25 ms·

Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the help of woodworking tools

535 points by jgrahamc 3y ago

RecycledEle 3y ago
I see a lot of tutorials on running mechanical hard disks without covers on and such. Years ago, the drives had safety systems to prevent this.
- duffyjp 3y ago
  In the late 90's I was an instructor in a youth PC repair class. For a fun demonstration we took an old IDE drive, removed the lid and had it running defrag. We did this outside. Next to show how important it was to prevent liquid spills we poured some cola directly into the drive. It sprayed everywhere but the drive kept working fine. Kids got a good laugh and did not learn a lesson that day.
daneel_w 3y ago
Does anyone have any advice (other than sending to a professional data recovery service) for how to access data on an HDD whose controller card stopped working, and refuse to accept a spare controller card taken from a brand new identical HDD?
- danparsonson 3y ago
  Is it not the case that the controller boards store track data specific to an individual drive? I don't think they can be swapped out.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    I fear this is the case...
  - ericbarrett 3y ago
    Historically they did contain a map of physically unusable sectors particular to the physical platters in the drive, and I'd be surprised if they didn't now. So the consequence of a controller swap was making the assembly unstable because you were using a foreign sector map; usually it was still enough to recover as long as you weren't writing new data. But nowadays a drive controller is far more complex, e.g. it might implement transparent hardware AES encryption, in which case swapping the board loses the key. And I've no doubt there are many modern manufacturing-related tricks for yield that go into them as well, any of which might make a different set of platters than what was shipped unreadable.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    Yes, they (the PCB's) cannot be swapped unless you also swap the chip containing the adaptive data.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  How do you know for sure it's the controller? Note that many controllers store parts of their firmware/config on the disk platter, so without the disk platter the board may not show up via sata.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    It's my suspicion, at least. In fact I have two of those drives, bought at the same time, and both died in the same sudden way with no more than two weeks between.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Wasn't there a firmware bug in some drives that made them fail after a certain number of seconds of uptime? Was a workaround/fix published?
      - daneel_w 3y ago
        Doesn't ring a bell for me, but given the highly questionable tiering/marketing methods from HDD manufacturers these days and the fact that they have been reducing warranty durations by some 50%, that type of planned obsolescence wouldn't surprise me. The drives are 3.5" 2TB WD Green purchased around 2012, and had been in use for about 1 year when they both died.
        justinclift 3y ago
        > 2012 If that's not a typo, then it seems like those drives have been powered off for about 10 years. I think powered off hard drives are commonly said to retain data for um... maybe 3 years (from rough memory). So, your drives have probably lost their magnetism (and thus the data). :(
        daneel_w 3y ago
        Not a typo, they've been powered off for around a decade. But HDDs (just like floppies) don't lose their magnetized property in just 3 years, or even 10 years, barring the very rare case of an extreme fluke or environmental exposure. Flash memory (memory cards, USB sticks, SSDs) loses electrical charge relatively fast, however. That might be what you're thinking of.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Cool it down to freezer temperatures and see if it works. Heat it up to ~60C and see if it works. This applies to both hard drives and SSD's. A good half of "failed" drives can be made to work for at least a few hours longer with that method. Unlike OP, If you see signs of life, don't mess with clamps or reflowing. Just leave it in the freezer/oven while you take data off it, with longish power/sata cables to a machine just outside the freezer/oven door. I recommend GNU ddrescue for getting data off - when you only have a few hours of service life left till it is dead-dead, it maximizes data recovery in a given time. There are various ways to generate a mapfile to skip recovering free blocks, which are worth using if you suspect the drive is mostly empty.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    Couldn’t this method risk making it completely irrecoverable if it fails?
    - sgarland 3y ago
      Freezing / heating? Other than the risk of humidity as mentioned, not really. Unless the head crashes into the platter, it's unlikely to do anything that would permanently kill the drive. That said, if you ever have a drive with absolutely critical, must-have data, don't bother with any of this and just ship it to professionals. You'll pay dearly, but they'll get your data out.
  - theolivenbaum 3y ago
    And for the freezer method, be careful with humidity when you take it out. Worth putting it in a bag with some dehumidifiers and just take the cable out
- kwstas 3y ago
  There are bios chips on the controller board than need to be transfered to the new one. In a reasonably modern drive that would be pretty challenging and rewuire a hot air station. https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Double check the numbers on the controller boards; HDD's are complicated little computers and the manufacturers change things during production of a particular model of drive fairly often. If you've got the controller board your drive wants and still nothing, then its time for professional help or considering the data lost, imo.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    The PCBs are of the exact same model. My fear is a DRM type scheme connected to serial numbers etc. stored on the platters having to match those of the controller.
    - h2odragon 3y ago
      doesn't even have to be DRM, just "media mapping" where its adjusting tot he individual platters and such. like factory low-level format stuff. I don't know how complex HDDs have got, but I recall giggling at someone installing linux on an HDD controller board several years ago. So I bet its much worse now.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  Since many years (like 15 or more) the PCB of a hard disk contains a chip (essentially an eeprom or flash device) containing so-called "adaptive data", a set of data written in the factory that are specific to the disk drive (head/platters) the PCB is mounted on. There is specialized hardware (and software) to be able to extract the data and save on another board's memory, but the poorman's way is that of transferring the actual chip from the old board to the new (identical) one. This, commonly referred to as "ROM swap" is not particularly difficult[1] as the chip is usually a rather simple 8 pin one, if you are not into this kind of things a hardware repair shop (like a phone repair one) will normally make this work for you. However newish hard disks may have not this separate chip, it has to be seen which model yours is. Here is a site with some more info: https://hddpcb.eu/gb/content/how-to-swap-hdd-pcb https://hddpcb.eu/gb/content/how-to-swap-hdd-pcb [1] meaning that it can be done DIY if you are familiar enough with soldering/desoldering components
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > other than sending to a professional data recovery service Ah, so you don't really need that data...
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    Why the snark? I will survive without the data, but I'm curious about alternatives to throwing $4000 at the problem and forfeiting my privacy and my data's integrity.
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      There are many people out there who thought what they could recover the data by themselves, only to swallow a bitter pill later, that's why. Because if you really need the data then you go to people who makes a living by recovering data. But if you are okay to lose the if unsuccessful then it's okay to try, but you should know/tell that beforehand. Reading through the other comments - you have a very low chance to succeed, because if you want to swap controller boards then you need to move adaptive data too, as other had said. But I'm curios what exactly happened, WD Green from 2012 are not the worst drives out there. How exactly they failed, what happens now when you power them on, with SATA connected, without? Did you try external USB2SATA converters/boxes?
      - daneel_w 3y ago
        >"Reading through the other comments - you have a very low chance to succeed, because if you want to swap controller boards then you need to move adaptive data too, as other had said." I'm pretty decent with soldering iron and hot-air gun. Migrating the SMD flash/EEPROM chip shouldn't be too hard. >"But I'm curios what exactly happened, WD Green from 2012 are not the worst drives out there. How exactly they failed, what happens now when you power them on, with SATA connected, without? Did you try external USB2SATA converters/boxes?" The discs spin up but the controller no longer communicates with the host. The computer doesn't see that the drives are attached to the SATA bus. There were no signs of problems coming, they just suddenly stopped working from one power-up to the next. I tried with different motherboards and a couple of SATA-USB bridges, all same result.
- toast0 3y ago
  Just a double check... you said in thread you have two of these drives that died at 1 year old. Did you have a third, working, drive you're transplanting boards from?
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    I have a third drive, working and unused, with same PCB model number. Others in this thread have said that my chances are good if I bring the DIP-8 EEPROM from the broken drives over to the working PCB.
leetrout 3y ago
I just lost data on a firecuda drive that was a few months old. The lab could not recover the data and also did not tell me the root cause of the drive failure. Compared with my samsung ssds which have (knock on wood) never died in a decade. I know all brands fail but is there something of lesser quality with the firecuda line?
- londons_explore 3y ago
