RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 64

By William Van Winkle

YOu MAY HAVE SEEN ALLUSIONS in some recent RAM articles to my storage problems. OK, with head bowed and an embarrassed blush, here's the whole story. I have a fairly large audiobook collection that has been gradually building for several years. Additionally, I have about 80GB of music, much of which was ripped from CDs I'd purchased and then sold off. I put my entire audio collection on a single internal drive and, like every other idiot who comes into your shop in a blind panic, meant to back it up...and didn't.

A couple of years ago, the drive failed. Now, I've found out the hard way that most drive failures aren't sudden. Drives don't just suffer a coronary and keel over dead. They're rather considerate and start with little bouts of arrhythmia, stumbling over occasional data fetches or causing really long drive access delays. This is the point where a smart person would think, "Hmm, something's wrong here. I should back up my data." Instead, I thought something like, "Man, I'm busy. And I can still get to my data. I'll back up soon."

The drive progressed from arrhythmia to fits of amnesia, and, finally, that poor drive dropped in its tracks and fell into a coma. Googling pushed me to a company called R-tools Technology. I paid $50 to download a program called R-Studio. The software did its thing for a geological epoch or two and finally returned nearly all of my audio files to me. Or so I thought. In the following months, I'd occasionally stumble over an album or audiobook with a missing track. Or worse, I had some new folders for recovered files with clever names like $$$Folder04960. Sometimes, the filenames in these folders gave me an idea as to where the data belonged. But if they didn't, I was left clueless.

Did I learn my lesson? A few months ago, I became the proud owner of a 1TB Maxtor OneTouch III, Turbo Edition. This external USB unit hosts two 500GB drives, which can be configured into a fast RAID 0 (1TB capacity) or a mirrored RAID 1 (500GB capacity). Naturally, my media collection had continued to grow, and I had one drive for audio, another for video, another for family photos, and so on. My media library was becoming cumbersome and disorganized. But one terabyte! Man, that would hold everything with room to spare! I became greedy and dumped everything onto the Turbo with a plan to back it up to an internal RAID...soon.

About two months ago, my Turbo drive developed arrhythmia. Clearly, I'm cursed. However, I didn't wait until the last minute for disaster to strike. I set up a 1TB JBOD in my system and started copying off the Turbo's data, only to find that there were already some parts of the drive that read very slowly and some that wouldn't read at all. The more data I tried to rescue, the longer each attempt took. Finally, with probably less than two-thirds of my assets saved, I conceded defeat. It was taking hours to move any given folder, and increasingly often I wasn't able to copy all of its contents. Fortunately, the entire family photos collection transferred to the JBOD. And naturally, one of the JBOD drives failed two weeks later. See? Cursed.

Much as I've been an idiot throughout this ordeal, I know that there are millions of other consumers and businesses out there behaving in the exact same way. Stupidity springs eternal, which is good if you're in the business of helping bail out people who've been stupid. The question that I, as a corrupted data owner, and you, as a services reseller, should be asking is: Now what?

I knew that services existed for doing things like law enforcement forensics and recovery of data for big businesses able to afford five-digit repair bills. But what about services for people like me or for small businesses? This line of questioning took me to Seagate, which, it turns out, bought a company called ActionFront last November. ActionFront is now becoming the first of several groups that will comprise Seagate Recovery Services. (Another recent addition is the eVault online backup and storage service.) I did a little digging, spoke with Paul Steele, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Seagate Recovery Services, and was invited by the Seagate press folks to let the company take a peek at my troubled Turbo.

Steele informed me that the bulk of today's recovery business is carried on by local resellers and IT shops, nearly all of which use software tools to perform "logical" recoveries as opposed to physical repair work inside the drive. This presents two problems. First, the recovery market is so fragmented that end-user awareness about solutions remains minimal. And perhaps even more importantly, according to Steele, only 20% to 30% of logical recoveries are fully effective. My early post-recovery problems were a perfect case in point. Needless to say, such success rates don't do much to elevate recovery services in the public eye.

A Seagate Recovery Services tech works to repair a fragile drive assembly. At last, now you can make some money from this guy's hard labors.

Seagate is doing very little to change ActionFront. The company is leaving ActionFront's reseller program more or less intact and separate from the Seagate Partner Program. ActionFront's global recovery labs will all stay open. What Seagate really brings is a recognizable, trusted brand to attract business and much deeper resources for promoting and expanding the service.

