
HDD Resurrection Using Freezer - wslh
http://krakonos.org/p/hdd-resurrection-using-freezer/
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csydas
I've always been exceptionally skeptical of the freezer claim due to a lack of
any real comprehensive explanation as to how it works or any actual study that
gets even a base number of failing drives that were temporarily recoverable as
a result of the freezing. I'm not convinced that the result would be any
different if the drive was simply allowed to rest and tried later.

Every explanation has talked about parts expanding and contracting, but given
how easy it would be to demonstrate this by simply disassembling the drive and
doing before/afters, I feel incredibly skeptical of such a claim and see it
more as a wild guess than anything.

All that being said, even though I see it as voodoo, freezer is still my last
stop with a drive when everything else fails, though I still let the owner
know that I'm not expecting any results.

~~~
dogma1138
It's not a "myth" I've done it to 3 drives when their heads got stuck 2 of
those it worked afterwards one of those worked for over a year.

My personal theory is that it shrinks enough to release the seized heads and
unlike striking on the side of the drive with a rubber mallet you don't run
the risk of damage to the plates due to a head strike. It could also be that
the shrinking fixes/temporarily aligns something in the surface mounted
components, maybe it breaks some tin whiskers that grew between the solder
balls under one of the chips or w/e but I've seen electronics revived before
after being frozen and brought back to temperature usually that doesn't last
that long after.

I've brought back to life quite a few HDD's via various means the most common
of which was replacing the controller board with an identical one, mechanical
failures were harder to fix but the freezing thing does seem to work in some
cases.

~~~
csydas
I don't doubt your technical prowess for repairing HDDs, but my skepticism is
based largely in that despite how overwhelmingly well known it is, it's never
been really tested in a formal setting and the explanations have never gone
beyond just "expanding and contracting", with no deeper explanation. Aside
from everyone's stories about how it worked, there really isn't a lot of good
solid knowledge about whether or not it actually does anything.

I'm not doubting stories where it went into the freezer and worked; quite the
contrary, I'm more than willing to believe that was part of what was done to
do it.

What I question is whether or not it was the actual freezing process that did
anything, if there actually is a physical change that occurs beyond people's
speculation.

It would seem to me that if there is a physical change going on with the
drive, it should be visible, or at least a difference ought be visible in a
before an after, save a few minor parts not visible to the naked eye or
without further disassembly.

The fact that there really hasn't been any research on this, even amateur,
despite the number of server farms, kind of makes me wonder if it's not just a
bit of old voodoo.

~~~
dogma1138
Freezing (as well as sharp acceleration) can unstick the mechanical parts of
the HDD quite often the arm that moves the heads up and down the platter. In
my case i could hear the "ticks" of the arm stepper motor they were gone after
a day in the freezer. And I've seen an iphone that would not work you put it
into a freezer for 1-2 hours, take it it turns on, after about 1-2minutes it
dies again and you could repeat it. There are probably so many things that
temperature could affect when it comes to electronics that I'm not sure if
there is even one thing that a research could easily focus on.

~~~
csydas
Well, that's sort of my point - with how many different items "could" be
studied and quantified, not a single study has been produced to measure even
one aspect just to say "we noticed no discernible change after the freezing
process". There isn't even really a good baseline statistic for what the
success rate is.

In the 30 some years I've been hearing the freezing idea, I find it really
peculiar that nothing besides anecdotal evidence, not even amateur studies of
just like a server farm testing failing drives or an IT desk recording their
attempts that gives a sample size of more than ~10ish.

Conjecture and theories are great, and it's good to hear that these drives
came back online. But, without exaggeration, I've tried this on hundreds of
drives over the course of my career when doing IT support, and I can think of
maybe 2 instances when after the freeze, the drive spun up long enough for
data t be recovered. And everyone's stories seem to be this way - just this
one or two times, after a freeze, it worked. There are no stories where a
company comes out and says "man, freezing drives has saved our butts and
customer data tons of times!"

I can't stress enough that this isn't a declaration that freezing doesn't do
anything. But I feel the skepticism is absolutely appropriate given the voodoo
qualities of the process and the overwhelming failure rate the process has.
The lack of research on it and the fact that it's just a "hail mary" for most
people rather than a cemented procedure just seems to me like the procedure is
just ceremony, and that if put to any sort of actual trial, the success rate
would fall well within the range of chance.

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Kristine1975
Why freezing can work sometimes but generally won't:
[http://www.datarecoverygroup.com/articles/freezing-your-
hard...](http://www.datarecoverygroup.com/articles/freezing-your-hard-drive-
bad-idea)

Related question:
[http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112050/](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112050/)

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newman314
Anecdotally, I've tried this with multiple drives previously and it's worked
several times.

The caveat being that it'll only work for a short time (basically just long
enough for you to extract data). I've also had to refreeze a drive several
times to get things out of said drive.

It's best to start replacing drives as soon as SMART shows an error. Got a
drive coming next week just for that reason.

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leaveyou
Anecdote here. I had an ~8 years old 500GB Western Digital hard disk which
spent the last 3-4 years on a shelf and when I tried to reuse it, after 2-3
uneventful months, it started to "refuse" to spin up at boot time and, after
several seconds of retrials, BIOS would print the classic "boot failure"
message. Sometimes it would spin up after several reboots but after a while it
refused to spin up at all so, after a quick google, I got to the "freezer"
method and to my surprise it worked. After being left in the freezer for ~1
hour (wrapped in plastic) it spun up instantly and functioned normally, long
enough to make a backup of some not very valuable files from it (after ~8
years, I was expecting failures). So "freezer method" could work as a measure
of last resort.

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niij
After trying 4-5 drives with this trick, only 1 was able to recover data using
this technique.

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techload
I have tried this trick a couple of times without success.

