Found an old 80Gb drive about 3 months ago and wanted to see if anything interesting was on it. It did nothing but click so I figured what the heck, put it in a freezer bag and give it a shot.

Having completely forgotten about it, I find it this afternoon. I post it here because I find it hilarious and the humor is lost on my wife.

4/29/2010 5:19:21 PM

4/29/2010 5:24:23 PM

your wife is not a nerd.

4/29/2010 5:27:50 PM

So does it work now?

4/29/2010 5:54:42 PM

There is no humor in that story.

4/29/2010 6:00:00 PM

So does it work now?

4/29/2010 6:49:50 PM

Quote :

"I find it hilarious and the humor is lost on my wife"

best part

4/29/2010 9:31:12 PM

^^

4/29/2010 10:25:08 PM

If it's going to work, it would only work for a few minutes while it's still "chilled", correct? Isnt that the reason you put them in the freezer? So the metal contracts and thus tightens the out of wack tolerances?

4/30/2010 1:32:20 PM

So does it work now?

4/30/2010 7:25:57 PM

^, damnit!

4/30/2010 10:25:48 PM

Quote :

"So I contacted Jim Reinert, vice president of data recovery and software products at Kroll Ontrack. According to Reinert, freezing a faulty drive might have been beneficial once upon a time, but is no longer recommended I'll list three technical reasons that freezing a malfunctioning hard drive might fix it, along with Reinert's thoughts about why this practice might not be a good idea any more. 1. Board expansion due to heat. "The chips on a [printed] circuit board (PCB) and the motor in the hard drive itself generate heat, and most materials expand slightly when heated," said Reinert. "In some cases, this can cause the solder connections on the circuit board to be unreliable. When the drive is put in the freezer, the materials shrink back to their normal orientation and the connections are reliable (until the circuit board heats up again)." Electronics failure is the most likely symptom to be addressed by freezing a drive, since chilling the electronics can delay thermal expansion of weak solder joints. That said, modern drives use far fewer components on the PCB than before, which means less heat and fewer individual points of failure. Reinert also noted that nearly all modern drives use fluid-bearing motors which produce less friction, and therefore less heat than ball-bearing motors." A drive that's been around for several years might still be using a ball-bearing motor, but most drives sold in the past few years use a fluid-bearing system. A white paper from Hitachi discusses the benefits fluid-bearing motors bring to hard drive designs. 2. Alignment of the head stack. The head stack is the assembly that controls the movements of each read/write head in a hard drive. Heat from the drive can cause elements in the head stack to expand, putting the drive out of alignment. "Freezing the drive could theoretically return the head stack to its original orientation," Reinert said. "But the modern servo [the motor that controls the head movements] is much better at making self-adjustments. Drives from 15 years ago used dedicated servos, where only one of the heads on a head stack was used to align the entire head stack, so the stack was very vulnerable to even microscopic changes in orientation. Older drives typically used 12-20 data surfaces and their physical dimensions were much bigger, so even slight alignment differences were exaggerated, compared to today's models that rarely use more than six surfaces, and are much, much smaller." 3. Stiction. This term means the drive's heads adhere to the surface of the disk platters. Normally, the heads fly over the platters on a cushion of air generated by the movement of the disk platters, but when the drive is shut down, the heads come to rest in an area of the platters designated for parking the heads, known as the "landing zone." "Occasionally when the platters stop spinning, the heads may stick to the platter surface," Reinert said. "Freezing a drive may get the heads unstuck from the platters, although it's more likely to make the situation worse by damaging the delicate surfaces of the heads." In summary, freezing a drive is like trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. It might work, but who knows what damage you'll do in the process? Plus, it's usually easier to just use a flyswatter. If the data on the drive is worth getting back, no price will be too high to pay for a professionally-engineered recovery job. That being said, if you have a dead drive on your hands and want to try this technique (no guarantees!), here's a step-by-step guide."

FYI

4/30/2010 10:43:40 PM

I've gotten it to work for one drive out of four.

5/1/2010 12:01:47 PM

I used to do that to NES games

the especially difficult ones to make work

5/2/2010 5:45:02 PM

Wow, there was apparently a fair bit of curiosity about if the drive worked. This is going to be disappointing, but I still haven't tried it because the only IDE port on my MB is obstructed by my 4 drive RAID 10 array because I'm cheap and am using my old mid tower case.

Apparently I wasn't aware of how lazy I was going to be when I thought to put it in the freezer in the first place. My ambition is fleeting.

It was making a physical noise when I tried it the first time, so it is probably kaput.

5/6/2010 7:15:51 PM

get a blog, brah

5/7/2010 11:43:19 AM