  From working tangentially in consumer electronics, I can tell you that nearly all failures are design related if you look deep enough. There are some products where some start dying after 1 year, and nearly all of them are dead after 2 years. Other times it's a combination of a bad design and some specific use case. For example "these fail after 3 years if you turn them on and off every day, but don't fail if you leave them running 24x7".
  - lelag 3y ago
    Or sometimes they will die if you leave them on for 40000 hours. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Solder joints seem to be a major failure. That'd be mostly fatigue (thermal cycling) and the occasional case of tin whiskers.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Yes, but in turn the failure is because the thermal expansion coefficient of the board and component were insufficiently closely matched (when taking into account the elasticity of the board and component)
      - giantrobot 3y ago
        Lead-free solder is just shittier than leaded solder. You're not wrong about design but better solder would reduce the impact of mismatched thermal expansion properties.
danparsonson 3y ago
This is superb, something like the modern equivalent of the engineer's slap that one could use with old spinning drives that would no longer spin up.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  I had that with an old drive that was in a drawer for years. I tried it many times and it wouldn't start. Then I accidentally dropped it (it landed pretty hard, hitting a metal table leg)... After that it worked fine and I was able to copy off all the data.
- snitty 3y ago
  Compressive maintenance rather than percussive.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kraquepype 3y ago
  I got a cheap used original PS4 and it wouldn't power up unless you put pressure on the mainboard, right around the PSU. I took pieces of wood, and a clamp and applied pressure there and it worked. The same pressure is applied if you use washers on the heatsink clamp - I did that and it's been running fine for months. The solder joints on the GPU get brittle under the stress of heat and compressing it restores the connection. Pressure or re-flowing is really just a band-aid, the real fix is to re-ball the GPU but that gets expensive.
  - reasonabl_human 3y ago
    Classic. This was a common failure mode for the 360 as well. Used to fix friends 360s that had the red ring of death by tearing them down, tightening the braces underneath the heat sink, and adding an additional case fan. Never actually had to escalate to reflowing the BGA mount underneath the GPU but recall tutorials of how to do that in a consumer oven.. thank goodness I never tried that one at home.
HPsquared 3y ago
Ah, data compression
- benkillin 3y ago
  I just had to login to upvote this. I am a little ashamed to admit it took me a second to get it. Then, I chuckled :)
kwstas 3y ago
Ha, I have use a clothespin to get a few documents from an old failing usb stick before. Clamp bga rework ftw! Was the drive getting too hot? Maybe under the gpu or in the bottom slot one of those piggyback boards?
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I know those chips are all ball grid array or something, but how does one (or more, I suppose) of the contacts fail this way? Seems like if the package contracts and lifts, that the copper pad would come with it, rather than just a break in the solder. I'm not sure what I should be visualizing for a cold solder joint on surface mount...
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Fatigue cracking from thermal expansion, and also perhaps residual stress and creep deformation. Definitely in the "mechanical engineering" realm.
- projektfu 3y ago
  It's possible that there was a flaw in the original manufacture of the board and one of the balls didn't flow properly, but it passed QC.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Wouldn't that be DOA though? This has to be some sort of flaw that creeps in slowly.
    - projektfu 3y ago
      The flowed contacts could be holding the ball against the pad, making an electrical connection, but then the connection gets fritzy as everything warms up. Ideally it would show itself in the first run but I could also see it getting worse with time. I assume this occurred after the manufacturer's warranty expired.
kosolam 3y ago
Awesome! Thanks for sharing all the technical details. Sure could help in real life situations
watersb 3y ago
> strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card under the SSD to support the PCB. Good to know it's still useful.
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  I'd make a collage out of it with AOL floppies, :CueCat scanners, and Juicero pouches.
compiler-guy 3y ago
This is both very clever and very cool. It's not a matter of if your storage media will fail, just when. Always keep backups.
- jraph 3y ago
  > very cool Yep, exactly -18C cool.
1970-01-01 3y ago
Lexi-tangent: This is a good example of English refusing to follow rules. C-clamps and G-clamps are exactly the same clamp.
- schoen 3y ago
  In a way, C and G are the same letter! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#History
- jaystraw 3y ago
  I came here to comment on G-clamp. I wonder where the author is from. I started building things as a kid, I've worked for quite a few contractors over the decades, I've sold some of my wooden creations and met many skilled people with beautiful shops in the US and Australia and have never ever once heard G-clamp. G-clamp makes total sense, I'm just curious!!
  - yardshop 3y ago
    He's probably not from England because there they call them cramps!
    - jgrahamc 3y ago
      I am British but also French and lived in many different places. I'm just confused. I imagine someone called it a G clamp in front of me at some point and I just started calling it that.
      - OJFord 3y ago
        I'm also British (SW) without the French or many different places - 'cramps' is new to me as far as I can remember. I'd call it a G clamp, and so does Screwfix, fwiw. (Wiktionary does give the clamp meaning too, not with a UK qualifier though. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cramp https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cramp)
freedomben 3y ago
> I'm tempted to try to permanently fix the SSD using my SMD hot air blower. But maybe I should just replace it at this point. Ah, a man after my own heart <3 With the modern widespread trend in tech of treating the owner/user as a security threat, it's easy to feel like the hacker spirit is dead or dying, and then posts like this rekindle my hope for humanity
- bpye 3y ago
  My concern with fixing a storage device is that storage is pretty much the worst thing to fail. Maybe as a cache drive or perhaps for some large applications - but I wouldn’t trust it with data I cared about…
  - toast0 3y ago
    A fix like this is likely to rebreak in the same way. The question becomes how many times do you think it's fixable before thermal stress destroys the board. Maybe future incidents will be prevented by increasing cooling of the device in the installed system? I'd be ok with this in a machine with regular backups, where you're looking at worst case the data from a day or two is lost, plus some downtime while getting a replacement and restoring a backup, and best case another trip through the hot air station. Seems pretty ok to me in that use. Would probably be fine for a use case with easily replaceable data too: if you've got a fast network connection, it could be your steam drive.
    - bpye 3y ago
      Yeah Steam drive is what I was thinking with large applications, but it could as easily be something like Xilinx’s Vivado…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chrisstanchak 3y ago
Found a good use for SVB debit card
- twism 3y ago
  beat me to it
sllabres 3y ago
"But, of course, the SSD gets quite hot during operation so I used one of the heatsinks from the PC and another made from part of carpentry square and some thermal adhesive tape to keep things cool." Instead of this i would suggest a fan. Even small ones create much more airflow than needed when please next to a device.
- klyrs 3y ago
  A block of metal is great heatsink, and a long ruler like that is both thermally conductive and has decent surface area to radiate heat away. More importantly, a fan is not a carpentry tool. Now, one could use a drill, shop vac, or circular saw to generate wind, but they'd be much less energy efficient than the passive radiator.
  - sllabres 3y ago
    I didn't understand the blog post as a challenge to only use carpentry tools but think he used what was available in his shop. (Most carpenter wouldn't have thermal adhesive tape or a thermal camera either ;-)
  - HankB99 3y ago
    For long term applications I much prefer passive cooling (AKA a hunk of metal.) I have one Raspberry Pi 4B in a case with a small heat sink on the processor and a small fan driven from the GPIO pins. It keeps the processor within limits even when overclocked and heavily loaded. Some day the fan will stop working and the processor will overheat (under heavy load) and throttle to prevent self destruction. I have two Compute Modules (CM4s) and found a passive heat sink that is finned aluminum that covers the entire module. There is no fan to fail. I can overclock the CM4 to 2 GHz and load it for stress testing and it remains well within limits. One of these is equipped with an NVME SSD and I was surprised to see it reach excessive temperatures under heavy loads despite the PCIe x1 connection on the Pi. I got a "hunk of copper" NVME cooler, cut it to fit a 2230 NVME and it keeps the NVME SSD within reasonable limits.
  - rocqua 3y ago
    Circular saws sure do produce a surprising amount of wind, but the thought of using one for cooling is horribly terrifying.
WalterBright 3y ago
Sounds like a born motorhead keeping his rod running!
randombits0 3y ago
I did this many years ago when I was a bench tech at a PC shop. It was an old Connor 40 meg drive running DOS. If I squeezed it just right, it would work. Too much? Failure, Abort/retry/ignore. Not enough? Same. So I stood there, squeezing the drive, and hitting ‘r’ for retry, over and over. It worked! Boss walked by. “What the heck are you doing?” “I’m milking the data out of this drive!”
- placesalt 3y ago
  I did the same sort of thing with a broken iPod hard drive. If it was squeezed, it would work; the fix was to put a folded business card in-between the exterior back plate and the drive. That would squeeze it enough that it'd work. Never heated up enough to start a fire, either, so it was safe!
  - dendrite9 3y ago
