I do some photography work in my spare time to make a little extra money. Whenever I take pictures, I store them on an SD card, and when that card gets full, I transfer the contents to an portable external hard drive. One day while using the hard drive, I dropped it, and when I plugged it in, it started making funny noises. My computer wouldn’t even recognize that the hard drive was plugged in. I was starting to panic, because I had important pictures on the drive. I contacted Alba Data Recovery and sent them my hard drive with express shipping.

This accident has convinced me to store my images on something other than a standard hard drive. Standard hard drives are more prone to damage because they have moving parts. When one of these drives is damaged, the internal mechanism that reads the information stored on the drive doesn’t work correctly. A solid state drive, or a flash drive doesn’t have any moving parts, so unless someone physically destroys every part of these drives, they should be able to withstand any drop.

The data recovery company was able to get all of the data from the hard drive, and they got the drive working again, but they recommended that I take precaution when using it again, because it might suffer a failure in the future. I bought a solid state drive, which had a smaller capacity than my other drive, but with the benefit of being damage proof. The new drive was much faster than the old drive at transferring content. I’m lucky that all of my pictures were still intact. I’ve run into a few cases where data on a perfectly functioning hard drive has been corrupted, and I had to retake photos to replace those corrupted ones.