Services :: Data Recovery in Prospect

Prospect is a community where people invest in good hardware. The laptops tend to be business-grade. The desktops tend to be well-specced. The external drives tend to hold years of carefully organized family photos, professional archives, or both. When one of those drives fails, the stakes are not abstract — they are deeply personal.

I’m Steve Schardein, owner of Triple-S Computers. I’ve been performing advanced data recovery in my Middletown lab since 2006, and I handle every case personally. No employees, no outsourcing, no shipping your drive to a lab in another state. My equipment — DeepSpar Disk Imager, USB Stabilizer 10Gb, UFS Explorer Professional, R-Studio Technician — is the same class of tooling used by the dedicated recovery facilities that charge $1,500 and up. The difference is that I’m fifteen minutes from your door, and I’m the person you actually talk to from start to finish.

Not Just a Service Area — A Place I Actually Know

I want to be upfront about something: plenty of tech companies list “Prospect” on their website because the search traffic is worth targeting. I list it because my kids attend school nearby in Oldham County, my wife teaches in the area, and I’m driving through Prospect multiple times a week. I support several Prospect-area businesses on an ongoing basis — including a well-known orthodontic practice and a local preschool — and I’ve served residential clients throughout Prospect, Norton Commons, and the surrounding Oldham County neighborhoods for years.

That familiarity matters when you’re handing someone a drive that contains your family’s photos or your business’s records. You’re not shipping it to an anonymous intake desk. You’re handing it to someone you can call directly, who lives and works in this part of Louisville, and who will answer the phone when you want an update.

When a Portable Drive Holds Someone’s Life’s Work

One of the more challenging recoveries I’ve handled came from a professional photographer whose 4 TB portable external drive stopped responding entirely. The drive contained years of Lightroom catalogs and RAW photography files — an archive that represented both their creative output and their livelihood. No backup existed.

When I connected the drive to my DeepSpar hardware, it would not even initialize properly. The PCB had issues, and the firmware was partially corrupted. Rather than immediately declaring the case beyond repair, I worked through the problem methodically: stabilizing the electronics, coaxing the drive into identifying itself, then carefully imaging the contents sector by sector over the course of several days. I used custom voltage management and multiple imaging passes — reading what I could on early passes, skipping troubled areas, then circling back with adjusted parameters on later passes.

The result was a complete recovery: 100% of the critical data, copied to a new Samsung portable SSD. The client was quoted $1,500 or more by a national lab. My total was under $600, with the replacement drive included at cost. That’s the kind of outcome I aim for on every case — not just technically, but in terms of what the client actually pays relative to what they get back.

The Hardware Behind the Process

I want to explain what “professional-grade equipment” actually means in practical terms, because it’s the core reason my outcomes differ from what a general repair shop can achieve.

When a mechanical hard drive is failing — clicking, grinding, not spinning up, or spinning up but not being recognized — a standard computer will either read it successfully or give up. There’s no middle ground. My DeepSpar Disk Imager operates differently: it communicates directly with the drive’s firmware, controls the power and reset cycles, and can adjust how aggressively it reads each sector. If a region of the disk is badly damaged, the imager skips it on the first pass and returns to it later, approaching from a different direction or with different timing parameters. This is how you extract data from a drive that “another shop said was dead.”

For flash-based media — SSDs, USB drives, SD cards — the failure modes are different but the principle is the same. The DeepSpar USB Stabilizer manages the electrical interface to prevent an unstable drive from disconnecting mid-read, while specialized recovery software (UFS Explorer Professional, R-Studio Technician) handles the logical reconstruction: reassembling file systems, recovering deleted structures, and extracting data even when the drive’s directory is damaged or missing entirely.

What Prospect Clients Typically Bring Me

Prospect has roughly 4,500 residents, a high proportion of professionals and executives, and a median household income well above the metro average. What that translates to in data recovery terms is that the hardware tends to be newer and higher-quality, but the data on it is often irreplaceable and poorly backed up. Specifically, the most common cases I see from this area are:

External hard drives and portable SSDs that stopped mounting — usually the sole repository of years of consolidated family photos and home videos. Business laptops belonging to remote workers or executives whose internal SSD failed, taking critical documents with it. Older desktop drives from home offices in Norton Commons or along the Hunting Creek corridor, where a system that’s been running reliably for years finally gives out without warning. And the occasional multi-drive NAS or RAID enclosure used for home media storage or small-business backup that has degraded beyond what the built-in redundancy can handle.

I also handle SD cards from cameras, USB flash drives, and macOS-formatted volumes including Fusion drives from iMacs. If your drive is encrypted with BitLocker or FileVault and you have the password or recovery key, I can still image and recover it — the encryption does not prevent the process, it just adds a decryption step after imaging is complete.

Fifteen Minutes from Prospect

My lab is at 800 Fossil Creek Court in Middletown, just east of I-265 off Shelbyville Road. From most of Prospect, the quickest route is I-71 south to I-265 south (Gene Snyder Freeway), then Exit 27 for Shelbyville Road heading east. The lab is about three minutes past the exit, across from the Lake Forest neighborhood. If you’re closer to the US-42 side of Prospect, you can also take US-42 east to I-265 and follow the same Shelbyville Road exit. Either way, it’s roughly 15 minutes and avoids downtown traffic entirely.

I can also arrange to pick up a drive if transporting it is impractical — I’m in the Prospect area regularly enough that this is rarely a scheduling problem. Just call and we’ll figure out the easiest option.

Where I Draw the Line

I handle everything from simple deleted-file recovery to advanced mechanical-failure imaging, firmware repair, RAID reconstruction, and encrypted volume recovery. What I do not do is cleanroom work: if a drive requires physical disassembly — head swaps, platter transplants, or a PC-3000 — that falls outside my scope.

When that happens (and it does sometimes), I will tell you so honestly and at no charge. I’ll also walk you through what to expect from a reputable cleanroom lab, what fair pricing looks like for that level of work, and what to watch out for from companies that overcharge. I’d rather send you to the right place informed than take your money for work I can’t complete.

Talk to Steve

If you’re in Prospect and you’ve got a drive that’s failed, stopped being recognized, or lost data you cannot afford to lose — call me at (502) 233-4393. The initial diagnosis is free, I’ll give you a flat-rate quote before any paid work begins, and if I can’t recover your data, you owe nothing. About 75% of my business comes from referrals, and a good portion of those referrals come from this part of Louisville. There’s a reason for that.