Scott Moulton of Forensic Strategy Services, LLC just got finished with a great presentation on hard drive recovery. Scott runs the forensics company that has to deal with dead or malfunctioning hard drives a lot, and he had a lot of information on the inner working of hard drive, how new perpendicular hard drives would be pretty easy to recover. He named about a dozen of reasons why hard drives die, and his presentation gave an appreciation for the job of data recovery, and what complexity is involved with it.
For a lot of the hard drives with failing electronics or mechanical parts, the exact same parts need to be purchased and replaced, and therefore Scott is a frequenter of eBay, where he can find all sorts of obscure components and complete replicas of the hard drive models he needs.
The presentation is available online in Flash format.
