Hard Drive in the fridge.

Factual Questions
1

A friend told me a mini story about how a tech friend of his had put a hard drive that wasn’t working in the fridge (I forget the details of the story) and wondered why.

I offered that perhaps the HD was overheating, and so running it in the fridge allowed it to run long enough to get the data off.

Is this a done thing in data-recovery?

2

If the bearings are seized, putting the drive in the freezer (or the fridge, I suppose) will cool it off, shrinking the metal so that the stuck parts hopefully pull away from each other allowing the drive to spin up again.

It’s a last-ditch effort, usually done so one can pull the data off the drive and then throw it out.