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I would like to take out an external 2.5" hard-drive (Toshiba MK2555GSXF 250GB SATA) out of its external case (Icy Box IB-AC603A-U3 Adaptor) and place it onto a laptop cooling pad (Zalman ZM-NC1000). The drive has recently suffered a fall and is damaged to dying. Before resorting to extreme last resort measures such as the freezing trick, I would like to ensure that it has proper cooling in place while I am attempting to ddrescue the data.

So are hard-drives airtight (hermetic)? Is there any risk of dust exposure if I set the internal hard-drive with the USB connector (without its external USB case) onto a cooling pad?

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  • After re-reading your question, can you clarify what you mean by: "bare hard-drive"? To me this implies removing the casing of the drive and exposing the servo motor, etc. directly to air, but as you are discussing an external enclosure, it could also simply mean the internal 2.5" drive.
    – Andon M. Coleman
    Feb 2, 2014 at 15:46
  • @AndonM.Coleman Thanks. No, I don't want to disassemble the thing. Just remove the internal hard-drive from its external enclosure (i.e. the internal hard-drive as sold in stores; NOT the bare, disassembled drive). See edited OP.
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 15:50
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    Why is everyone talking about taking apart the hdd? Inside the enclosure is a normal SATA drive it should be as simple as hooking it up to a open SATA to USB adapter
    – Ramhound
    Feb 2, 2014 at 16:46
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    Related: What is the purpose of the holes marked “Do Not Cover” on hard drives?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Feb 2, 2014 at 17:13
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    Fun fact: Hitachi is releasing hermetically-sealed, helium-filled 7TB drives for datacenter usage.
    – Bigbio2002
    Feb 3, 2014 at 22:13

3 Answers 3

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Hard drives are not air-tight - they have a small hole with a filter that allows them to maintain the correct pressure in the drive. As long as you don't block the hole, though, I don't think there should be any issues with that.

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  • Is it fine/necessary if I put the disk into a ziploc bag, and then onto the cooling pad? Does this risk obstructing the small hole?
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 15:44
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    @landroni With the info above I would assume that it would be fine and that the pressure is just for DRAMATIC changes in pressure like going up or down a mountain. Putting it in the freezer, I would recommend double bagging it. As long as you don't plan on scaling a mountain with a freezer containing a HDD, I suppose you'll be jut fine. :D P.S. as far as putting in on a cooling pad you don't have to worry about dust the little hole has a "filter" for that reason. Fans blow on hard drives all the time in higher end computers to keep them cooler. Some cases are even designed for this.
    – Anonymous Penguin
    Feb 2, 2014 at 15:56
  • Please don't out a hdd into a plastic bag will cause an ESD event
    – Ramhound
    Feb 2, 2014 at 16:42
  • Hm? I've had them running in plastic bags before during data recovery (good old freezer trick) and haven't experienced such an error.
    – WindowsEscapist
    Feb 2, 2014 at 17:38
  • @Ramhound I suspect that putting the HDD onto a sheet of paper, onto the cooling pad will do just fine. Thanks!
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 18:19
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It will be perfectly OK to remove the HDD from the Icy Box enclosure. Be careful not to put any up/down force on the connectors - slide the drive until it is clear of them before removing the drive.

Any fan blowing air over the drive will keep it cool, e.g. a desktop fan. You can sit the drive on one of its long edges to get more airflow over it.

From the looks of the enclosure in the link you gave, just opening the lid of it and blowing a desktop fan on it will be enough to keep it considerably cooler than it would otherwise be in the enclosure.

Bear in mind that the HDD will have a minimum operating temperature of maybe 5 or 10 degrees Celsius, whereas a freezer may be at minus 30 degrees Celsius. Please also see Freezing your Hard Drive - A Bad Idea.

Addendum: from Toshiba's specs (pdf) Operating temperature 5°C - 55°C, storage temperature -40°C - 60°C.

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  • Very interesting! Thanks for the specs (didn't think of that). Does it mean that it is perfectly fine to store the HD in a -20°C freezer (assuming that you can avoid the humidity/condensation issues)? The Freezing your Hard Drive - A Bad Idea guys seem to be saying otherwise.
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 18:35
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    @landroni Unless I was informed otherwise, I would take the storage specs to mean it was still factory-sealed in its ESD film with a silica gel packet.
    – Andrew Morton
    Feb 2, 2014 at 19:27
  • Indeed. In your opinion, would the freezing trick be less dangerous (or at least more likely to avoid humidity issues) if I first sealed the HD in a double or triple ziploc bag with a silica gel packet inside, left it outside the freezer for a day or two, and only then put it in the freezer for 12h?
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 19:41
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    @landroni If you have exhausted all other methods and no longer care that you might completely and utterly destroy the data on the HDD, then carry on. If you are "lucky" then it is the USB/SATA adapter which is faulty rather than the HDD, so it would be worth trying a different adapter if you can't connect the drive to a computer using a SATA cable (and power, of course).
    – Andrew Morton
    Feb 2, 2014 at 19:58
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Yes, when mechanical hard drives are manufactured they are assembled in a clean room, but they are not airtight. You can remove them from their enclosure and run them but you will expose the platter(s) to dust particles/humidity and this will eventually lead to failure.

That said, if you are doing this for data recovery then it really is not going to matter much. You will no longer have a clean read/write surface, but the whole point of this seems to be that you want to get the data off the drive before it fails completely (if I am not mistaken).

UPDATE:

After clarifying exactly what you are referring to by bare drive, I should point out that cooling probably will not be an issue. For a long time I had a WD VelociRaptor 2.5" drive sitting outside the chassis of one of my computers connected via external SATA. This drive runs at a demanding 10K RPM but only requires passive cooling. The drive itself is 2.5", but it has a heatsink built-in that makes it occupy a 3.5" form factor:

    

Your drive should not require anywhere near the same level of sophistication in terms of cooling as the WD VelociRaptor. But it would be a good idea to put it somewhere with good ventilation since you are going to run the disk continuously to get the data off of it.

If you ever take apart a TiVo and look where the disk drives are mounted with respect to cooling fans, you will notice there is no special consideration taken to cool the drive (short of not putting it directly over top the CPU or PSU). The only fan in a TiVo is always located next to the PSU, and blows air out.

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  • The cooling is necessary, I think. Without any additional cooling (just the external casing), after several hours of continuing work testdisk was reporting read errors everywhere and the drive got quite hot; while subsequent smartctl failed. Some suggest to add cooling so as to improve operational performance. Freezing the disk for 12H may be one way to go, but others suggest to simply ensure proper cooling before anything that extreme (e.g. put the drive in sealed ziploc bag in the fridge/freezer while trying to copy data from it). So I'm trying to start slow with an even softer approach.
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 16:24
  • I am confused, I thought you wanted to get the data off the disk and replace it because it was damaged in a fall? How many hours of continued operation would this entail? For that matter, your original external enclosure solution served as nothing more than a crude heat spreader at best. If you place the internal drive on the same cooling pad nothing should change.
    – Andon M. Coleman
    Feb 2, 2014 at 16:28
  • The external enclosure has no fan whatsoever (completely passive). But I would like to place he HD on a proper cooling pad (and with the window open, handily cold in winter). As for the ddrescue backup, I have no idea how long that would take. Probably depends on how quickly the drive gets hot, and how many bad sectors there are (assuming that it works at all).
    – landroni
    Feb 2, 2014 at 17:59
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    @landroni - The fan isn't required. build a small support so nothing makes direct contact with the PCB.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 2, 2014 at 20:05

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