Anyone tried this? Advice from a PC magazine; if your HD fails, seal it in a bag, place it in the freezer for half an hour, boot up your PC and then plug in the HD. According to the magazine, this will give you enough time to whip off any files from the failed HD.
I wouldn’t dare try this, the files on my broken PC are too important to risk this way. (Too important to back up first apparently, but lesson learned :p) Any value to this advice?
It worked for me but won’t work in all cases. It depends on what caused the drive to fail. In my case, I had backups of most of the data so I was willing to take the risk. One problem was that water condensed on the drive as soon as I removed it from the freezer. Also, as it warmed up, it stopped working, so I refroze it several times before I got everything I needed.
I’ve tried it and I have had about 50/50 results. I guess it depends on why your hard drive quit moving. I found that if you have a drive going bad and the arm is sticking a good whack will get the arm moving enough to get your data off it. But if the arm is really stuck or broken there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it at that point. (Except have the drive taken apart by a pro and put together, which is quite costly)
I’ve had some luck doing this, but I’ve had better luck leaving a drive in the blazing Arizona sun until it was almost too hot to handle, and then getting the files of of it before it could cool down (I suspect the spindle lubrication was almost dry - the heat thinned out the remaining lubricant enough to let the platters spin).
I’ve only had this work once, out of about three tries.
Is it likely to make the HD any worse than it was before?
I was the data recovery expert for my company a few years ago. Once we verified with the user that the data was not worth sending for data recovery by a pro I would try what I could. Freezing worked in some cases. It wouldn’t hurt the drive. Just make sure you put it in a bag, and don’t let it get wet. Another successful technique if you have a duplicate drive is to swap the circuit card on the drive with another. This requires both drives be the same model. It will not always work, but it worked for me twice.
Side note. The one time we had to send a drive out for data recovery it cost $15,000 for 250GB of data. User had not backed up in over a year expecting the RAID in his system to be his backup. 2 drive failures later(drives overheated) off they went.