    Oh man I remember doing that to eke out a little more life from several mp3 players, one or two Creatives and an Sansa e200. There was also one with a sliding door over an SD card with 32MB that I had to pop open and try to fix. I think that was around 2003? I'm pretty sure I upgraded to a 64MB card at some point. Shims were plastic cards, subway tickets, and occasionally toothpicks as an adjustable clamp while I was trying to figure out where the failure was.
  - toast0 3y ago
    I've had to do that to make batteries stay connected in various devices; I've also made shims out of folded aluminum foil when battery contacts are just too far apart; and used a penny (with the edges coated) to shim a light socket where the end of the fixture made it impossible to screw the proper bulb in all the way. Good times :D
- throwaheyy 3y ago
  I had this happen once but the force that would cause the drive to work seemed to be gyroscopic rather that pressure on the casing. So I had to hold the laptop at an angle and turn myself around on the spot while I copied the data off. If I stopped spinning around the drive would grind/crash and the OS would hang.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
>> Y U NO USE SSD ONLY??11 That's why. HDDs aren't failure free but at least most of the shenanigans are solved already. Except SMR.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes. Inserting it into an NVMe M.2 USB case I was able to see the drive on my Mac. Success! Oh so the fridge trick now also works for NVMe drives? I saved files out of an old HDD (about 20 years ago) by putting the HDD in the fridge for about half an hour too: got the files out of the drive then trashed the drive.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Ah yes, good old 'cold storage'.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  I had an emergency one time on the road where the laptop I was using late at night randomly shut down in the middle of audio editing. Weird. I booted it up and it died again fairly quickly. Next time even sooner. Eventually I realized it was overheating. Cue getting ice from the hotel dispenser and using a fan and a metal tray to keep the laptop alive until my work was done.
tbyehl 3y ago
Is 42C even hot for an NVMe? I recently started collecting SMART stats for all the drives in my home fleet and that seems about typical for the drives I have when idle-ish. I've also seen it suggested that keeping NVMe drives too cool is bad for performance. But more importantly, this is a reminder TO HAVE BACKUPS. Many of my friends love their Synology systems. I am thrifty so I use urbackup and it has saved my butt a few times. https://www.worldbackupday.com/ https://www.worldbackupday.com/
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  Yeah. I have a Synology and backed up everything except... this PC. It was just the "gaming PC" and then I realized that I would rather not re-install everything and try to recover the drive. It's set up on the Synology now.
  - benoliver999 3y ago
    I have this with movies. I don't back them up because of the storage requirements. Everything is ripped from BluRays that I own, but... can I be bothered re-doing them?
    - tbyehl 3y ago
      If you'd already built out the automated "Some stranger on the Internet ripped it for me" workflow you could say that usenet is your backup. A buddy just gifted me a decomm'd Synology RS2416+ w/ expansion unit full of drives that could, just, back up what I have... and I am definitely not going to do that.
  - tbyehl 3y ago
    Ouch. I'm am grateful to have picked up the "When in doubt, back it up anyways" habit before getting burned.
- iamjackg 3y ago
  For some reason the Max field in the picture says 42.4°, but if you look at the center target you'll see that it says 88.7°. I missed it too at first and was equally confused.
abotsis 3y ago
Too bad we didn't have such technology for the xbox "red ring of death". oh wait.
aquafox 3y ago
Can someone please explain the physics behind 1) A "faulty connection" and why it fails at a certain temp? Is it a partially broken circuit that doesn't work anymore if resistance is too high? 2) Why airblowing fixes it. Because it melts the crack together? Any why it doesnt do any other harm to the SSD?
- kortex 3y ago
  It sounds like to me a faulty solder joint (crack between the smd pin and the pad). Cooling probably causes a differential contraction which brings the pin into better contact, and of course clamping achieves the same. It may have started with a hairline defect that got worsened by thermal cycles. If it is a bad solder joint, reflowing bridges and fixes the joint. It won't harm the chips as long as the temperature is correct, since it needed to be soldered in a reflow oven in the first place. However (I believe) there is some risk of excess heat corrupting some data, and/or worsening the defect, so if you can back up first using the jury-rig, that's certainly preferable.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Coefficient of thermal expansion is related to density of an object, so chips with higher density and circuit boards with lower density expands to different sizes at the same temperature. Something will have to give way eventually, and usually the solder balls that join chips to the board do so by building up cracks. It WILL do other harms to the SSD. Semiconductor parts have limited reflow counts allowed to meet specifications such as failure rates, longevity, maybe power consumption too. It will be a factor at scale or over time. But it's free extra half life for semi broken parts too.
bdd 3y ago
Reflowing the controller worked for me twice for now. Once with an Intel Optane drive that worked without issues for 3 years and started overheating one day. And another one from a fanless machine that used an mSATA drive that chose to die on a Sunday, with no spare mSATA disk lying around. In both cases I went for short hunting under a microscope, looking for that one guilty shorted cap, yet finding none. It was the controllers with "tired" BGA solder balls, which could use some tender loving care of 225°C (soak) -> 400°C (peak) -> 325°C (hold) reflow.
- russdill 3y ago
  That's quite aggressive. I typically reflow with peak 225C. https://microchip.my.site.com/s/article/SAM-Cortex-M3-M4-M7---AVR8-AVR32---Soldering-reflow-profile--unless-specified https://microchip.my.site.com/s/article/SAM-Cortex-M3-M4-M7-...
  - amelius 3y ago
    According to that datasheet peak temp should be above 245C for at least 20s.
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    That sounds low, unless you are using one of the commercial brands notorious for displaying too-low temperatures (so that their iron/air/oven will be "the good one" that works when others don't).
  - bdd 3y ago
    Dunno. This works for me without damaging the parts, pads, or traces. Your link is for PCBA reflow ovens. Talks about minutes long of exposure. I'm using a Atten ST-862D hot air station with questionable temperature and airflow accuracy. For an M.2 drive I'll probably soak 225 for 15 seconds 3 times the size of the chip areas in circles. Hit my memory-1 button to go to 400 and focus on the chip for 3 seconds. Hit memory-2 to go down to 300 and one up arrow for 325 for 5 more seconds while watching nearby caps' solder pads and ensuring they don't fly away. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
sfink 3y ago
Reminds me of when I fixed my computer with a chopstick back when I was a poor college student. I didn't know anything about cold solder joints at that time, but I did discover that my flaky motherboard would start working when I flexed it a certain way. So I wedged a bamboo chopstick between the motherboard and the case to keep it in a little bit of flexion. Lasted the rest of the year.
- allenrb 3y ago
  Not quite the same thing, but there was a time when 30 pin SIMM sockets had terrible plastic clips on either end. Being something of a gorilla in my youth, I’d break them off from to time. Fortunately the one in my daily driver had another module behind it, so in went a pencil eraser to force the simm in the broken socket to stay in contact. Was so relieved as newer socket designs came out.
Vicinity9635 3y ago
[dead]
lsh123 3y ago
Long time ago I saved data from a hard drive by putting it into freezer, then copying data, putting it into freezing, copying data, ... repeat a lot of times :)
mdip 3y ago
About 15 years ago I made quite a bit of money recovering data from damaged HDDs using various low-tech means. It started when I threw a very expensive (at the time) 1.5TB HDD. It had various things going on with it but I recall it wouldn't spin up and once I was able to get it to spin up, it wouldn't function for more than a few minutes before it would error out and the drive would become unrecognized by the PC. I remember I made it spin up again entirely by accident. Figuring the drive was toast, I'd removed it and while fumbling with the cables it slipped out of my hand and landed on the hardwood floor. I hadn't noticed when I was holding the drive, but it felt like something was "stuck"[0] and after picking it up off the floor, it felt like the components were moving again. On a whim I plugged it back in and it worked. The second problem, I knew, was thermal. The drive got incredibly hot very quickly. Being that it was a 1.5TB drive at a time when "that was big", I'd need the drive to be functional for hours to complete copying the data. I had a dorm fridge in my office and debated putting it in one of my external cases and running a cable from there but knew that the moisture wouldn't play well. Because I kept very little in this fridge, it was filled with a few cans of soda, coffee creamer and about ten of those blue gel bags that people freeze/put in coolers in lieu of ice. I did this mainly because the fridge was really loud and keeping it stocked with anything made it run a lot less. The upshot was that the size of these "bags" was just a little larger than a 3.5" HDD, if left out they maintained their temperature for hours[1]. I grabbed two, placed the drive on top, put two more on top of the drive and managed to image the whole thing. It was so simple, I popped an ad on Craigslist and $200 "I'll get your data back or you don't pay." Out of 30-40 drives, there were less than 5 that were beyond help. About half were software issues, many of which were simple to resolve. Very few required a tool like photorec, but it did the job when needed[2]. The rest were handled with an extremely stable power supply, four gel bags and patience. Except for one of my own