Ifyour hard drive fails, people might recommend you to freeze the drive. However, data recovery specialists suggest that thefreezing trick doesn’t work for the current hard drives.
The “old freeze trick” for old hard drives might have worked occasionally due to the design and technology used in such drives. Even then, the drives would rarely revive.
With improvement to drive manufacturing technology, such action only causes further harm.
Let me explain everything in detail.
Does Freezing Hard Drive Work?
If you have a very old hard drive that is no longer working, freezing it could work for a very short time. But for modern hard drives, it is unlikely and may actually hamper your chances of data recovery.
To understand why it is so, let’s take a look at the differences between old hard drives and new ones.
While you will see many people encouraging freezing a drive online, they likely got successful results with old hard drives.
Even then, old disks rarely stayed functional after a freezing treatment.
For the current drives,freezing will not usually fix any alignment and other hardware issues. In fact, you are far more likely to damage the disk even further.
Other Consequences of Freezing Hard Drive
A hard drive is not entirely airtight. It contains a hole with a filter that equalizes the air pressure between the inside and outside of the drive.
You will even find messages likeDO NOT COVER BREATHER HOLEorDO NOT COVER ANY DRIVE HOLESnear such holes.
When you freeze a hard drive, you also freeze the air inside and around it. Since air contains a small amount of water vapor, these can form ice crystals on the interior part of the drives.
The outside air also gets inside through the breather hole and causes more ice formation.
