If you have had a hard drive problem then sure enough you have done some searching on the Internet and seen some startling revelations about hard drive recovery. My personal favorite is :it is safe to put your hard drive in the freezer over night"! Better yet, there are sites that actually recommend putting your hard drive in the freezer. As anyone with a 5th grade education knows, changing temperatures dramatically will cause materials to either contract or expand depending upon whether heat or cold is applied.
Expanding or compressing platters is not a good idea since the heads are programmed to search for the first sector of a hard drive in a particular place. The larger the capacity of the hard drive, the smaller that sector is physically. While it is true that older drives that were prone to get locked up due to heat, could benefit by being cooled down, that is just not the case with hard drives that have been manufactured in the last 5 to 6 years.
Speaking of older hard drives, that brings us to the second most popular myth about hard drive recovery which states that you can easily swap a damaged circuit board from 1 hard drive of the same model to another of the same model. Again that might have been true of Quantum hard drives 10 years ago, but don't try it now! A good example of why that doesn't work is just about any popular Western Digital hard drive. You can take any mass produced model number and search for revisions. You will find that the average WD hard drive model has at least 6 or 7 revisions. Each revision speaks a different language! OK maybe language is too strong a word, but dialect isn't. They just don't understand each other when you put a board that has one version of firmware on it and have that try to communicate with a head assembly that has another firmware imprinted on its chip sets. Companies that perform hard drive recovery these days must be able to heat boards and work on chips if they are going to have any hope of repairing electronic problems.
The final myth we are going to look at today I like to call hammer logic. One time long ago I was an electrical contractor and my answer to a lot of problems involved a hammer or using my Kliens as a hammer. Older hard drives used to get locked up and have issues with their bearings. A light tap with a baltine hammer could in some cases unlock the bearings and possible get the motor to spin properly and at the right speed. A hard drive's motor is intrinsic to the system that makes a magnetic media device like a hard drive work at all.
Hard drives spin at a specific RPM which insures that the heads float just barely above the platters so that they can read the sectors according to the predefined sector map and either read or write your data. Either way, the motor must spin at the right RPM or very bad things will happen. We have been able to resolve quite a few issues when it comes to hard drive recovery involving bad bearings, and one of them involve a hammer. In modern hard drives, any deviation of a micro-millimeter can cause the sectors to move and then be unreadable by the heads. This is even more true in large capacity hard drives that employ perpendicular recording, a sector mapping system that upends the sector at a 90 degree angle making the readable surface of a sector microscopic in size. Hitting these sensitive devices with a hammer is a bad idea.
If your hard drive is making clicking noises, whining or has just plain died, the best thing to do is contact a real hard drive recovery company!