drives, I never popped screws and generally didn't resort to "applying physics and gravity" in hopes that if I couldn't recover anything, I'd at least give them a drive that was "no more damaged than when I received it" (they still signed a document covering me for any liability). The whole experience made me realize how critical keeping "components other than the CPU" cool is. Every drive I've experienced hardware failures on[3] has had something heat-related coinciding. I remember one time I couldn't figure out which of the 8 drives was indicating failure; I saw one of the three fans in the drive cage wasn't spinning. I shut the server down, pulled out the fan and its 3-drive set, figured has to be the middle drive, swapped it and it started rebuilding the array on reboot. I guessed right. :) [0] If you take a drive, lay it flat on a desk and spin it, you'll hear things move ... this one didn't. [1] Provided it's just sitting on a wooden desk. [2] There was one customer that I'll never forget and he was a reason I stopped doing this entirely. I told him I could recover photos/videos/specific file types from his drive but it will recovery everything it sees including files that may have been intentionally deleted. He said "Oh, no! Don't do that. I'll pick up my drive." I still wonder, to this day, what kinds of horrors I would have been in for (I rarely did more than a spot check on the data, anyway). [3] I still have a pretty massive custom built storage server with an older LSI MegaRAID controller and a mess of SAS HDDs. For what it's used for, the speed is more than adequate the individual drive costs are substantially less (even taking into account SAS over SATA) and they outlive my SSDs.
koonsolo 3y ago
Ah Seagate, good memories! In the 90's they had this policy that you can send them a broken HD and they would replace it with a new one. Since they wouldn't make the old version anymore, the new drive would have more capaciy. So at first you could just send them your hard drive and you would get an upgraded back. I was probably not the only one who heard about it, and so they started testing the incoming drives to see if they were really malfunctioning. I once tried to break such a drive. Formatting the hard drive while bashing it on the table. The thing kept going, no problem.
- flakes 3y ago
  The image in my head of you bashing the harddrive gave me a good laugh!
- aftbit 3y ago
  My elementary school had a little school supplies store in the school itself. I bought a 4-function calculator for math. Next week, they had an upgraded calculator which showed the inputted formula and supported more functions. The old calculator was gone from the store, but my parents wouldn't give me money to buy the new one. So I took the old calculator apart, disconnected a power wire so it didn't work, and brought it back to exchange for the new one. Sorry school!
- ashbee 3y ago
  The first PC I built myself in the 90s had a Seagate hard drive. It developed a "click of death" after a few years, a repetitive clicking noise which corresponded with my PC freezing/crashing. I discovered at some point that a few swift kicks to the front of the case would get it going again for a couple of days. This lasted for a good year or two before no amount of kicking would revive it.
creer 3y ago
A ziplock baggy with ice cubes and a little water can absorb a lot of heat.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
OJFord 3y ago
Dodgy flash bodge involving a woodworking clamp & 'strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card' - this is absolutely the 'most HN' story I've ever read!
jaegerma 3y ago
> So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes. Just scrolled through the Ontrack website: Data recovery myths: why you should avoid the temptation of a DIY repair Suggestions we’ve seen online that definitely _will not_ help you recover your data include: - Putting your hard drive in the freezer overnight :')
- rasz 3y ago
  This isnt a hard drive. It worked because cold causes components to shrink and pulled BGA ram chip closer to the board. Cold spray is standard practice when diagnosing electronics defects.
progman32 3y ago
Once I pulled all my data off my stricken phone in my hotel room using nothing but the veggie sausages I'd stashed in the mini fridge as a cold sink. Failed at just the wrong moment the evening before an important event, of course. No time to find enough bandwidth to restore my backups...
sacnoradhq 3y ago
Oh fuck, I have 4 FireCudas (2 530s and 2 520s). I'd probably try reflowing BGAs in my buddy's shop's BGA oven.
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
I had a new laptop that I swear would hardlock while watching YouTube, but only when the device was recently powered on (it was on for weeks / months at a time normally). Eventually someone suggested a solder contact may be less stable when cold, after a few weeks of testing I confirmed this was true (or enough to reproduce the issue) before RMAing the laptop, which has been working perfectly ever since!
userbinator 3y ago
The use of more brittle lead-free solder has almost certainly contributed to higher failure rates of BGAs under thermal cycling, leading to more ewaste generation. But at least the ewaste is environmentally friendly...?
dugite-code 3y ago
Reminds me of the time I had my spinning rust system drive sitting in the freezer with the wires leading out to my tower sitting on top. I was desperately trying to image my system drive with clonezilla. As a poor student it was a stressful time, thankfully it worked.
pseudosavant 3y ago
This doesn't involve woodworking tools but is the weirdest fix I've ever done. I had a Surface Pro 3 that was working fine and then suddenly died and would not power on. I couldn't figure out anything to fix it. Eventually I read a random post on Reddit[0] how a guy tried putting it his SP3 in the freezer (in a sealed freezer bag) and it eventually came back to life. I skeptically tried it. I thought freezing was more likely to destroy something else on it, but what did I have to lose? It was already dead. I put it in a sealed freezer bag with as much air removed as possible, and then put it in the freezer for a couple of hours. I took it out, plugged power in, and I was able to turn it on! The first time I did it, it only worked for a few days. I tried freezing it again, and that worked. It still works to this day, many years later. My theory is that it seemed like a power problem, and that freezing the battery put the chemistry through some kind of cycle that repaired it. I did keep the Surface wrapped in layers of towel to warm it back up slowly. Mostly to help prevent any moisture from building up somewhere before it got to temperature. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/5tficj/how_i_revived_my_dead_surface_pro_3_has_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/5tficj/how_i_reviv...
- ngrilly 3y ago
  > freezing the battery put the chemistry through some kind of cycle that repaired it Do you think that replacing the battery would have fixed it?
  - pseudosavant 3y ago
    Perhaps. But freezing it twice also seemed to fix it. I used it as my primary machine for years after this fix.
- archerx 3y ago
  I remember back in the day when I had one of the original Gameboys that needed 4AA batteries, I would put the batteries in the freezer for a while when they died and I could get few extra minutes out the batteries. Maybe your battery theory is right.
jchw 3y ago
I have a GPD MicroPC. The weird SATA SSD it came with stopped working after I dropped it once. Everything seemed fine, and I noticed that sometimes it would work if the mounting pressure was a bit higher than usual. So, I did the right thing and stacked a bunch of electrical tape between the chassis and the SSD, and it has been working ever since. It's OK if the SSD dies though; it's running NixOS, so getting it back up and running with a new SSD would be a very short ordeal.
aledalgrande 3y ago
lol when I read the title I was asking myself how they would have scalpeled out the right sectors... turns out it was a lot less exciting
iamjason89 3y ago
The power button broke on a dell laptop i was working on one time. We had to order the part, but the customer didn't want to wait. I offered a very cheap alternative, and took his spare wifi antenna cables and cut the off. Then I soldered them DIRECTLY to the motherboard and routed them to hang out the side. It was like jumper cables, you tap the and the laptop would turn on
eastdakota 3y ago
I think the use of a chopped up SVB credit card is clearly the cherry on top of this story.
jeffrallen 3y ago
Bonus points for calling out the cut up SVB card. Classy.
throwthat1 3y ago
A clamp is a wood working tool?
- astrodust 3y ago
  You can't get much done before you need at least one clamp. Most wood-workers have dozens on hand at all times.
  - throwthat1 3y ago
    Yeah but it is more of a general purpose tool than a woodworking tool... And this post kinda proves my point
aetherspawn 3y ago
HP sold me a crappy high-end Pavillion laptop around 12 years ago with a GeForce chip in it that would unsolder itself due to poor thermals. The fix was to disassemble the back of the laptop, mask around the GPU with tin foil, and hit it with a hair dryer on max setting for about 20 mins. The fix would last like 3 months. Learnt it off some guy on YouTube who was such a hero.
- rasz 3y ago
  In particular nvidia bump gate case it was microbumps cracking under thermal stress due to use of badly matched thermal coefficient of the glue securing the crystal. Defect was between gpu core and carrier package, not the BGA balls.
flybarrel 3y ago
It's the SVB card for me....lollll
rajnathani 3y ago
JFYI: The author of the post is the CTO of Cloudflare.
riyapant 3y ago
Using woodworking tools to retrieve 1TB of data from a faulty drive is not recommended and is highly unlikely to be successful. Data recovery requires specialized equipment and expertise to handle delicate electronic components. Using woodworking tools could further damage the drive and data beyond recovery. It's best to consult professional data recovery software/service for such tasks.
riyapant 3y ago
Using woodworking tools to retrieve 1TB of data from a faulty drive is not recommended and is highly unlikely to be successful. Data recovery requires specialized equipment and expertise to handle delicate electronic components. Using woodworking tools could further damage the drive and data beyond recovery. It's best to consult professional data recovery services or try DIY data recovery software for such tasks.

