently selecting a company that provides fair pricing. This means a fixed price for data recovery service as opposed to an escalating pricing scheme that depends on the evaluation of the drive. Fair pricing also means that the company is willing to give its customers a full refund for unsuccessful data recovery attempts. ATP Data Services (www.atpdataservices.com) deeply understand its customers’ needs as it already serves a wide range of customers across industries, recovering data from any brand of storage technology.
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