Ontrack Data Recovery refined toolkit

Kroll Ontrack has announced a refined toolkit for its Ontrack Data Recovery for flash and solid state drives (SSDs) that allows the company’s engineers to offer users a higher success rate and quicker data retrieval turnaround, while increasing the integrity of the information recovered.

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 levelling’ techniques, whereby information is evenly distributed across random blocks of the memory chip.

In solving flash and SSD data loss problems, the company normally employs methods involving removing components of the device to resolve the corrupted information. But efforts to better understand and manage flash and SSD storage challenges - wear levelling in particular - have increased the company’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, the company is claimed to be equipped to meet users’ evolving recovery needs.