535 points by jgrahamc 3y ago

I see a lot of tutorials on running mechanical hard disks without covers on and such. Years ago, the drives had safety systems to prevent this.

duffyjp 3y ago
In the late 90's I was an instructor in a youth PC repair class. For a fun demonstration we took an old IDE drive, removed the lid and had it running defrag. We did this outside. Next to show how important it was to prevent liquid spills we poured some cola directly into the drive. It sprayed everywhere but the drive kept working fine. Kids got a good laugh and did not learn a lesson that day.

daneel_w 3y ago

Does anyone have any advice (other than sending to a professional data recovery service) for how to access data on an HDD whose controller card stopped working, and refuse to accept a spare controller card taken from a brand new identical HDD?

danparsonson 3y ago
Is it not the case that the controller boards store track data specific to an individual drive? I don't think they can be swapped out.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  I fear this is the case...
- ericbarrett 3y ago
  Historically they did contain a map of physically unusable sectors particular to the physical platters in the drive, and I'd be surprised if they didn't now. So the consequence of a controller swap was making the assembly unstable because you were using a foreign sector map; usually it was still enough to recover as long as you weren't writing new data. But nowadays a drive controller is far more complex, e.g. it might implement transparent hardware AES encryption, in which case swapping the board loses the key. And I've no doubt there are many modern manufacturing-related tricks for yield that go into them as well, any of which might make a different set of platters than what was shipped unreadable.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  Yes, they (the PCB's) cannot be swapped unless you also swap the chip containing the adaptive data.
londons_explore 3y ago
How do you know for sure it's the controller? Note that many controllers store parts of their firmware/config on the disk platter, so without the disk platter the board may not show up via sata.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  It's my suspicion, at least. In fact I have two of those drives, bought at the same time, and both died in the same sudden way with no more than two weeks between.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Wasn't there a firmware bug in some drives that made them fail after a certain number of seconds of uptime? Was a workaround/fix published?
    - daneel_w 3y ago
      Doesn't ring a bell for me, but given the highly questionable tiering/marketing methods from HDD manufacturers these days and the fact that they have been reducing warranty durations by some 50%, that type of planned obsolescence wouldn't surprise me. The drives are 3.5" 2TB WD Green purchased around 2012, and had been in use for about 1 year when they both died.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        > 2012 If that's not a typo, then it seems like those drives have been powered off for about 10 years. I think powered off hard drives are commonly said to retain data for um... maybe 3 years (from rough memory). So, your drives have probably lost their magnetism (and thus the data). :(
        daneel_w 3y ago
        Not a typo, they've been powered off for around a decade. But HDDs (just like floppies) don't lose their magnetized property in just 3 years, or even 10 years, barring the very rare case of an extreme fluke or environmental exposure. Flash memory (memory cards, USB sticks, SSDs) loses electrical charge relatively fast, however. That might be what you're thinking of.
londons_explore 3y ago
Cool it down to freezer temperatures and see if it works. Heat it up to ~60C and see if it works. This applies to both hard drives and SSD's. A good half of "failed" drives can be made to work for at least a few hours longer with that method. Unlike OP, If you see signs of life, don't mess with clamps or reflowing. Just leave it in the freezer/oven while you take data off it, with longish power/sata cables to a machine just outside the freezer/oven door. I recommend GNU ddrescue for getting data off - when you only have a few hours of service life left till it is dead-dead, it maximizes data recovery in a given time. There are various ways to generate a mapfile to skip recovering free blocks, which are worth using if you suspect the drive is mostly empty.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Couldn’t this method risk making it completely irrecoverable if it fails?
  - sgarland 3y ago
    Freezing / heating? Other than the risk of humidity as mentioned, not really. Unless the head crashes into the platter, it's unlikely to do anything that would permanently kill the drive. That said, if you ever have a drive with absolutely critical, must-have data, don't bother with any of this and just ship it to professionals. You'll pay dearly, but they'll get your data out.
- theolivenbaum 3y ago
  And for the freezer method, be careful with humidity when you take it out. Worth putting it in a bag with some dehumidifiers and just take the cable out
kwstas 3y ago
There are bios chips on the controller board than need to be transfered to the new one. In a reasonably modern drive that would be pretty challenging and rewuire a hot air station. https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html
h2odragon 3y ago
Double check the numbers on the controller boards; HDD's are complicated little computers and the manufacturers change things during production of a particular model of drive fairly often. If you've got the controller board your drive wants and still nothing, then its time for professional help or considering the data lost, imo.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  The PCBs are of the exact same model. My fear is a DRM type scheme connected to serial numbers etc. stored on the platters having to match those of the controller.
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    doesn't even have to be DRM, just "media mapping" where its adjusting tot he individual platters and such. like factory low-level format stuff. I don't know how complex HDDs have got, but I recall giggling at someone installing linux on an HDD controller board several years ago. So I bet its much worse now.
jaclaz 3y ago
Since many years (like 15 or more) the PCB of a hard disk contains a chip (essentially an eeprom or flash device) containing so-called "adaptive data", a set of data written in the factory that are specific to the disk drive (head/platters) the PCB is mounted on. There is specialized hardware (and software) to be able to extract the data and save on another board's memory, but the poorman's way is that of transferring the actual chip from the old board to the new (identical) one. This, commonly referred to as "ROM swap" is not particularly difficult[1] as the chip is usually a rather simple 8 pin one, if you are not into this kind of things a hardware repair shop (like a phone repair one) will normally make this work for you. However newish hard disks may have not this separate chip, it has to be seen which model yours is. Here is a site with some more info: https://hddpcb.eu/gb/content/how-to-swap-hdd-pcb https://hddpcb.eu/gb/content/how-to-swap-hdd-pcb [1] meaning that it can be done DIY if you are familiar enough with soldering/desoldering components
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> other than sending to a professional data recovery service Ah, so you don't really need that data...
- daneel_w 3y ago
  Why the snark? I will survive without the data, but I'm curious about alternatives to throwing $4000 at the problem and forfeiting my privacy and my data's integrity.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    There are many people out there who thought what they could recover the data by themselves, only to swallow a bitter pill later, that's why. Because if you really need the data then you go to people who makes a living by recovering data. But if you are okay to lose the if unsuccessful then it's okay to try, but you should know/tell that beforehand. Reading through the other comments - you have a very low chance to succeed, because if you want to swap controller boards then you need to move adaptive data too, as other had said. But I'm curios what exactly happened, WD Green from 2012 are not the worst drives out there. How exactly they failed, what happens now when you power them on, with SATA connected, without? Did you try external USB2SATA converters/boxes?
    - daneel_w 3y ago
      >"Reading through the other comments - you have a very low chance to succeed, because if you want to swap controller boards then you need to move adaptive data too, as other had said." I'm pretty decent with soldering iron and hot-air gun. Migrating the SMD flash/EEPROM chip shouldn't be too hard. >"But I'm curios what exactly happened, WD Green from 2012 are not the worst drives out there. How exactly they failed, what happens now when you power them on, with SATA connected, without? Did you try external USB2SATA converters/boxes?" The discs spin up but the controller no longer communicates with the host. The computer doesn't see that the drives are attached to the SATA bus. There were no signs of problems coming, they just suddenly stopped working from one power-up to the next. I tried with different motherboards and a couple of SATA-USB bridges, all same result.
toast0 3y ago
Just a double check... you said in thread you have two of these drives that died at 1 year old. Did you have a third, working, drive you're transplanting boards from?
- daneel_w 3y ago
  I have a third drive, working and unused, with same PCB model number. Others in this thread have said that my chances are good if I bring the DIP-8 EEPROM from the broken drives over to the working PCB.

leetrout 3y ago

I just lost data on a firecuda drive that was a few months old. The lab could not recover the data and also did not tell me the root cause of the drive failure. Compared with my samsung ssds which have (knock on wood) never died in a decade. I know all brands fail but is there something of lesser quality with the firecuda line?

londons_explore 3y ago
From working tangentially in consumer electronics, I can tell you that nearly all failures are design related if you look deep enough. There are some products where some start dying after 1 year, and nearly all of them are dead after 2 years. Other times it's a combination of a bad design and some specific use case. For example "these fail after 3 years if you turn them on and off every day, but don't fail if you leave them running 24x7".
- lelag 3y ago
  Or sometimes they will die if you leave them on for 40000 hours. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Solder joints seem to be a major failure. That'd be mostly fatigue (thermal cycling) and the occasional case of tin whiskers.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Yes, but in turn the failure is because the thermal expansion coefficient of the board and component were insufficiently closely matched (when taking into account the elasticity of the board and component)
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      Lead-free solder is just shittier than leaded solder. You're not wrong about design but better solder would reduce the impact of mismatched thermal expansion properties.

danparsonson 3y ago

This is superb, something like the modern equivalent of the engineer's slap that one could use with old spinning drives that would no longer spin up.

