I have actually seen one in person. It was last summer at a Computer Museum. It is actually pretty small compared to tape drives for the same computer.

[…] Via Terminally Incoherent […]

Well, it all depends on what happened to the drive. Both methods have their merits, but they may or may not work depending on circumstances.

If the circuit board is fried then the fridge is definitely not going to help it (unless the low temperature somehow magically restores the burnt circuitry).

On the other board, changing the controller board may not do anything if your drive died because one of the head was damaged or locked up. If you expose the drive to a low temperature, the hope is that the metal particles will compress and the locked head may dislodge itself from whatever was obstructing it…

The problem is, in most cases you can’t really know for sure what happened to the drive, unless you actually see a smoldering circuit board. :P

So in either case the probability of restoring the drive to a working order is low and the possibility of damaging the drive even more is high. Both methods are kind of “oh what the hell, the drive is dead anyway so I’ve got nothing to loose” kind of things. If you really care about restoring your data the only reliable method is to send it to a data recovery specialist with a clean-room assembly lab where they can take it apart and see what is going on inside.

And btw, cleanroom recovery is not always as exuberantly expensive as people think. For example, these guys will recover a windows drive for $379.

Hi. I have two 40GB Maxtor 34098H4 hard drives, one of which died completely three months ago. The BIOs will not recognize it and it will not spin when my computer is powered up. The dead drive does not make any noise. After doing some research, I found two seemingly possible methods of getting a dead drive to spin which each have supporters and detractors. The two methods are possible alternatives (To those who cannot afford it) to paying thousands of dollars to a professional firm with a sealed clean room to recover data. The first method involves finding the same model hard drive as the dead one with the exact PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and then swapping the PCB from the good drive into the dead one to make it spin. The second method involves putting the dead drive into a Ziplock storage bag and putting it into the freezer overnight and then taking the drive out and pray that the hard drive will spin. I wanted to try the first method but after examining my good hard drive, which is of the same size and model as the dead one, I found that the PCBs are slightly different. So, the first method will not work for me (I don’t have the time and resources to try to find an exact PCB for the dead drive). I was wondering, would the second method work? Many people have claimed that the second method works and others have claimed that it would end up damaging the drive heads or platters even further. In your experience, have you tried the second method and what is the success rate for making the hard drive spin again so that data can be recovered? I just want to recover some old pictures and music from my dead drive. Any assistance you can offer is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Well, pr0n is the first thing to go when I need space. But there is some other stuff like games, movies, book scans and pictures that I don’t want to loose.

Oh, and I have bunch of virtual machine images for VMWare that I don’t use and should probably delete. Each of these things is several gigs at least…

Well, then, someone’s gonna have to delete some pr0n…

Absolutely – any kind of video or sound editing eats enormous amounts of space.

My laptop only has a 20G drive, but I’m nowhere even close to filling it up. I use that machine mostly for work, so there are no movies, music or pr0n on it. And since it is a fairly old machine running Ubuntu I do not have any high-end games on it either.

My home WinXP machine has 2x 160G (two independent drives though, not RAID) and I have roughly 1G, 2G, 8G and 25G free space on each of the different partitions. Sigh…

My boyfriend uses Garageband (a multi-track studio on the Mac) to record his music. The files usually run up to gig each, depending on how many tracks are on the song. His iBook only has 40 gigs on it, so it filled up immediately. Oh, yeah, and the pr0n.

I could easily fill it in a few months. Three words: backups, torrents and pr0n. That stuff eats space like crazy. ;)

I just got a 250 Gig LaCie External Harddrive last week for the boyfriend.

He will never be able to fill it! ;-)