PSA: Modern SMR drives act more like SSDs. Deleted data may not be recoverable.

[LordXeb]

Hello everyone, 

I wanted to give everyone a heads up on this. Modern hard drives with SMR have TRIM enabled on them. Yes, that TRIM that is found in SSDs. If you delete data it may not be recoverable, at all. Overwritten, deleted, etc it doesn't matter. The data may be gone pretty quick and returned to zeros. 

 

This is something I have found while getting back into data recovery again (yeah!!!!!). Any drive with SMR drive that has come in with deleted data has been gone forever. You can sometimes find Master File Table records, but all files are empty. Basically husks. 
What drives you think have SMR? All those 3.5" drives that say they are, but many MANY 2.5" drives are SMR drives as well. You have been warned. 
 

[GanjaSMK]

This is imperative information for those of us who side-gig PC related work including recovery/data protections.  Thanks LordXeb!

[LordXeb]

7 hours ago, GanjaSMK said:

This is imperative information for those of us who side-gig PC related work including recovery/data protections.  Thanks LordXeb!

Oh I do more than just side recovery. I do clean room work, firmware repair, file system reconstruction, data deletion recovery. I also do RAID recoveries as well. I deal with a lot of badly degraded drives too. Currently learning about the newer drives and working on SSDs. BTW, I would say over half of SSDs are not recoverable either do to no support, severe firmware/controller failure or just straight up dead NAND. Monolithic recovery is a whole other specialty. 

Also, a lot of modern drives are not supported due to a lot of reasons. Especially large capacity drives. And in particular helium drives. Helium drives DO NOT operate in a non-helium environment. Many can detect when there isn't enough helium around and won't even unpark their heads. Others will have instant head crash without helium. Finding parts for head exchanges is hard due to lack of drives and they apparently have some tricky adaptives/firmware things. Plus, there is literally no utility support with a PC3000. There are some labs out there that have ways, but they don't share. 

Edited February 11, 2023 by LordXeb

[GanjaSMK]

Oh that's pretty intense for you; that's the REAL deal. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, eh!