"If you look at how data recovery operates today," says Steele, "it's mostly a model for forming partnerships, not even revenue sharing, with the recovery companies saying to just send every case you encounter directly to them. We feel like there's a play here in enabling resellers with a set of tools and capabilities that will help them grow their business. It's not about a commission check that shows up once a month; it's about being able to provide some of those recovery services on your own. We're the back-end support to help with some of the things they don't have the capability to do."

One of the first recovery tools Seagate makes available to resellers is a utility called Disk Check, which will allow you to run diagnostics on internal drives and determine the problem so you can provide a firm quotation. Next up is the imminent release of Seagate's consumer-oriented recovery software for $129, followed in 30 to 45 days by the professional version for $900 to $1,000.

If logical recovery won't work, then off the drive goes to Seagate. According to Steele, about 50% of the drives received must be opened for physical repair. Head damage is very common, and this often entails "slaps," where the heads scrape off some of the magnetic media. Most platter data may be fine, but if the head is damaged, the drive may not be able to read anything. So you need another head whose parameters match the original closely enough to be able to read good areas. Crashes often create internal debris that must be cleaned out. Sometimes the motor assembly has to be swapped out, and other times the platters must be transplanted into a new chassis. About 15% of failures entail defective electronics on the PCB, and finding the right firmware in the right chips can be a real nightmare.

ActionFront has amassed thousands of spare drive parts over the years as a sort of repair library, but Steele says that about 60% of jobs still require the sourcing of a new component. In fact, techs on average will go through three sets of parts to complete a successful recovery because of the necessity of finding an exact match. This might, on the head assembly, for example, pertain to the exact placement of the head, which can vary from drive to drive even within the same model and production run. Now you begin to see why the repair cost for a single drive averages around $1,500.

The enticing side of that figure is Seagate's reseller revenue sharing. Entry-level partners will make 5% to 10%, and the rates improve as you move up through the program's tiers. Higher-level participants also get to leverage Seagate's go-to-market campaign resources to help draw in more business. Hands-on training becomes available to mid-level program members, but any level can soak up Seagate's ample Web-based training.

"We're also launching a new program called Seagate Recovery Services Advantage," adds Steele. "If you use our priority service, we will give your files back on a Seagate drive with a two-year warranty. In addition, in the event that Seagate opens the top cover on a competitor's drive and thereby voids the warranty, we will replace that drive and return your files to you on a Seagate drive, again with a two-year warranty. And since we recover virtually any media type, if you send us a flash drive, we'll return the data on a Seagate Pocket Drive."

In my mind, there are two exciting facets to this new Seagate arrangement. The first is that drive recovery is just easy money for resellers. All drives fail eventually. ActionFront estimated a couple of years ago that 300,000 hard drives were sent to recovery companies annually, never mind all of the customers who might have sought recovery had they known the options. For a 10% cut, practically all you have to do is make a phone call and slap a shipping label on a box. The second facet is that, if you choose, Seagate is working to help you make recovery a viable service offering. The more work you do in-house, the more money you'll make. That's pretty exceptional in this field.

What happened with my Turbo drive? It turns out that the heads on the first drive were unstable and had damage. Plus the second drive is also faulty. (Cursed! Cursed, I tell you!) As I write this, the Seagate/ActionFront techs are waiting for replacement parts to arrive for the second drive. The estimate for repair is $2,900. In my case, the company must work on both drives in order to image them, then work with the Turbo's electronics, which contain the striping information specific to my RAID 0. If necessary, the techs will analyze both images and compute the pertinent striping data to run in software and join both drive images. Once the recovery is done, Seagate will copy it out to a new external drive.

Hopefully, I'm done with being stupid. My critical media files will reside on an internal RAID 1 that will in turn perform incremental backups at least once per week to Maxtor's external Turbo drive. This may sound paranoid and excessive, but I've been struck by drive failure lightning twice and walked away each time only lightly singed. Luck runs out. The next time—oh, I'm sure there will be a next time—if I'm not adequately prepared, I'm pretty sure the lightning will take me down. Over time, I might forgive myself for losing the history of my children's early years. But my wife never would. I'd say that's worth a few hundred dollars.