By Brian Osborne, 6/12/09

DriveSavers has made news in their ability to save data from some of the most destroyed hard drives you have ever seen. Now the company who saves data wants to educate users on how a hard drive works and what causes a hard drive to crash. The DriveSaver hard disk simulator is a free iPhone app now available on the iTunes App Store.

Using the simulator you can look into a functioning hard drive and watch how it operates to read and write data. There is even a special demo mode which will cycle through all the components of a hard drive and several different crash modes. Different crash modes offered include click failure, no spin/seized motor, spin up and down, electronic failure, contamination failure and head crash failure.

Not only does the free application show you how a hard drive works and crashes, but it also gives you strategies to prevent against data loss such as best practices, backup strategies, the best data recovery options and securing data. Also featured is examples of extreme drive failures and successful data recovery applications. If you end up really needing DriveSavers the application also lists how to contact the company and get a web estimate for data recovery.

Read more from the DriveSavers website.

Brian’s Opinion

There is nothing more terrifying then losing everything you have because of the death of a hard drive. It’s great to have companies like DriveSavers to recover the data, but it’s also good to know how a hard drive can die in the first place. Let’s be honest. Knowledge is really the first step in the prevention of lost data.

Very few people have ever had an opportunity to peek into the inner workings of a hard drive. This free application now allows this to be possible. The good news is that you don’t even have to destroy a hard drive to do it.

DriveSavers has saved more than just data for a lot of people. They have probably even saved careers and businesses with their services. This new iPhone application is yet another service DriveSavers is providing to its customers.

Read the original article on Geek.com