HPsquared 3y ago
I had that with an old drive that was in a drawer for years. I tried it many times and it wouldn't start. Then I accidentally dropped it (it landed pretty hard, hitting a metal table leg)... After that it worked fine and I was able to copy off all the data.
snitty 3y ago
Compressive maintenance rather than percussive.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kraquepype 3y ago
I got a cheap used original PS4 and it wouldn't power up unless you put pressure on the mainboard, right around the PSU. I took pieces of wood, and a clamp and applied pressure there and it worked. The same pressure is applied if you use washers on the heatsink clamp - I did that and it's been running fine for months. The solder joints on the GPU get brittle under the stress of heat and compressing it restores the connection. Pressure or re-flowing is really just a band-aid, the real fix is to re-ball the GPU but that gets expensive.
- reasonabl_human 3y ago
  Classic. This was a common failure mode for the 360 as well. Used to fix friends 360s that had the red ring of death by tearing them down, tightening the braces underneath the heat sink, and adding an additional case fan. Never actually had to escalate to reflowing the BGA mount underneath the GPU but recall tutorials of how to do that in a consumer oven.. thank goodness I never tried that one at home.

HPsquared 3y ago

Ah, data compression

benkillin 3y ago
I just had to login to upvote this. I am a little ashamed to admit it took me a second to get it. Then, I chuckled :)

kwstas 3y ago

Ha, I have use a clothespin to get a few documents from an old failing usb stick before. Clamp bga rework ftw! Was the drive getting too hot? Maybe under the gpu or in the bottom slot one of those piggyback boards?

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

I know those chips are all ball grid array or something, but how does one (or more, I suppose) of the contacts fail this way? Seems like if the package contracts and lifts, that the copper pad would come with it, rather than just a break in the solder. I'm not sure what I should be visualizing for a cold solder joint on surface mount...

HPsquared 3y ago
Fatigue cracking from thermal expansion, and also perhaps residual stress and creep deformation. Definitely in the "mechanical engineering" realm.
projektfu 3y ago
It's possible that there was a flaw in the original manufacture of the board and one of the balls didn't flow properly, but it passed QC.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Wouldn't that be DOA though? This has to be some sort of flaw that creeps in slowly.
  - projektfu 3y ago
    The flowed contacts could be holding the ball against the pad, making an electrical connection, but then the connection gets fritzy as everything warms up. Ideally it would show itself in the first run but I could also see it getting worse with time. I assume this occurred after the manufacturer's warranty expired.

kosolam 3y ago

Awesome! Thanks for sharing all the technical details. Sure could help in real life situations

watersb 3y ago

> strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card under the SSD to support the PCB. Good to know it's still useful.

sacnoradhq 3y ago
I'd make a collage out of it with AOL floppies, :CueCat scanners, and Juicero pouches.

compiler-guy 3y ago

This is both very clever and very cool. It's not a matter of if your storage media will fail, just when. Always keep backups.

jraph 3y ago
> very cool Yep, exactly -18C cool.

1970-01-01 3y ago

Lexi-tangent: This is a good example of English refusing to follow rules. C-clamps and G-clamps are exactly the same clamp.

schoen 3y ago
In a way, C and G are the same letter! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#History
jaystraw 3y ago
I came here to comment on G-clamp. I wonder where the author is from. I started building things as a kid, I've worked for quite a few contractors over the decades, I've sold some of my wooden creations and met many skilled people with beautiful shops in the US and Australia and have never ever once heard G-clamp. G-clamp makes total sense, I'm just curious!!
- yardshop 3y ago
  He's probably not from England because there they call them cramps!
  - jgrahamc 3y ago
    I am British but also French and lived in many different places. I'm just confused. I imagine someone called it a G clamp in front of me at some point and I just started calling it that.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      I'm also British (SW) without the French or many different places - 'cramps' is new to me as far as I can remember. I'd call it a G clamp, and so does Screwfix, fwiw. (Wiktionary does give the clamp meaning too, not with a UK qualifier though. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cramp https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cramp)

freedomben 3y ago

> I'm tempted to try to permanently fix the SSD using my SMD hot air blower. But maybe I should just replace it at this point. Ah, a man after my own heart <3 With the modern widespread trend in tech of treating the owner/user as a security threat, it's easy to feel like the hacker spirit is dead or dying, and then posts like this rekindle my hope for humanity

bpye 3y ago
My concern with fixing a storage device is that storage is pretty much the worst thing to fail. Maybe as a cache drive or perhaps for some large applications - but I wouldn’t trust it with data I cared about…
- toast0 3y ago
  A fix like this is likely to rebreak in the same way. The question becomes how many times do you think it's fixable before thermal stress destroys the board. Maybe future incidents will be prevented by increasing cooling of the device in the installed system? I'd be ok with this in a machine with regular backups, where you're looking at worst case the data from a day or two is lost, plus some downtime while getting a replacement and restoring a backup, and best case another trip through the hot air station. Seems pretty ok to me in that use. Would probably be fine for a use case with easily replaceable data too: if you've got a fast network connection, it could be your steam drive.
  - bpye 3y ago
    Yeah Steam drive is what I was thinking with large applications, but it could as easily be something like Xilinx’s Vivado…
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

chrisstanchak 3y ago

Found a good use for SVB debit card

twism 3y ago
beat me to it

sllabres 3y ago

"But, of course, the SSD gets quite hot during operation so I used one of the heatsinks from the PC and another made from part of carpentry square and some thermal adhesive tape to keep things cool." Instead of this i would suggest a fan. Even small ones create much more airflow than needed when please next to a device.

klyrs 3y ago
A block of metal is great heatsink, and a long ruler like that is both thermally conductive and has decent surface area to radiate heat away. More importantly, a fan is not a carpentry tool. Now, one could use a drill, shop vac, or circular saw to generate wind, but they'd be much less energy efficient than the passive radiator.
- sllabres 3y ago
  I didn't understand the blog post as a challenge to only use carpentry tools but think he used what was available in his shop. (Most carpenter wouldn't have thermal adhesive tape or a thermal camera either ;-)
- HankB99 3y ago
  For long term applications I much prefer passive cooling (AKA a hunk of metal.) I have one Raspberry Pi 4B in a case with a small heat sink on the processor and a small fan driven from the GPIO pins. It keeps the processor within limits even when overclocked and heavily loaded. Some day the fan will stop working and the processor will overheat (under heavy load) and throttle to prevent self destruction. I have two Compute Modules (CM4s) and found a passive heat sink that is finned aluminum that covers the entire module. There is no fan to fail. I can overclock the CM4 to 2 GHz and load it for stress testing and it remains well within limits. One of these is equipped with an NVME SSD and I was surprised to see it reach excessive temperatures under heavy loads despite the PCIe x1 connection on the Pi. I got a "hunk of copper" NVME cooler, cut it to fit a 2230 NVME and it keeps the NVME SSD within reasonable limits.
- rocqua 3y ago
  Circular saws sure do produce a surprising amount of wind, but the thought of using one for cooling is horribly terrifying.

