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I don't think his reasoning behind freezing is correct; most of what I've previously read suggests that freezing is only a useful trick for bearing damage. If t
by thaumaturgy 17y ago
I don't think his reasoning behind freezing is correct; most of what I've previously read suggests that freezing is only a useful trick for bearing damage. If the hard drive is making a rattling noise while running, and then stopping, it likely has a bad bearing, and freezing it for a while (or running it cold) can coax the gimpy bearing into running a little longer. However, you're probably not going to be able to get the entire drive image off of it, so pick and choose what's really important to you.
In the event of an actual head crash, you're usually screwed. If the head crash left a stripe all the way around the platter, the head likely won't seek past it. (I don't know why; it should be able to, but it doesn't -- I tested this recently on a Toshiba drive.)
Head crashes seem to have a tendency to occur close to the spindle, and if that happens, the data on the drive is completely irretrievable.
Occasionally the armature will develop a mechanical fault and will collide with the edge of the platters when the drive powers up. If this happens, you can usually either "adjust" the armature slightly, or replace it with an armature from a matching donor drive.
There are a few other tricks and things too, but those are the most common for internal failures. Sometimes just replacing the logic board is all that's needed -- you have to be able to diagnose what's wrong with the drive. Simply sticking it in the freezer isn't likely to do a darned thing for you.
And I'm a little skeptical that this guy has ever even cracked a drive open. They don't have a "bunch" of platters, they almost always have 2.
- ax0n 17y agoI had a laptop hard drive suffer a head crash on the lower platter, and it was able to seek past it. Further, the freezer trick seemed to work a little, but it may have been simply letting the drive rest for a while. I do know that I've never seen it take 12 full hours to reach temperature equilibrium in a hard drive. 3 or 4 usually does the trick just fine. I eventually got most of my important data off. This was before external hard drives were commonplace and frequent backups of laptops made much sense, though.
- sophacles 17y agoThey used to have 3,4, and even 5 platters. It could just be that he hasn't opened a drive for a decade or two.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoOh, you're right. I forgot about that.
- baddox 17y agoThat wasn't decades in the past. Western Digital's VelociRaptor 600GB drive has 3 platters. Some of the new 4k sector drives have 3 platters. The first 1TB hard drives (obviously in the past) had 4 or 5 platters. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/1tb-hdd-roundup-3_2.html#sect1 http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/1tb-hdd-rou...
- sophacles 17y agoThanks! I personally haven't opened an hdd in 15 years, so I couldn't speak to newer drives. (and now I feel old :) )
- wonginator1221 17y agoI have tried the freezer trick before with varying success. On one occasion, my friend's laptop hard drive kicked the bucket and failed when I tried to use Spinrite. However, a few weeks ago, a Aeagate hard drive from my brother's Macbook failed. Throwing it in the freezer for a few hours did the trick and we were able to make a full copy of the data.