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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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Linux Penalty

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 10:40pm on 2007-10-25

I'm looking at web sites for data-recovery places. Most don't list prices; a few advertise flat-rate services. On one, I got to the page where they ask what OS you use, and there are prices next to the answers ...

... and it got me wondering why it costs three and a half times as much to recover data from an disk formatted with ext2 than one formatted with FAT32 or NTFS.

I'm guessing that what they're going to have to do no matter what the filesystem, is replace the drive motor in a clean room and read the data off. Ext2 doesn't strike me as being that much harder to read. Right? Hmm. Maybe "flat rate" isn't the way to go here, if their price-by-OS has to do with whether they need to run Norton or something. (Or maybe I'm way off base here and the fact that I'm not in the drive-recovery business is showing.)

I just had to wince "aloud" at that 3.5x factor just for running Linux. Ouch. Not that I can really afford the Windows-user price either, but ... ouch.

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geekosaur: orange tabby with head canted 90 degrees, giving impression of "maybe it'll make more sense if I look at it this way?" (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] geekosaur at 03:29am on 2007-10-26
It's only in the simplest of cases that simply replacing the motor (or the logic board) is sufficient; if you're recovering data from a head crash, you get to put a whole bunch of raw bits together by hand. And I'd guess Linux suffers from (a) lack of familiarity (b) their tools for recovering data from it are not as fully developed and need more handholding. (Well, and (c) ext2 is kind of a lousy format.)
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posted by [identity profile] gravitrue.livejournal.com at 06:55am on 2007-10-26
I suspect it's simply what the market will bear. On windows, you'll have more desktop users with lower budgets, and also a higher volume. Most linux crashes that people are willing to pay you for will be for businesses that will pay heavy for the data.

The tools may indeed be better for windows. They certainly would be for FAT.
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