This past week I had one of my hard disk failed. The drive was my backup drive for remote and LAN backup operations. When performing a nightly backup process, I noticed a failure to complete and investigating further, realized the hard drive had both read and write failures. Upon closer inspection (shutdown and restart) I heard the dreaded ‘click of death’ .. needless to say, the drive was not detected by the computer.

While it was primarily a backup drive, the failure of the drive would have had some data loss and both my LAN and remote servers did not have backup. This was a huge issue as re-syncing the data would have taken over 5 days during which time the remote systems would have had no backup. Yikes.

I heard about freezing a hard drive to help in data recovery. The theory is a hard drive has tight tollerances .. when running for an extended period of time, components of the drive expand and cause some form of mechanical failure. Given the scenario, I thought it would be a good time to try this process.

I took the hard drive, wrapped it into an air-tight freezer bag and placed it in the freezer for 30 minutes. Upon reconnect, I booted the system and no click! Awesome. I was able to do some file transfer for about 25 minutes before the read errors started to occur again.

I then froze the hard drive again for another 30 minutes and was able to once again move data over to my new drive. All in all, I ended up transfering around 30GB of data.

The logic behind freezing of a drive seems reasonable. I checked drive specifications and it is capable of being stored in -40C and an environmental operating temperature of 0C. As a result, doing this procedure is within the manufacturers specifications (check your particular drive for details).

According to some online sources, this procedure has between a 50-60% success rate.

I think my future hard disk diagnostic will be as follows:

1. Verify cabling is secure and tight.
2. Check drive in a secondary system (it might be a disk controller issue and not a hard disk issue, yes they can cause abnormal mechanical noise)
3. Perform the “freeze” operation
4. Look into swapping the controller board or use data recovery service

I am NOT recommending this as an “official” procedure. Use it at your own risk! Remember, backups are ALWAYS important and I *STRONGLY* recommend maintaining and verifying you have a proper backup procedure in place!!