That's fascinating, I've never heard of hard drive data recovery using liquid nitrogen. Is the idea that the lower temperature prevents the drive from overheating long enough to recover the data? Sounds very cool.
In older drives, a lot of failures were down to the heads actually getting stuck on the platters.
By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).
I literally squeezed the data out of a drive once. 40M Connor, one of the first IDE drives. If I squeezed it too much, “Data Error, Abort, Retry, Ignore”. Too little? Same result. Just right? In like Flynn!
I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back.
teddyh|3 years ago
Jaruzel|3 years ago
By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).
u02sgb|3 years ago
randombits0|3 years ago
I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back.
Boss asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m milking the data out of this drive!” ;)