Freeze your hard drive for data recovery?

I woke up this morning to hear that horrible clacking noise (unfortunately, I’ve heard it before on an older computer) coming from my external hard drive and see a “delayed write failed” error message on my computer.  Fortunately, I don’t have anything critical on the external ... mostly just a lot of MP3s. I was hunting around the innertubes for data recovery options when I came across this blog post that says that freezing your hard drive works as a short-term solution for data recovery.  Judging from the comments on the blog post (and on other message boards I found afterwards) this appears to have worked for some people. I don’t think Rumproast gets a lot of geek traffic, but has anyone successfully tried this?  Also, can I just put the whole external hard drive, case and all, into the freezer or do I have to crack it open and take out the disk (or disks)?

We now return to our regular non-geek programming.

Posted by Kevin K. on 11/27/07 at 09:45 AM • Permalink
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I’d put the whole thing in without cracking it open.  One less thing to go wrong.  This would mean that you’d need to leave it in the fridge/freezer for a while, because the case will protect it.  Heat and moisture are not good for electronics, so I can see that getting it cooler (and in a sense drier) may help.  Slower temperature changes are better than rapid ones, so if it’s piping hot now let it get to room temperature before cooling it.

I would be most concerned with moisture.  You know how when you have a cool glass of water beads of sweat form on the outside?  That’s one thing you wouldn’t want.  So make sure that you do it on a dry day, i.e. when there’s a relatively low relative humidity and the dew point is much lower than the ambient temperature.  Today for example.

sucks.

Will, thanks for the advice. I did crack it open before reading your comment and the innards consist of two side-by-side Western Digital 250gb HDDs. I assume only one of them is failing, but I couldn’t tell from touch or by listening which one it is after briefly powering it up.  I guess I have to send my spider senses into the shop.

I’m going to throw it back together and sit on it until I get another external. Ugh, what’s even more disheartening than losing a lot of music is having to plow through hardware reviews to pick a replacement.

I hate computers.  ;)

About a month ago, my workstation failed on me....and after much diagnosis, it was determined that I not only had a bad muthaboard, but 2 bad drives in my striped array....which meant I lost a shitload of media/workstuff.....when I got home that night I happened to be backing up some stuff when my external drive crapped out.  I had probably written that drive a total of 5 times.....I too had read about the freezing thing, but still haven’t been bothered trying it.....Oh, my point to this useless rant:  Computers suck.

The hard disk’s electronics control the movement of the actuator and the rotation of the disk, and perform reads and writes on demand from the disk controller.

I make a backup automatically every 2nd week and store it on a extern hdd.

the last hdd that crashed me was in my xbox. there came blue smoke out of it :)

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With more players, the game is more likely to end due to all the artifacts being claimed from one column, which means you have fewer turns to play and consequently less control of your success.

Your hard drive seems to be physically damaged still may be you can recover your data.Show your hard drive to any data recovery service center.

Thanks for your advice.I have recentaly lost my data since the data get corrupted.I have used data recovery software to recover all my data.