Flash drives still have problems

flash_gordon (1)Kroll Ontrack, a company which specialises in data recovery, claimed that while nearly 90 percent of the people they surveyed used solid state drives (SSD), a third claimed they had some malfunctions.

Obviously Kroll has something of an axe to grind here, but it has surveyed over 2,000 people in the survey.

Of the SSDs which showed a malfunction, over 60 percent lost data and less than 20 percent managed to recover their data.

The reason it’s difficult to recover data is because it’s scattered on the drive, compared to hard disk drives, where the information is stored linearly, according to Paul Le Messier, operations manager at Kroll.

SSDs, however, are steadily become more popular both for enterprises and individuals. Of those surveyed, three quarters use flash drives in laptops and mobiles, 60 percent in desktop PCs, and 20 percent in servers.

The main attractions are performance and speed.

With the increasing usage of SDDs however, Kroll has averaged a 100 percent increase in recovery requests year on year from 2011 to 2014.