Putting A Hard Drive In The Freezer For Data Recovery

Author: ACS Data Recovery
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If you need professional data recovery services, visit https://acsdata.com/hard-drive-freezer-trick/ or call 1-800-717-8974. At ACS Data Recovery, we get countless calls where people have stated they tried freezing their hard drive, or their computer / IT technician recommended putting their dead hard drive in the freezer. We are going to show you why this is not only a bad idea, but it's a HORRIBLE idea. If your data is important DO NOT put your hard disk in the freezer for any reason. Doing so can...and will cause permanent data loss. At ACS Data Recovery we've been recovering data from failed hard drives for people all over the world for over a decade. We do all of our own recovery work in-house, and we never charge evaluation fees. Even if you don't send your drive to us, just make sure you find another reputable firm to help you...but by all means...NEVER put your hard drive in the freezer.

Comments

  1. The condensation that you showed was from your environment which is not climate controlled, as well as, your breath. Handling a drives PCB (electronics) is your bare hands is also a do NOT do in the industry.
  2. If your goal here is to keep hard drives out of the freezer you may want to change the title of this video.
  3. i had a broken harddrive and i did nothing and it worked
    for 10 minutes
    then i teared it down. and the read head was broken litterally
  4. Hi I know it is a long time since you did this but when you took the drive out of the bag was it still cold?. If so then moisture would freeze on the platters from the air as you open it.

    The reason I say this I had a drive from a apple cinema that would not boot and I could not get much if any data off it.

    I put it in a freezer inside bags but connected to a USB to SATA interface. 24H later I left it in the freezer and powered it up and got 92Gb off it and the user was over the moon.

    I don't know if it was the board or the mechanics that was faulty but it did work.

    But I have never been able to repeat it properly again.
  5. Why not just use FREEZE spray (or even a can of compressed air - used close by that stuff cools stuff fast too) the PCB instead of throwing the whole HDD in a freezer.
    I kinda wasn't paying to this guys ravings anyway, just thought from what part of it I actually heard while doing more important things.
    BTW: This is the first I've heard of HDDs being frozen in an attempt to 'repair' them! -B!LL!
  6. Don't get me wrong, I think you're bang on the money discouraging people from doing this, but your reasoning is wrong.

    "After 5 hours, it's pretty obvious you can see, theres already crystallisation on the platter itself"

    This crystallisation is not the result of being in the freezer for 5 hours. This crystallisation is the result of condensation settling then freezing on the drive surface.

    I'm not saying that there was no moisture in the drive whatsoever, but everything that we see in this video settled on that drive after you broke the seal.

    You can see in your video how fast the condensation is settling and freezing, it happens before our eyes - between the first time you show us the platter at 9.52 to only a minute later the platter went from mostly reflective to nearly completely opaque.
    The only reason we see the edges slightly misty when you first open the drive is because you were letting moisture in from 9.16 to 9.52 after breaking the seal.
  7. You put the drive in a frost-producing freezer. Putting it in a frost-free freezer would seem to cause less ice-crystals to form.
  8. If you put a HDD in the freezer you should not be allowed with in 100 ft of a PC or laptop
  9. Why does western digital suck i have 5 tbs worth of their drives guess what? none of them work Seagate now
  10. Metal to the microwave???? are you crazy? Why do you lie to people?
  11. can you not put the ocb in the freezer
  12. It's been over 3 years now and we are still waiting for someone to post a video of an actual failed hard drive being recovered using the freezer method. I don't mean a drive that just reads slow...I mean a clicking drive that is completely undetectable. If it works so well...show us. This video is not meant as a scare tactic or a way to boost our business...it's to show people why they shouldn't attempt this if they have irreplaceable data. In case you missed it, we have another freezer video using even better safety precautions. It ended up killing a perfectly functional drive. Link here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYY-Ixq_g-0
  13. Had an 11 year old Fujitsu 2.5" drive with errors all over it. Freezing worked again. Windows files were too badly gone even with Windows repair but got all of client's data. This time I dribbled freeze spray on the bearing casing during a force clone as it didn't respond as well to a full freeze. Looks like it was definitely bearing play in this instance.
    Remember: only try these techniques if you want to dabble with recovery when data is not critical. Take it straight to an expert if in doubt.
  14. Why is Danny McBride telling me to freeze my hard drive?
  15. Wish I'd known that earlier.. Perhaps I could have just done a platter swap, but now mine is likely trashed. I had never heard of that "old wives' tale", incidentally.. It's only that mine was running so hot that I thought that was making the error rate much worse. Helped for a few minutes only... I have a virtual drive with my XP Serial on it, and no backup of either the nunber or the data, which was many hundreds of hours of fine tuning a visual pinball installation. I'm just not going to go through another half a year of that again.. S, in immortal words of Ricky Ricardo..
    ..Don' go freez the hardd driver.. Lucie.. or it'll 'splode' ;-)
  16. Not saying that I would ever attempt this, but I thought the silica gel would take care of moisture inside.
  17. easy fix for frosting , use a single bag, throw a couple silica dessicant bags in with it