Put Only Meat In The Freezer

MichaelS wrote on 4/13/2006, 9:44 PM
Where did I read that to fix a hard drive gone bad, you can put in the freezer? I thought it was here, but I can't seem to find the post. Perhaps it was somewhere else. Anyone else heard this advice?

Anyhow, there's an excellent letter to the editor in the new issue of MIX magazine, by an engineer type, solidly denouncing this practice.

The way rumors and "old wives tales" get started it's important to separate fact from fiction...especially when dealing with valuable data. Its a good read!

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 4/13/2006, 10:13 PM
Like the title of your post.

I am actually one of the people that recommended cooling a bad drive in the fridge, but not because I read it anywhere. I was desperate to recover data from a disk a few years back. It would work for about five minutes and then ceased working. About the only thing I could figure that would cause this was heat. So ... I put the drive in the fridge and sure enough, when I reconnected it into my system, it worked for about 20 minutes. I kept repeating the cooling process until I recovered all my data.

This obviously isn't a solution for all situations, but it worked for me. It was, at the time, entirely my own "invention," although I have since seen it recommended by others.

So, I can tell you from actual hands-on experience that this particular piece of advice is NOT an old wives tale, although goodness knows, there are enough of those to be found on the 'net.

Here's what I said on previous occasions:

OT. HD malfunction. Tips required

OT:HD platters
GlennChan wrote on 4/13/2006, 10:17 PM
My own experience:
My own hard drive was screwing up because it was overheated (very poor cooling). I later discovered that merely cooling it properly would make the hard drive work.

However, one of the first things I tried was putting the drive in the freezer. The drive worked for a little while, but then stopped working (lots of clicking). The un-contraction from thawing may be why the drive stopped working. But if it was sitting at room temperature and the temperature stayed fairly constant, it would work fine.
Terry Esslinger wrote on 4/14/2006, 12:13 AM
I actually had a Maxtor external 300 G drive that stopped working. It was the drive I had all my footage, songs, graphics etc on. It just made clicking noises and the computer would not recognize it. Thought I was cooked.
Because of soem things I had read I put it in the freezer and then hooked it up. I was able to get it to work long enough to recover 90% of what was on it.
A wives tale that works!!
apit34356 wrote on 4/14/2006, 1:00 AM
Like CPUs, heat can and will damage a disk drive. There are many issues with heat from platter and head assembly expanding, the air too hot to properly "fly" the heads....etc.... But one of the dirty little secrets is the electric motor and control assembly fails to maintain proper speed,( many issues here). Like CPUs, the electric motor's wiring becomes too hot and can not maintain speed at the proper voltage/amps setting, the control assembly ups the voltage/amps, but begins too to over heat also, dropping voltage/amps. Soon the total assembly "amps" demands exceeds the drive's safety design. Drop in speed, heads cannot fly correctly, air becoming too hot for head assembly to fly, head assembly automaticly retracts,.... motor trys too spin up.... motor is over heating.... speeds continue to drop.... then there the is issues of bearing overheating........
cbrillow wrote on 4/14/2006, 3:31 AM
This is a situation where a few qualifiers need to be applied.

It's important to note that it's an effective technique that's limited to specific types of drive failures and is not a panacea. Nor does it actually fix the hard drive. When it works, it may allow the drive to be accessed for a limited amount of time to permit an emergency data retrieval attempt.

First time I heard of this practice was in a phone call with tech support to a major drive manufacturer, in which it was recommended as a last-ditch attempt to salvage data from a drive I was returning to them for warranty replacememnt. The engineer I spoke with gave a rational explanation of why it can sometimes work and indicated that he has had occasional success in doing it.

In the end, I think it's something that's worth a try for most of us casual users who'd maybe like to try something to save a photo or two from extinction, but anyone facing serious consequences due to data loss would be best served by forking over the cash for a data retrieval service.



epirb wrote on 4/14/2006, 3:52 AM
hmm. chilling a metal container then bringing it into room temperature.....can you say condensation? definatly wouldnt try this w an external drive. ; )
Chienworks wrote on 4/14/2006, 5:05 AM
My previous (now extinct) ISP had a bunch of the old Sun "pizza box" computers for servers. These were only about 2.5" tall and had dual hard drives stacked in one corner. Cooling was nearly non-existant. That was fine when they were new with 40MB (yes, that's an M you see there, not a G) 4200RPM drives. Later on though we upgraded to a pair of 4GB 7200RPM drives. These would put out way to much heat and the system would crash after 10 minutes or less. Our solution was to separate the drives. Unforunately the system used Sun proprietary 3" long SCSI cables and we couldn't find anything longer. We ended up making a little wooden bracket to hold the upper drive standing straight up, left the cover off, and parked a little electric fan next to the system to blow room air onto the two drives. After that it was stable and would run for years without a crash.