Data Recovery Donor Hard Drives

[lcoughey]

In case you didn't already know, data recovery labs are known to charge a lot for their services...especially when parts are needed. What you might not have known is that those selling them the parts are making a killing off of selling them the parts.

In the past year, DeepSpar created a site (www.mydonordrives.com) where data recovery labs and anyone else who would like to list their hard drive inventory so that we could have access to each other's databases. For those with DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 systems, the populating of information is a lot faster as it will read details from the service tracks and populate a lot of the fields automatically. But, you can still enter drives in manually, if you wish.

I'm suggesting that you consider listing all your hard drives around your shops, including those in your systems on this site. Just be sure to fully erase them before you send them off, for obvious reasons. I've gone so far as to include it as an iFrame into my own site (www.recoveryforce.com/data-recovery/donor-hard-drives-for-data-recovery/) to draw more traffic to my site, should you want to do the same.

If you have any questions about it, you can either contact DeepSpar directly through their contact link on the site, or you can ask me and I will do my best to answer you based on my experience as a user.

 

[mraikes]

It says you have to be an "authorized seller" to list drives on that site.

I sent an email to their support contact asking how to become one and will report back here if they respond.

 

[lcoughey]

I confirmed with Andrei, the owner of DeepSpar, that he is open to resellers posting too. But yes, you need to be setup by them to have the ability to list drives...keeps the spammers and scammers away.

 

[mraikes]

Maybe you could ask Andrei to speak to Serge and either of them could let us know how to do it. Because here's Serge's response:

"Hi Mathew,

The main value of that site is its integration with our DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 hardware. The hardware can automatically pull all the donor matching parameters from the drive's firmware subsystem (much more than what is physically written anywhere on the drive) and posts them to the site together with a drive health check. The idea is that data recovery companies can sell their extra donor drives that they no longer require to other data recovery companies. The site is completely free; it's ran as a courtesy service for our customers.

The only other way to post drives up on the website is manually by working with our support team to convert the inventory listings you have into a format that can be uploaded to our site. We are open to working with suppliers who have over 1,000 drives available for sale.

To sum up, to post drives you either need to own a DeepSpar Disk Imager 4, or you need to have a 1,000 or more drives that you'd like to sell. Let me know if you fall into either of those categories and I'd be glad to help.

Sincerely,
Serge Shirobokov
Technical Sales Manager"

Since I neither own a Deepspar nor have 1,000 drives (!), I guess I'm out.

Luke, maybe you and your other data recovery buddies should come up with a database that us little TN'ers could add to. If it were a valid outlet for old/used drives it wouldn't take long for the TN community to surpass the measly 894 drives listed on the donordrives website.

 

[lcoughey]

I'll look into it and will follow up when I know more.

 

[gikstar]

Personally I can't be bothered. I just save up my bad drives and when I have 40 or more I drive them by $300 Data Recovery on my way into downtown Los Angeles... I don't ask for anything in return. To me they are junk which I know can be of value to a recovery company, so I Bless them

 

[lcoughey]

Personally I can't be bothered. I just save up my bad drives and when I have 40 or more I drive them by $300 Data Recovery on my way into downtown Los Angeles... I don't ask for anything in return. To me they are junk which I know can be of value to a recovery company, so I Bless them

I wasn't referring to dead drives. I'm referring to every drive you have. If I were to offer you $180 for the 500GB hard drive in your system, would you have to take long to think about it? I've got a project here right now where we are looking for a very old Maxtor (mid 90's). We cannot find the exact match, but the close matches are selling for $249. Pretty crazy, knowing that the drive isn't really worth more than $5.

 

[Larry Sabo]

I've just arranged with an electronics recycler to supply me drives that he receives. I'll test them and return any that are not suitable donors and pay him a small fee for each of those that are. I want to try to strike such a deal with other recyclers, too. Prices for donor drives are ludicrous.

 

[lcoughey]

I've just arranged with an electronics recycler to supply me drives that he receives. I'll test them and return any that are not suitable donors and pay him a small fee for each of those that are. I want to try to strike such a deal with other recyclers, too. Prices for donor drives are ludicrous.

Yup...but, it is not common for recyclers to have the exact model of Seagate DM series drive you need when you need it.

 

[lcoughey]

I guess I'm at fault for misleading you. I just had a good conversation with Serge and better understand where they are coming from. To summarize, they want the site to provide the hidden details about listed drives that you cannot find on the label of the drive. These are the details that are becoming more critical for part compatibility.

So, with DDI4, it reads the information directly from the drive and populates the fields on the site.

So, for those without DDI4, they are expecting to have a PC3K system from which they can manually populate that data. But, because of the huge amount of work it will take, they'd prefer to make sure that these sellers have a significant number of drives to be listed.

In short, they want to make sure that the site is full of drives with the correct information than a site full of drives that don't have any of the necessary details needed for data recovery.

Sorry for misleading you. For those of you who do have DDI4 systems, be sure to get your hard drive inventory listed.

 

[mraikes]

I got excited for a moment there, but the oldest Maxtor I can find off hand is from 2003.

So apart from the site Deepspar is trying to build, do most other donor drive providers have access to such hidden information?

That is, how often do you just have to "go with what you know" from whatever information is on the label? Or is that simply not done?

 

[lcoughey]

I got excited for a moment there, but the oldest Maxtor I can find off hand is from 2003.

So apart from the site Deepspar is trying to build, do most other donor drive providers have access to such hidden information?

That is, how often do you just have to "go with what you know" from whatever information is on the label? Or is that simply not done?

Without DeepSpar's site to bring the inventory of all the labs together, we are stuck purchasing from a few suppliers who specialize in donor drives for data recovery. These suppliers are pretty good, but they can only sell what they have. The advantage of MyDonorDrives.com is that they it can list drives in labs all around the globe.

I've thought about doing in the past, but perhaps I can do better by actually posting drives that I need for parts here...I'd rather give one of you the money for the drive than to someone I don't know.