How to See, Hear and Feel a Hard Drive Crash

Published: Jun 17, 2009
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
2 minute read
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If you’ve ever wanted to watch a hard drive crash in your hands — but not lose any of your stuff — then read on.

DriveSavers Data Recovery has launched DriveSaver, a free application for the iPhone dedicated to educating users about protecting digital data.

The company claims that DriveSaver is the first iPhone application developed by a professional data recovery specialist.

This is a hard drive simulator that demonstrates the mechanics of a working hard drive and simulates hard drive crashes. DriveSaver will be useful to anyone who ever wanted to see inside a hard drive or learn why drives fail — and they fail all the time.

The application simulates various types of hard drive failures, from watching the drive shatter into pieces to seeing a circuit board go up in smoke. The Hard Drive Demo, using the iPhone touch-screen, allows users to explore the different parts of the drive and its uses.

“Initially, we developed this application as an internal reference tool for our partners. It is designed to educate IT professionals and their customers about hard drive storage technology and data recovery,” said Scott Gaidano, president of DriveSavers. “It was so well received that we decided to release it to the public for free. Anyone with an iPhone can experience the disastrous feelings, sights and sounds of an actual hard drive crash.”

DriveSaver application is available on iTunes and in the Utilities and Productivity categories of the iPhone App Store; it is compatible with any iPhone or iPod Touch. To download, click here.

Chris Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.

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