We Hate the Hard Drive Freezer “Trick”
As Wisconsinites, whether we’re in the sweltering throes of another record-breaking summer or the dead of winter, colder temperatures will always be on our minds… and with it, one of our most hated DIY data recovery tricks as well: putting your hard drive in the freezer to repair whatever damage is making it click or beep or just not work.
On our blog, we’ve talked about a few of the common data recovery myths floating around the Internet. Some of these, like simple control board swaps, we’ve discussed at length.
We’ve talked about the dangers of opening up a hard drive by yourself. But there is one myth we’ve devoted far too little of our efforts toward dispelling. And that myth is the hard drive freezer method (although we’d rather call it a trick).
On the list of the many things we wish people would stop doing to their failed hard drives, the hard drive freezer trick is right at the top. We hate the freezer trick. Hate it, hate it, hate it. And not in the clickbait-y “Doctors hate her! See how this single mom lost 20 pounds in a week” way.
We’ve received more cases than we could ever want where a minor hard drive problem became exponentially worse due to this destructive tidbit of subzero pseudoscience. It can destroy critical data, it gives our engineers headaches, and most importantly, it makes hard drive repair more difficult (which in turn raises the cost of data recovery).