What drives do you use for imaging?

[jft135]

For those of you who do data recovery, what is your preferred HDD to use as a target for your imaging? I've always been partial to WD Blacks, but WD Golds are pretty competitive price-wise. Any drive that gets its entire contents regularly overwritten needs to be able to take a beating, so cheap drives are out. I'm just curious what others are using.

 

[lcoughey]

For cloning, we use whatever drive we have on my wiped and tested shelf with enough sectors to hold the clone. We just buy low end drives, as they tend to spend more time off than they do on and have a higher chance of being needed for parts in a future project down the road.

 

[Archon Prime]

If I swap an HDD to replace a new drive even, i'll use WD blue or green, depending on the customers requirements. If they are a gamer or graphics designer, etc I'll recommend black.

 

[labtech]

Same like Luke here. The drive type does not really matter as we use them in rotation all the time. The value is in availability and getting the job done fairly fast rather than in the durability of the drive long term.

 

[TechPJC]

WD Black

 

[Diggs]

Ummm... All my drives are WD Black or Red. But I do choose low-hour drives to image to, not something with 45,000+ hours on it.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

If we're recovering and sending data back...don't need a long life enterprise drive (5 year)...it's just being used for a few hours, so "any old drive off the shelf" will suffice. Typically an external USB drive so the client can copy their data back. So it's more often a WD Passport.

 

[lcoughey]

Assuming that the patient drive is in pretty rough shape, the time to clone could take a week or two. But, usually a day or two. Then assume it takes another day or two to recover the data. The clone sits at least 2 weeks before being wiped and tested before being put back into circulation for the next job.

So, a drive may be powered on 300-400 hours in a 720 hour month (30 x 24). At that, it is not taxed at all, as the write pattern is in a slow steady motion, not requiring a lot of seeks. In the world of data recovery, I'd rather have 10 cheap drives for cloning than 5 expensive ones. Of course, if you only do 1 or 2 jobs a month, it won't matter what you have as you will have plenty of time to wipe and test your drive and get it back into circulation before the next project needs it.

 

[Ken's PC Repair]

Like the others I'll use anything that's large enough. I retire drives when they get to 40k hours even if they are still healthy. After they are done being a target drive they are wiped, tested, then labeled for reuse.