Guest Post by Jesse Jones - Seagate Recovery Services
Seriously, I’ve heard it a million times (cringe), “my hard drive stopped working so I threw it in the freezer for a couple hours”… I can understand how this terrible idea has spun out of control in a bad version of telephone. Someone 10 years ago that worked in data recovery told his friend he put a hard drive in the freezer to recover the data. That someone told someone else and alas, we have the idea that freezing your hard drive like it’s a TV dinner will resolve problems, unfortunately not so much. First and foremost, hard drives are not TV dinners.
Secondly, very serious details were miscommunicated. To be honest, if you only have your data centrally stored on 1 hard drive (shame on you), but do you honestly want to jeopardize the chances of recovering priceless invaluable or non-reproducible data? My first suggestion would be to exhaust your options with technical support or try a software recovery. It’s possible the nonfunctioning drive you’re holding may be recovered with less drastic and less expensive means than a clean room solution. If either of these fail to yield access to the drive, or if the drive starts making any abnormal noises, send it to an in lab data recovery specialist and let them do what they’re known for. For the sake of argument though, there are legitimate reasons why freezing your hard drive is never a good idea.
I’d like to consider myself the female version of MacGyver (who doesn’t?). So when I initially started working with Seagate’s Data Recovery and heard the very first caller describe their troubleshooting methods of freezing the drive, I was curious. I figured who better to speak to and bust the myths than our Research and Developer Director for in lab data recovery, Dmitry K.
There are two misconceptions of why you would put a drive in the freezer. First if a hard drive has thermal failure, it would help cool the drive. The flaw with this theory is that it would be completely unnecessary to cool the entire hard drive (and all its minutely detailed internal components) for one symptom. If this is the pinpointed issue, it would be better to try cooling it in front of a fan. Blowing air onto the hard drives exterior will create far less future obstacles, and may provide results without causing further damage.
If a hard drive is experiencing some sort of internal arm failure where it has become weak and falls onto the platter (click click noise), freezing it can provide a false sense that the metal components will tighten or retract long enough to get the drive initialized. If a drive is experiencing this level of internal issue, power cycling thru it any further can and will cause media damage on the platter where the data is stored. Media damage is irreversible and will make any future in lab data recovery attempts very difficult if not completely impossible pending the amount and location of the damage. If that’s not reason enough to stop, the fact that the drive is being “frozen” or cooled in anything other than a “controlled environment” can cause condensation on the platters, which can erode or rust the platters. So if the theory doesn’t work, getting the data off the drive is now a much more complex case.
Professional in lab data recovery companies do use a technique “similar” to this, however it is in a controlled environment with zero humidity with highly trained professionals (highly trained = borderline rocket scientist). Anyone who tries to recover data on their own is gambling and risking the potential of losing all of the data completely.
More from Jesse:
What to do when the unthinkable happens…to your hard drive
What should you do when your external hard drive stops working?
I dunno. I was also skeptical about this, but tried this on my son’s dead hard drive. After I sealed it in plastic, froze it in the freezer, let it warm to room temperature and connected it to an external bay, the hard drive was revived! Just used it to salvage the important data and pics though. After that, got rid of it.
Wouldn’t it be easier if Seagate would make MORE RELIABLE external hard drives, and not like the 1TB one that I bought, saved all my pictures from a month documentary trip on it, and totally broke less than 2 months after, leaving me no other option than probably sending it to recovery services which amount between £300 and £1,000 – somewhere in the far future when and if I’d be rich and nostalgic to afford them?!
Hiii,
I too had recently lost contents of my external hard drive due to accidental format on mac laptop. So in order to recover formatted mac hard drive, i used Mac HDD Recovery software. This tool easily recovers any hard disk within few minutes. You may download this tool from internet for trial usage.
Website:-http://www.machddrecovery.com/formatted-hard-drive.html
Download Link:-http://www.machddrecovery.com/download/machddrecovery.zip
HI Jesse
Great point to get out there from the manufacturer, as mentioned by Ron above if the failure falls into a very small percentage of cases that are capicitor oriented then yes a blast in the freezer would logically ammend (for a short period of time) the issue. Not in all cases long enough to recover data. And in many cases just makes the issue worse.
The big issue for us as in the data recovery industry is these gambles people take with what in many cases is private recoveries containing the only iterations of family photos, legal documents and the like. Its hard to fathom how people would risk these items “giving it a go”. We have many people turn up to our labs teary eyed with dead and now effectively wet hard drives.
Its like reaching for the superglue if you broke your leg because its cheaper than a doc..
Sorry but I will chance a freezer which has worked for many people I know, over having someone tell me to let the professionals handle it at usually a cost well over $300! No thank you!! Rip off…
[...] Friends don’t let friends freeze their hard drives! [...]
The freezer trick absolutely works! had a drive that wldnt work, stuck it in freezer for 3 hrs, was able to retrieve info until it returned to room temp. then it wld stop wrking. refreeze and try again. took a week but I was able to get all info off. “expert” said my info was gone. the drive would not wrk unless frozen.
I had lots of drive failures for years and I’ve found the best way to prevent drive failures is to backup the important data in 3-5 locations (different drives). It’s Murphy’s law that if you aren’t backed up your drive will fail. If you are, it won’t. Simple as that and it’s worked for years. No failures.