WalterBright 3y ago

Sounds like a born motorhead keeping his rod running!

randombits0 3y ago

I did this many years ago when I was a bench tech at a PC shop. It was an old Connor 40 meg drive running DOS. If I squeezed it just right, it would work. Too much? Failure, Abort/retry/ignore. Not enough? Same. So I stood there, squeezing the drive, and hitting ‘r’ for retry, over and over. It worked! Boss walked by. “What the heck are you doing?” “I’m milking the data out of this drive!”

placesalt 3y ago
I did the same sort of thing with a broken iPod hard drive. If it was squeezed, it would work; the fix was to put a folded business card in-between the exterior back plate and the drive. That would squeeze it enough that it'd work. Never heated up enough to start a fire, either, so it was safe!
- dendrite9 3y ago
  Oh man I remember doing that to eke out a little more life from several mp3 players, one or two Creatives and an Sansa e200. There was also one with a sliding door over an SD card with 32MB that I had to pop open and try to fix. I think that was around 2003? I'm pretty sure I upgraded to a 64MB card at some point. Shims were plastic cards, subway tickets, and occasionally toothpicks as an adjustable clamp while I was trying to figure out where the failure was.
- toast0 3y ago
  I've had to do that to make batteries stay connected in various devices; I've also made shims out of folded aluminum foil when battery contacts are just too far apart; and used a penny (with the edges coated) to shim a light socket where the end of the fixture made it impossible to screw the proper bulb in all the way. Good times :D
throwaheyy 3y ago
I had this happen once but the force that would cause the drive to work seemed to be gyroscopic rather that pressure on the casing. So I had to hold the laptop at an angle and turn myself around on the spot while I copied the data off. If I stopped spinning around the drive would grind/crash and the OS would hang.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

>> Y U NO USE SSD ONLY??11 That's why. HDDs aren't failure free but at least most of the shenanigans are solved already. Except SMR.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes. Inserting it into an NVMe M.2 USB case I was able to see the drive on my Mac. Success! Oh so the fridge trick now also works for NVMe drives? I saved files out of an old HDD (about 20 years ago) by putting the HDD in the fridge for about half an hour too: got the files out of the drive then trashed the drive.

gnicholas 3y ago
Ah yes, good old 'cold storage'.
jtbayly 3y ago
I had an emergency one time on the road where the laptop I was using late at night randomly shut down in the middle of audio editing. Weird. I booted it up and it died again fairly quickly. Next time even sooner. Eventually I realized it was overheating. Cue getting ice from the hotel dispenser and using a fan and a metal tray to keep the laptop alive until my work was done.

tbyehl 3y ago

Is 42C even hot for an NVMe? I recently started collecting SMART stats for all the drives in my home fleet and that seems about typical for the drives I have when idle-ish. I've also seen it suggested that keeping NVMe drives too cool is bad for performance. But more importantly, this is a reminder TO HAVE BACKUPS. Many of my friends love their Synology systems. I am thrifty so I use urbackup and it has saved my butt a few times. https://www.worldbackupday.com/ https://www.worldbackupday.com/

jgrahamc 3y ago
Yeah. I have a Synology and backed up everything except... this PC. It was just the "gaming PC" and then I realized that I would rather not re-install everything and try to recover the drive. It's set up on the Synology now.
- benoliver999 3y ago
  I have this with movies. I don't back them up because of the storage requirements. Everything is ripped from BluRays that I own, but... can I be bothered re-doing them?
  - tbyehl 3y ago
    If you'd already built out the automated "Some stranger on the Internet ripped it for me" workflow you could say that usenet is your backup. A buddy just gifted me a decomm'd Synology RS2416+ w/ expansion unit full of drives that could, just, back up what I have... and I am definitely not going to do that.
- tbyehl 3y ago
  Ouch. I'm am grateful to have picked up the "When in doubt, back it up anyways" habit before getting burned.
iamjackg 3y ago
For some reason the Max field in the picture says 42.4°, but if you look at the center target you'll see that it says 88.7°. I missed it too at first and was equally confused.

abotsis 3y ago

Too bad we didn't have such technology for the xbox "red ring of death". oh wait.

aquafox 3y ago

Can someone please explain the physics behind 1) A "faulty connection" and why it fails at a certain temp? Is it a partially broken circuit that doesn't work anymore if resistance is too high? 2) Why airblowing fixes it. Because it melts the crack together? Any why it doesnt do any other harm to the SSD?

kortex 3y ago
It sounds like to me a faulty solder joint (crack between the smd pin and the pad). Cooling probably causes a differential contraction which brings the pin into better contact, and of course clamping achieves the same. It may have started with a hairline defect that got worsened by thermal cycles. If it is a bad solder joint, reflowing bridges and fixes the joint. It won't harm the chips as long as the temperature is correct, since it needed to be soldered in a reflow oven in the first place. However (I believe) there is some risk of excess heat corrupting some data, and/or worsening the defect, so if you can back up first using the jury-rig, that's certainly preferable.
numpad0 3y ago
Coefficient of thermal expansion is related to density of an object, so chips with higher density and circuit boards with lower density expands to different sizes at the same temperature. Something will have to give way eventually, and usually the solder balls that join chips to the board do so by building up cracks. It WILL do other harms to the SSD. Semiconductor parts have limited reflow counts allowed to meet specifications such as failure rates, longevity, maybe power consumption too. It will be a factor at scale or over time. But it's free extra half life for semi broken parts too.

bdd 3y ago

Reflowing the controller worked for me twice for now. Once with an Intel Optane drive that worked without issues for 3 years and started overheating one day. And another one from a fanless machine that used an mSATA drive that chose to die on a Sunday, with no spare mSATA disk lying around. In both cases I went for short hunting under a microscope, looking for that one guilty shorted cap, yet finding none. It was the controllers with "tired" BGA solder balls, which could use some tender loving care of 225°C (soak) -> 400°C (peak) -> 325°C (hold) reflow.

russdill 3y ago
That's quite aggressive. I typically reflow with peak 225C. https://microchip.my.site.com/s/article/SAM-Cortex-M3-M4-M7---AVR8-AVR32---Soldering-reflow-profile--unless-specified https://microchip.my.site.com/s/article/SAM-Cortex-M3-M4-M7-...
- amelius 3y ago
  According to that datasheet peak temp should be above 245C for at least 20s.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  That sounds low, unless you are using one of the commercial brands notorious for displaying too-low temperatures (so that their iron/air/oven will be "the good one" that works when others don't).
- bdd 3y ago
  Dunno. This works for me without damaging the parts, pads, or traces. Your link is for PCBA reflow ovens. Talks about minutes long of exposure. I'm using a Atten ST-862D hot air station with questionable temperature and airflow accuracy. For an M.2 drive I'll probably soak 225 for 15 seconds 3 times the size of the chip areas in circles. Hit my memory-1 button to go to 400 and focus on the chip for 3 seconds. Hit memory-2 to go down to 300 and one up arrow for 325 for 5 more seconds while watching nearby caps' solder pads and ensuring they don't fly away. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sfink 3y ago

Reminds me of when I fixed my computer with a chopstick back when I was a poor college student. I didn't know anything about cold solder joints at that time, but I did discover that my flaky motherboard would start working when I flexed it a certain way. So I wedged a bamboo chopstick between the motherboard and the case to keep it in a little bit of flexion. Lasted the rest of the year.

allenrb 3y ago
Not quite the same thing, but there was a time when 30 pin SIMM sockets had terrible plastic clips on either end. Being something of a gorilla in my youth, I’d break them off from to time. Fortunately the one in my daily driver had another module behind it, so in went a pencil eraser to force the simm in the broken socket to stay in contact. Was so relieved as newer socket designs came out.

Vicinity9635 3y ago

[dead]

lsh123 3y ago

Long time ago I saved data from a hard drive by putting it into freezer, then copying data, putting it into freezing, copying data, ... repeat a lot of times :)

mdip 3y ago

About 15 years ago I made quite a bit of money recovering data from damaged HDDs using various low-tech means. It started when I threw a very expensive (at the time) 1.5TB HDD. It had various things going on with it but I recall it wouldn't spin up and once I was able to get it to spin up, it wouldn't function for more than a few minutes before it would error out and the drive would become unrecognized by the PC. I remember I made it spin up again entirely by accident. Figuring the drive was toast, I'd removed it and while fumbling with the cables it slipped out of my hand and landed on the hardwood floor. I hadn't noticed when I was holding the drive, but it felt like something was "stuck"[0] and after picking it up off the floor, it felt like the components were moving again. On a whim I plugged it back in and it worked. The second problem, I knew, was thermal. The drive got incredibly hot very quickly. Being that it was a 1.5TB drive at a time when "that was big", I'd need the drive to be functional for hours to complete copying the data. I had a dorm fridge in my office and debated putting it in one of my external cases and running a cable from there but knew that the moisture wouldn't play well. Because I kept very little in this fridge, it was filled with a few cans of soda, coffee creamer and about ten of those blue gel bags that people freeze/put in coolers in lieu of ice. I did this mainly because the fridge was really loud and keeping it stocked with anything made it run a lot less. The upshot was that the size of these "bags" was just a little larger than a 3.5" HDD, if left out they maintained their temperature for hours[1]. I grabbed two, placed the drive on top, put two more on top of the drive and managed to image the whole thing. It was so simple, I popped an ad on Craigslist and $200 "I'll get your data back or you don't pay." Out of 30-40 drives, there were less than 5 that were beyond help. About half were software issues, many of which were simple to resolve. Very few required a tool like photorec, but it did the job when needed[2]. The rest were handled with an extremely stable power supply, four gel bags and patience. Except for one of my own drives, I never popped screws and generally didn't resort to "applying physics and gravity" in hopes that if I couldn't recover anything, I'd at least give them a drive that was "no more damaged than when I received it" (they still signed a document covering me for any liability). The whole experience made me realize how critical keeping "components other than the CPU" cool is. Every drive I've experienced hardware failures on[3] has had something heat-related coinciding. I remember one time I couldn't figure out which of the 8 drives was indicating failure; I saw one of the three fans in the drive cage wasn't spinning. I shut the server down, pulled out the fan and its 3-drive set, figured has to be the middle drive, swapped it and it started rebuilding the array on reboot. I guessed right. :) [0] If you take a drive, lay it flat on a desk and spin it, you'll hear things move ... this one didn't. [1] Provided it's just sitting on a wooden desk. [2] There was one customer that I'll never forget and he was a reason I stopped doing this entirely. I told him I could recover photos/videos/specific file types from his drive but it will recovery everything it sees including files that may have been intentionally deleted. He said "Oh, no! Don't do that. I'll pick up my drive." I still wonder, to this day, what kinds of horrors I would have been in for (I rarely did more than a spot check on the data, anyway). [3] I still have a pretty massive custom built storage server with an older LSI MegaRAID controller and a mess of SAS HDDs. For what it's used for, the speed is more than adequate the individual drive costs are substantially less (even taking into account SAS over SATA) and they outlive my SSDs.

