05 May 2010

ONTRACK DATA RECOVERY TOOL ENHANCEMENTS SPEED TURNAROUND FOR FLASH AND SOLID STATE DRIVES

Kroll Ontrack®, the leading provider of information management, data recovery, and legal technology products and services, today announced enhancements to its data recovery solutions for Flash and Solid State Drives (SSDs). This refined toolkit allows Ontrack® Data Recovery engineers to offer customers a higher success rate and quicker data retrieval turnaround, while increasing the integrity of the information recovered. Industry analysts have indicated that well over 100 vendors are investing heavily in SSD technology.

As prices continue to decrease, large information technology companies and laptop/notebook manufacturers will increasingly integrate Flash-based SSDs into their business solution portfolios and consumer products, taking advantage of improved read/write performance, efficient heat dissipation, lower energy consumption and decreasing cost.

As the Flash and SSD memory storage market matures and more users rely on Flash memory and SSDs to store their electronic files, new challenges in data recovery have emerged – particularly those related to Flash and SSD file storage and organisation. Unlike traditional hard drives, where information is stored linearly and concentrically on the drive, storage on Flash and SSDs employs “wear leveling” techniques, whereby information is evenly distributed across random blocks of the memory chip.

“Eighty percent of the time we employ proprietary methods to solve Flash and SSD data loss problems, which often involves removing components of the device to resolve the corrupted information,” said Robert Winter, chief engineer at Ontrack Data Recovery services.“Efforts to better understand and manage Flash and SSD storage challenges – wear leveling, in particular – have greatly increased Kroll Ontrack’s ability to sort out file systems and manage the complexity of data stored on Flash or SSD drives, improving the speed and quality of the recovery.”

“Flash and SSD drives remove one data loss factor: spinning or moving parts, but human error, environmental disasters and unspecified corruption incidents remain factors. With improved capabilities related to Flash and SSD file storage technologies, Kroll Ontrack is better equipped to meet customers’ evolving recovery needs,” concluded Pederson.

Through its Ontrack Data Recovery products and services, Kroll Ontrack is the largest, most experienced and technologically advanced provider of data recovery products and services worldwide. Using its hundreds of proprietary tools and techniques, Ontrack Data Recovery solutions help businesses and consumers recover lost or corrupted data from all types of operating systems and media and storage devices through its do-it-yourself, remote and in-lab capabilities. Kroll Ontrack offers a free initial consultation for customers experiencing a data loss.