Do-it-yourself hard-drive data recovery
Data recovery is expensive. For the crashed external Maxtor 5000DV I wrote about a few days ago, I was given an estimate of $500 - $1000. Before I pony up the loot, I was wondering if there aren’t any safe DIY remedies.
I Googled “hard drive spin down force”, “hard drive resurrection”, “hard drive repair” and similar keywords/phrases until I came to this topically-relevant page on Hack-A-Day.
There are several interesting suggestions in the hard drive resurrection thread regarding how you may be able to repair or recover data from a crashed hard drive on your own. Potential solutions include:
- setting up a “clean”-room-like area and then replacing components (you need to build up skills and confidence on junk drives before working on the real thing)
- freezing the HDD and, then, operating it at low temperature – long enough to extract data
As far as the drive-disassembly “option”, I feel it’s a bit too risky for me. My excuse being: I don’t have the time to invest into those skills nor do I have the time to look for replacement parts for this drive. I haven’t even found a way to take the damn plastic enclosure off (where are the screws? Or is this unit hermetically sealed?). I do feel this option is certainly within the grasp of serious hobbyists who have invested time into building their skill-set as well as grasping the art and science of data recovery.
So I decided to try option #2 and tossed the drive in the freezer overnight. The following morning I still could not get the drive to boot. But, encouragingly, the strange noises I heard earlier were gone. I could hear the drive spinning up and spinning down — cycling back and forth like this once every 10 sec or so. But the drive did this quietly. I left the unit in the freezer during the experiment — i.e. while it was powered and connected to the computer via USB. Condensation and its associated electrical risks as well as a maintained low temp are, I believe, good reasons for keeping the drive in the freezer the entire time. Cords and cabling are slim enough to allow the freezer’s door gaskets to seal around them. The temp in my freezer remained around 6 degrees F.
(above) The image above show the Maxtor drive in the freezer, at a temperature of 6.7 degrees F.
Despite my inability to extract data, the noise reduction I noted convinces me that freezing may indeed “resurrect” certain drives long enough to extract data, as some have reported.
Here is another forum thread on this topic.
Update (2006-11-26):
The image below shows the Maxtor 5000DV above disassembled (HD itself, a basic run-of-the-mill Maxtor internal, is not shown).
Note the drive above has no internal cooling. Another, newer (2005) Maxtor external I own is shown below…
The drive above has better spin-down (drive spins down or stops altogether when PC is inactive for more than 15 minutes) implementation and seems to have an internal fan. Still, the case temperature gets quite warm. Not long after the image above was taken, I positioned an air-conditioning vent closer to my computer system, and especially close to the drive above. This strategy helps to keep the running temperature roughly 5 degrees F above room temperature. In any case, I no longer trust pre-packaged external drives. I now opt to make my own high-performance/high-reliability units by: (a) choosing a really good internal HD (preferably, one meant for server/heavy-duty use — it should say so in the model’s sales literature); (b) using a really good external hard-drive case (enclosure) kit. The AMS Venus enclosure (left of the Maxtor above) is a highly-rated unit that comes with an internal cooling fan. See this link for more info on how to use an external drive as your operating-system “C”.