If you’ve been shopping around for data recovery company then no doubt you’ve come across pictures of large fully enclosed clean-rooms with people dressed in full body suits, dust masks and eye protection standing over stainless steel furniture while the walls of the room are mostly white or made from glass.   The photo on the left is probably similar to what you’ve been seeing.  In fairness there are clean-rooms that look like this however they are not recommended or used for data recovery.  The reality of the data recovery clean-room is very deceptive when these types of photos are used for marketing purposes.  The clean-room on the left for example is a clean-room used for pharmaceutical work.

This photo for example is an example of what you will find on many data recovery sites.  Surely this picture must be a data recovery lab, there are actually people working on computers right?  Wrong again, this is a clean-room used in the design and manufacture of silicon component chips.  It may be a computer related project, but its not data recovery. The reality is that most, if not all of the photos that you see on various data recovery sites are photos from manufacturing companies such as Intel, or from the pharmaceutical industry.  Or they might even just be props and actors.  In fairness there are a few big name labs that have built rooms such as this, but they’re little more than marketing props made to dupe government officials into believing that they have an edge over their competitors to justify the fact that they are charging over four times the market rate for clean-room data recovery work.

The reality of the matter is that walk in clean-rooms are neither practical or advisable for data recovery.

So what does a data recovery lab look like?

The clean-room that a data recovery lab uses is known as a Laminar flow clean workbench.  The laminar flow hood draws air in though its HEPA filters and forces it down slowly to ensure that only “class 100” clean air passes over the open drive.  The lab has lots of monitors as well as hard drives in bins, microscopes, soldering equipment and other devices used in testing
diagnosing and repairing damaged drives.  The time actually spent working in the clean-room is minimal compared to the time spent diagnosing and repairing the drive and the drives on-board firmware with specialized equipment such as the PC3000 UDMA.  The remainder is spent programming extraction algorithms and babysitting extraction jobs to ensure that the data extraction process is working accordingly.

So when you drop off your hard drive don’t except folks in white lab coats to greet you in a room that looks like the air lock of the international space station.  What you can expect is the highest level of professionalism, a fair price and the fastest recovery time in the industry.

Located in Waukesha, Wisconsin

ITC Data Recovery Lab
1701 Pearl St.
Waukesha, WI 53186