07 February 2012

Kroll Ontrack develops unique capabilities that dramatically improve data recovery from solid state media

Leading data recovery provider pioneers quality, fast and cost-effective data recovery capabilities for SSDs

LONDON, 7th Feb, 2012 – Kroll Ontrack, the leading provider of data recovery, information management and legal technologies products and services, today announced that it has developed unique, proprietary capabilities, significantly improving the quality of recovery from solid state drives (SSDs) in less than a quarter of the time typically required. The Ontrack Data Recovery engineers at Kroll Ontrack overcame a number of technical challenges associated with flash media in order to develop these capabilities.

Data recovery from new types of data storage can be extremely time-consuming because of the need to research the algorithms used to originally store the data. Previously, recovery from SSDs, if possible at all, took significantly longer than from other storage devices. The new capabilities from Kroll Ontrack automate many of the processes involved ensuring a better, faster recovery for this growing market.

"SSDs have much larger storage capacities than other types of flash storage and the cost per gigabyte is falling rapidly," said Phil Bridge, Managing Director, Kroll Ontrack UK. "As a result, SSDs are increasingly used in data centres and personal devices, with the value of the data contained on them also increasing. The development of SSD recovery capabilities underline the Kroll Ontrack commitment to pioneering data recovery techniques for new and challenging forms of storage media and ensures our capabilities continue to be in line with the needs of our customers."

One of the complexities of data recovery from solid state media is due to wear leveling. Wear leveling is a technique that balances usage evenly across all disk sectors to ensure the maximum functional life of the media, since SSDs generally have a finite number of read/writes before they become unstable. However, in the event of a media failure, wear leveling makes it extremely time consuming to piece the data back together.

"Solid state media presents several challenges for data recovery specialists," said Robert Winter, Chief Engineer, Kroll Ontrack UK. "With traditional spinning media, data usually remains in the same physical location on the disk when it is altered. The situation with solid state media is much more complicated, with the location of the data changing every time it is accessed or re-written, making recovery far more complex."

Another factor that complicates the recovery of data from SSDs is that the individual memory chips on any given device usually work in a RAID-like configuration, which makes data even less contiguous and harder to piece together in the event of failing device malfunction or data corruption. Moreover, there are no standardised configurations across different manufacturers, meaning that the new SSD recovery capabilities need to be able to handle different forms of Error Checking & Control (ECC) and Correct Address Translation via Logical Block.

To create the new capabilities, Ontrack Data Recovery experts conducted extensive research into SSD technology which resulted in an in-depth understanding of this media. This enabled the development of unique processes and procedures and the ability to improve recovery rates while decreasing the average time per recovery.

"The technical challenges involved in producing capabilities to enable a fast and reliable recovery from solid state media were considerable, so we are pleased to be able to offer our customers a best-in-class solution for this increasingly important form of flash media," said Bridge.

About Kroll Ontrack Inc.

Kroll Ontrack provides technology-driven services and software to help legal, corporate and government entities as well as consumers manage, recover, search, analyse, produce and present data efficiently and cost-effectively. In addition to its award-winning suite of software, Kroll Ontrack provides data recovery, data destruction, electronic discovery, document review and ESI consulting services.