Data Recovery Myths – The Self-Made Clean Room
If you’re starting to research data recovery, you’ll notice that the phrase “clean room” recurs quite a bit.
A clean room is exactly what it sounds like: a specialized room designed to minimize a hard drive’s chance of contamination by microscopic particles. This is important because the platters of a hard drive are delicate enough that even a single piece of dust can permanently damage information. By heavily filtering the air and carefully controlling what is allowed into the room, data recovery companies can ensure that a hard drive can be safely opened.
The big problem with clean rooms is that they’re expensive. Ac certified class-100 clean-room can cost upwards of $200,000 to build, and must be constantly and carefully maintained. To get around this, some do-it-yourself data recovery gurus have suggested several ways that an at-home clean room can be built inexpensively.
The most popular theory on the Internet is that by filling a bathroom with steam (by running a hot shower for several minutes), the contaminants in the air will either dissipate or bind with water vapors and stick to a surface (the walls, floor, and ceiling of the room). Unfortunately, a clean room isn’t quite so simple.
The filtering in a professional clean room targets minuscule particles that aren’t affected by water vapor, particles small enough that they may not be visible (but still deadly to your drive). Pro clean rooms are also rated and measured–clean-rooms used for hard drive assembly and recovery have a minimum class 100 rating, meaning that there are less than 100 particles per square cubic liter of air. A steamed-up bathroom can contain thousands of particles per square foot, hardly an environment suitable for internal hard drive work.
And even if do-it-yourself clean rooms were appropriate for hard drive repair, hard drive specifications are so precise that data loss is extremely probably without special tools designed to manipulate hard drive parts without ruining their alignment. Steam can also damage the components of a hard drive, which are highly susceptible to excess moisture.
It’s tempting to try at-home recovery methods, but if your data is important, it’s not very wise–a professional data recovery is your only safe choice.
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