# Hard Drive in the fridge.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hard-drive-in-the-fridge/299784>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 17, 2005, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hard-drive-in-the-fridge/299784 "2005-04-17T19:06:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\
**Post date:** [April 17, 2005, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hard-drive-in-the-fridge/299784/1 "2005-04-17T19:06:53Z")

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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?

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**Author:** ![buckgully](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/eb9ed0/32.png) [@buckgully](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buckgully)\
**Post date:** [April 17, 2005, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hard-drive-in-the-fridge/299784/2 "2005-04-17T19:37:35Z")

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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.