Empire College Adopting DriveSavers Hard Drive Simulator

DriveSavers Data Recovery announced that Empire College, based in Santa Rosa, California, is the first educational institution to adopt the company’s hard disk drive simulator, DriveSaver, as a training resource for students enrolled in the School of Business Information Technology Program.

DriveSaver is an online Flash-based hard drive simulator that educates users about hard drive data storage technology, best practices for protecting digital data and data recovery solutions.

The most popular feature of the simulator is Crash a Hard Drive. Users can actually see and hear a hard drive crash and learn the reasons why it failed. The flash-based online application simulates various types of hard drive failures, from watching the drive shatter into pieces to seeing a circuit board go up in smoke chip-by-chip. The Hard Drive Demo enables users to explore the different parts of the drive and its uses. And to further spread knowledge of hard drive technology, DriveSavers is now making DriveSaver available as an embeddable widget that users can place on their own sites.

"We’re very excited to have DriveSaver as a training tool for our IT students and staff," said Gary DeMarco, IT director and instructor. "It is a valuable lesson for IT students to see the inside mechanics of a hard drive and understand why drives fail. The information will help them in many situations working as an IT professional."

DriveSavers annually invites Empire College students to tour the company’s facility. During this tour, students are able to see, hands-on, the data recovery process for storage devices. A key part of the tour is learning about the security protocols required during the data recovery process to ensure all customer data is protected.

DriveSavers undergoes annual SAS 70 Type II Audit Reports, offering high level of data security. The students also are able to see inside an official Certified ISO 5 (Class 100) cleanroom and other specialized engineering laboratories. Throughout the tour, data recovery engineers are available to answer questions from both instructors and students.

DeMarco continues: "DriveSavers is a wonderful company and our visits are always informative and enjoyable. It’s a great opportunity for a new student to see what happens in the real world of data recovery and IT."