How Are Clean Room Used In Data Recovery?
Clean rooms used are rooms that have been designed to reduce the level of particulates in the air like dust and airborne microbes. Clean room construction employs filters extensively. Staff would usually have to enter clean rooms through airlocks and wear protective gear while working inside the rooms.
For professional data recovery companies a clean room is an essential asset as hard drive repair often requires the use of exceptionally clean working conditions.
External air literally has to go through a range of extremely fine filters to ensure that any airflow into the clean room is totally clear of any harmful particles and often secondary systems are also in place with directed airflows to reduce the risk of internally generated contaminants coming into contact with the actual workbench area or surface.
There are different “classes” of clean rooms, with each class limiting permissible different numbers of particles per cubic meter, as well as the maximum sizes particles. Thus a Class 1 clean room is one where the number of particles should not exceed 1000 particles per cubic meter.
Clean rooms are not only used in data recovery operations though, they are widely found in all manner of industries ranging from medical labs to pharmaceutical manufacturing plants and of course electronics manufacturing plants. Rooms can be a few feet square or can encompass an entire manufacturing plant area depending on the operation in question.
Why Are Clean Rooms Essential For Hard Drive Repair?
The internal components of a hard drive and in particular the disk platters (many drives have more than one) are exceptionally susceptible to further damage from airborne particulates once opened. Even the most microscopic particles can further damage the extremely sensitive platter surfaces as can damage from ESD, so a clean room environment is essential for a success repair in many instances.
With each generation of disks, data is packed more and more densely on the disk platters. It is thus increasingly important that data recovery be attempted in exceptionally clean rooms.
Another consideration for using a clean room though is the warranty on your drive that will be made invalid if not repaired by an authorised agent or in a clean room environment although in reality the value of the accumulated data on most drives is by far massively more valuable than the drive itself, so all the more reason to ensure that it is only worked on in the cleanest of environments to prevent further damage.
Thus clean rooms are necessary for data recovery on both performance and product warranty considerations. Disk drives should only be opened in clean rooms and kept there until the recovery is complete and the drive is closed. Data storage media are getting packed with data more and more densely with each new generation of drives. It is thus extremely important to attempt data recovery in exceptionally dust free rooms.
If you need to hand over your hard drive to a data recovery services company check the validation of their clean room. At the very least it should be class 100 certified although the top companies will have invested in even better standards, for example ISO class 3.
Top Tip For DIY Data Recovery – Don’t Do It!
In recent times with the “Credit Crunch” beginning to bite a lot of people may well be tempted to try to repair or recover their data from a failed hard disk drive or memory stick. Alternatively they try to use recovery software, which is easily available on the net, can be paid for and downloaded online.
In most cases this software will be a hard drive recovery programme for a hard disk drive that has suffered from some form of logical table corruption and will not assist with
- Mechanically failed devices
- Degraded hard Disk Drives
- Devices with electronic failures
This software will of course not be able to help and if the drive is degraded or suffering from a mechanical failure attempting to run this software will in most cases cause further damage to hard disk drives, potentially making the disk unrecoverable.
The software itself is very often very reasonable priced – usually under $100 but is only good for one purpose to recover either deleted or logically failed drives, so if you are not sure what you are doing trying to do a self recovery can in the long run cost a lot more.
There are of course a lot of IT experts around of course and you may even have some in your own business, but do they really know what they are doing when it comes to the serious issue of data recovery? You would think that your onsite IT support would be data aware bit this is quite often simply not the case.
In a typical case a drive was initially presented for diagnosis and duly diagnosed with a blown PCB - the drive seemed completely dead and would not spin at all. As an additional test a new PCB was placed on the board so that the response of the heads could be tested. The result of this test was that the heads appeared to have been “blown” by a power surge through the drive.
Upon further discussion, with the client, it transpired that the IT dept had decided to remove the HDD from the laptop and as it was an IDE device mount it as an external storage device by using an IDE connector. Unfortunately they plugged the HDD to the connector “upside down” meaning that crucially the drive received a huge power spike through it when the connector was hooked up to a PC.
It appears that the lack of care taken by the IT dept has caused the drive far more problems that what was probably a simple case of “bad sectors” on a hard disk drive. The cost of a simple bad sectors recovery has now become a full HDD rebuild with the search now on for suitable parts - causing delay and additional costs to the School concerned.
Many businesses need to get their data back as quickly as possibly so it is quite frustrating to have additional costs and additional downtime whilst you are waiting for data to be recovered
Sadly this is not an isolated case and data recovery companies the world over will have a whol;e collection of stories where simple recoveries were turned into data disasters by the DIY and have a go brigade
So the moral of this is that whilst many people will look for a quick and cheap fix for their hard drive recovery problems, they really are best leaving it to the experts.