koonsolo 3y ago

Ah Seagate, good memories! In the 90's they had this policy that you can send them a broken HD and they would replace it with a new one. Since they wouldn't make the old version anymore, the new drive would have more capaciy. So at first you could just send them your hard drive and you would get an upgraded back. I was probably not the only one who heard about it, and so they started testing the incoming drives to see if they were really malfunctioning. I once tried to break such a drive. Formatting the hard drive while bashing it on the table. The thing kept going, no problem.

flakes 3y ago
The image in my head of you bashing the harddrive gave me a good laugh!
aftbit 3y ago
My elementary school had a little school supplies store in the school itself. I bought a 4-function calculator for math. Next week, they had an upgraded calculator which showed the inputted formula and supported more functions. The old calculator was gone from the store, but my parents wouldn't give me money to buy the new one. So I took the old calculator apart, disconnected a power wire so it didn't work, and brought it back to exchange for the new one. Sorry school!
ashbee 3y ago
The first PC I built myself in the 90s had a Seagate hard drive. It developed a "click of death" after a few years, a repetitive clicking noise which corresponded with my PC freezing/crashing. I discovered at some point that a few swift kicks to the front of the case would get it going again for a couple of days. This lasted for a good year or two before no amount of kicking would revive it.

creer 3y ago

A ziplock baggy with ice cubes and a little water can absorb a lot of heat.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

OJFord 3y ago

Dodgy flash bodge involving a woodworking clamp & 'strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card' - this is absolutely the 'most HN' story I've ever read!

jaegerma 3y ago

> So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes. Just scrolled through the Ontrack website: Data recovery myths: why you should avoid the temptation of a DIY repair Suggestions we’ve seen online that definitely _will not_ help you recover your data include: - Putting your hard drive in the freezer overnight :')

rasz 3y ago
This isnt a hard drive. It worked because cold causes components to shrink and pulled BGA ram chip closer to the board. Cold spray is standard practice when diagnosing electronics defects.

progman32 3y ago

Once I pulled all my data off my stricken phone in my hotel room using nothing but the veggie sausages I'd stashed in the mini fridge as a cold sink. Failed at just the wrong moment the evening before an important event, of course. No time to find enough bandwidth to restore my backups...

sacnoradhq 3y ago

Oh fuck, I have 4 FireCudas (2 530s and 2 520s). I'd probably try reflowing BGAs in my buddy's shop's BGA oven.

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

I had a new laptop that I swear would hardlock while watching YouTube, but only when the device was recently powered on (it was on for weeks / months at a time normally). Eventually someone suggested a solder contact may be less stable when cold, after a few weeks of testing I confirmed this was true (or enough to reproduce the issue) before RMAing the laptop, which has been working perfectly ever since!

userbinator 3y ago

The use of more brittle lead-free solder has almost certainly contributed to higher failure rates of BGAs under thermal cycling, leading to more ewaste generation. But at least the ewaste is environmentally friendly...?

dugite-code 3y ago

Reminds me of the time I had my spinning rust system drive sitting in the freezer with the wires leading out to my tower sitting on top. I was desperately trying to image my system drive with clonezilla. As a poor student it was a stressful time, thankfully it worked.

pseudosavant 3y ago

This doesn't involve woodworking tools but is the weirdest fix I've ever done. I had a Surface Pro 3 that was working fine and then suddenly died and would not power on. I couldn't figure out anything to fix it. Eventually I read a random post on Reddit[0] how a guy tried putting it his SP3 in the freezer (in a sealed freezer bag) and it eventually came back to life. I skeptically tried it. I thought freezing was more likely to destroy something else on it, but what did I have to lose? It was already dead. I put it in a sealed freezer bag with as much air removed as possible, and then put it in the freezer for a couple of hours. I took it out, plugged power in, and I was able to turn it on! The first time I did it, it only worked for a few days. I tried freezing it again, and that worked. It still works to this day, many years later. My theory is that it seemed like a power problem, and that freezing the battery put the chemistry through some kind of cycle that repaired it. I did keep the Surface wrapped in layers of towel to warm it back up slowly. Mostly to help prevent any moisture from building up somewhere before it got to temperature. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/5tficj/how_i_revived_my_dead_surface_pro_3_has_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/5tficj/how_i_reviv...

ngrilly 3y ago
> freezing the battery put the chemistry through some kind of cycle that repaired it Do you think that replacing the battery would have fixed it?
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  Perhaps. But freezing it twice also seemed to fix it. I used it as my primary machine for years after this fix.
archerx 3y ago
I remember back in the day when I had one of the original Gameboys that needed 4AA batteries, I would put the batteries in the freezer for a while when they died and I could get few extra minutes out the batteries. Maybe your battery theory is right.

jchw 3y ago

I have a GPD MicroPC. The weird SATA SSD it came with stopped working after I dropped it once. Everything seemed fine, and I noticed that sometimes it would work if the mounting pressure was a bit higher than usual. So, I did the right thing and stacked a bunch of electrical tape between the chassis and the SSD, and it has been working ever since. It's OK if the SSD dies though; it's running NixOS, so getting it back up and running with a new SSD would be a very short ordeal.

aledalgrande 3y ago

lol when I read the title I was asking myself how they would have scalpeled out the right sectors... turns out it was a lot less exciting

iamjason89 3y ago

The power button broke on a dell laptop i was working on one time. We had to order the part, but the customer didn't want to wait. I offered a very cheap alternative, and took his spare wifi antenna cables and cut the off. Then I soldered them DIRECTLY to the motherboard and routed them to hang out the side. It was like jumper cables, you tap the and the laptop would turn on

eastdakota 3y ago

I think the use of a chopped up SVB credit card is clearly the cherry on top of this story.

jeffrallen 3y ago

Bonus points for calling out the cut up SVB card. Classy.

throwthat1 3y ago

A clamp is a wood working tool?

astrodust 3y ago
You can't get much done before you need at least one clamp. Most wood-workers have dozens on hand at all times.
- throwthat1 3y ago
  Yeah but it is more of a general purpose tool than a woodworking tool... And this post kinda proves my point

aetherspawn 3y ago

HP sold me a crappy high-end Pavillion laptop around 12 years ago with a GeForce chip in it that would unsolder itself due to poor thermals. The fix was to disassemble the back of the laptop, mask around the GPU with tin foil, and hit it with a hair dryer on max setting for about 20 mins. The fix would last like 3 months. Learnt it off some guy on YouTube who was such a hero.

rasz 3y ago
In particular nvidia bump gate case it was microbumps cracking under thermal stress due to use of badly matched thermal coefficient of the glue securing the crystal. Defect was between gpu core and carrier package, not the BGA balls.

flybarrel 3y ago

It's the SVB card for me....lollll

rajnathani 3y ago

JFYI: The author of the post is the CTO of Cloudflare.

riyapant 3y ago

Using woodworking tools to retrieve 1TB of data from a faulty drive is not recommended and is highly unlikely to be successful. Data recovery requires specialized equipment and expertise to handle delicate electronic components. Using woodworking tools could further damage the drive and data beyond recovery. It's best to consult professional data recovery software/service for such tasks.

riyapant 3y ago