Unformattable Hard Drive

[Softus]

Freezing will on occasion allow the disk to be read if the disk is well kaput, usually lasts long enough to get data off.

I agree, if you mean "cooling" and not "freezing - I've used this myself to great effect, but have never got around to finding out why.

My earlier point, about cheese, was the platters are already rigid, so cooling them in the freezer doesn't make them hard.[/quote]

 

[Igorian]

Freezing will on occasion allow the disk to be read if the disk is well kaput, usually lasts long enough to get data off.

I agree, if you mean "cooling" and not "freezing - I've used this myself to great effect, but have never got around to finding out why.

My earlier point, about cheese, was the platters are already rigid, so cooling them in the freezer doesn't make them hard.

[/quote]

Chilling failing electronic components can help to make them run in a more stable fashion for a short time and is commonly used by bench engineers to assist in identifying intermittent faults. I would suspect that freezing a drive is affecting it's electronics more than the mechanics.

It's more common to use an aerosol coolant because it can be applied locally and condensation is kept to a minimum.

 

[Softus]

Chilling failing electronic components can help to make them run in a more stable fashion for a short time and is commonly used by bench engineers to assist in identifying intermittent faults. I would suspect that freezing a drive is affecting it's electronics more than the mechanics.

Thanks Igorian; my thoughts were along those lines (easy to say now, I know).

In the mode of a chat, I recently had a drive that went faulty within three months of it being fitted, with a very faint 'click' of an actuator when it appeared to have got too hot. Giving it some time in the fridge to think about what it had done got it going for long enough to copy off 95% of the client's data, but in the end the fridge trick only lasted for a couple of minutes.

This behaviour seemed to fly in face of my intuited understanding of what the cooling down was achieving, but I suppose it could easily have been the electronics in the actuator there were failing.

It was an IBM/Hitachi Deskstar, BTW. I think it's the first ever of those to go faulty, n'est-ce pas?

 

[eggplant]

I agree, usually it is the cooling of electronic components not mechanical. I fairly recently had a drive clunking on me, it was whilst moving house and I hadnt backed up in a while, they usually give someindication that failure is pending, but this one didnt, just gave the typcal head clunk noise and failed to detect so I couldnt even run any lower level recovery utils on it. I searched for ideas and came accross a site where someone had frozen - or maybe chilled is a better word - their drive, having nothing more to lose, I tried it and lo and behold it worked for long enough. I dont know why or how but it did! this was a maxtor which IMO arnt the best. IBMS' are decent, apart from some of the 40's (could be 60's) that had major problems a few years ago - know in the trade as deathstars not deskstars.

l

 

[Igorian]

Yes, I can't say that i've had to replace an IBM drive, but i'm not sure if that's because they are more reliable or less common.

In my experience Fujitsu drives are the worse. Until recently they were only sold with a 12 month warranty, where other manufacturers commonly supply 3 or 5 year replacement warranties. I have mixed feeling about Maxtor. I've seen some last for 10 years + and others that fail in 10 minutes. Good warranty replacement service though.

 

[Softus]

I agree about both Fujitsu and Maxtor, and generally buy the IBMs (now Hitachi), with only the one failure.

I read somewhere that the Hungarian built 40Gb IBMs are the ones to avoid, but that was a short episode in the evolution of Deskstars, and the horror stories are less frequent.

I recently had a Seagate replaced under warranty - I had to send it to Holland and wait a long time, but they sent out a 160Gb drive for a 60Gb one, so the owner was happy.