Clean room necessary?

[Coldblackice]

This how-to video looks fairly professional, and from a harddrive repair group, too. However, I'm confused as to why it's being done (apparently) outside a clean room, and without proper clothing/gloves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwGJep8zmbo

Is it true that opening a harddrive outside of a clean room environment pretty much insta-kills the drive from dust?

Now that I think about it, perhaps they're just teaching the method of how one would go about doing this repair in a clean room environment. Even so, it'd be pretty unprofessional to post without any warning.


(Miscellanous questions, if any have expertise on this)

If one were to do this in a non-clean room, but after finishing, gave it a good hardy blast of compressed air (toward some exhaust/vaccum/ventilation system), and all the dust was successfully blown off, would the drive remain undamaged (provided the head hadn't traversed any dust yet)? Or is it a matter of once the dust lands, the damage is already done?

How "guaranteed" would opening a drive in a non-clean room kill the drive? How much dust would be necessary? What's the correlation between dust particles and damage -- does "1 dust" = "1 byte" damage, figuratively speaking? Or is it less about where the dust lands, and more about the dust damaging the head, if the head traverses over it?

 

[Fooshnik]

One fleck of dust could take out quite a few tracks as it gets picked up by the head and dragged all over the place. You could probably get away with opening it in a non clean room if the drive was empty and you did a surface scan after closing it and reallocated all the newly-bad sectors. If you were doing it to try to recover a lost drive you'd probably not get the best results.

There are other videos that are step by step with dialog so you know what they're doing.

 

[dangerouseddy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height

The flying height or floating height or head gap is the distance between the disk read/write head on a hard drive and the platter. The earliest hard disks had no flying height; their heads were in contact with the media.[citation needed] But in modern drives, the flying height is normally about 3 nanometers. Thus, the head can collide with even an obstruction as thin as a fingerprint or a particle of smoke. Despite the dangers of hard drive failure from such foreign objects, hard drives generally allow for ventilation (albeit through a filter) so that the air pressure within the drive can equalize with the air pressure without.[1] Drive function depends on the head floating on an air bearing, or cushion of air, so it is not possible at this time to have the head simply operate in a vacuum.[2] Regulation of flying height will become even more important in future high-capacity drives.[3]

id say any modern drive thats opened up outside a clean room will die pretty quicky. not sure if it could cause a head crash or head failure but i wouldnt trust an hd after it had been opened in such an environment

 

[odditory]

This how-to video looks fairly professional, and from a harddrive repair group, too. However, I'm confused as to why it's being done (apparently) outside a clean room, and without proper clothing/gloves.

Because demonstration. As for the rest of your questions, you have no business opening a hard disk unless you don't care about destroying it. This isn't a casual/DIY activity. Requires experience, special tools - some of them custom - and a positive air pressure space/container/room for the drive and that's just for starters.

Replacement parts aren't something you just order from disk manufacturers either - pro shops have spent years building up their library of swap-in parts. Sometimes you can find spare for-parts-only drives on eBay, but essentially once a drive's been opened its cooked and not worth running beyond getting an image dump.

 

[Coldblackice]

One fleck of dust could take out quite a few tracks as it gets picked up by the head and dragged all over the place. You could probably get away with opening it in a non clean room if the drive was empty and you did a surface scan after closing it and reallocated all the newly-bad sectors. If you were doing it to try to recover a lost drive you'd probably not get the best results.

There are other videos that are step by step with dialog so you know what they're doing.

Thanks! Just random curiosity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height





id say any modern drive thats opened up outside a clean room will die pretty quicky. not sure if it could cause a head crash or head failure but i wouldnt trust an hd after it had been opened in such an environment

Thanks!

Because demonstration. As for the rest of your questions, you have no business opening a hard disk unless you don't care about destroying it. This isn't a casual/DIY activity. Requires experience, special tools - some of them custom - and a positive air pressure space/container/room for the drive and that's just for starters.

Replacement parts aren't something you just order from disk manufacturers either - pro shops have spent years building up their library of swap-in parts. Sometimes you can find spare for-parts-only drives on eBay, but essentially once a drive's been opened its cooked and not worth running beyond getting an image dump.

Don't worry, the questions were pure curiosity. I only stumbled across the video while looking for pictures of TVS diodes on drive PCB's, remembering a time when I paid someone to fix/bypass them on an old drive (which I would feel confident doing myself these days, should the need and diagnosis arise).

I've known the necessity of clean-room environments for any type of platter work, and even then, it's a job for the pros. But after seeing this video, and how nonchalantly they went about teaching it (and without any warning), I was stumped.

 

[Fooshnik]

People used to hack their hard drives and replace the top with a piece of plexi, if you've ever seen one like that it's almost supernatural the way the head moves. I never had the nerve to try it. I'd imagine most of the drives that had this mod done are no longer in service.

 

[-Dragon-]

It's not like opening your drive instantly kills it, but you've greatly increased the chance of head or platter damage from foreign objects. Basically you just gave your HDD a death sentence and it's now only a matter of time.

 

[odditory]

I've known the necessity of clean-room environments for any type of platter work, and even then, it's a job for the pros. But after seeing this video, and how nonchalantly they went about teaching it (and without any warning), I was stumped.

No doubt, a pro that's done it 100x is bound to make it look easy Interesting idea selling their custom tools for drive surgery but a little dangerous in their potential to give false hope to someone that hasn't done that type of thing before thinking they're going to crack open their drive and no big deal. I've managed to screw up drives even IN a clean room despite having done surgeries and swapped parts out dozens of times before, simply because these parts are so delicate and the guys that work on them every day have more of a feel for it.

 

[Proplus]

I've opened up a 3.5" drive just to see what happens. It ran OK (lid off) doing a scandisk in Windows XP for about 15 minutes but then started getting disk errors all over and died completely within 30 minutes.

I have successfully recovered data from a click of death 2.5" HDD by removing the lid to free the actuator, That drive lasted about another week before click of death set in again.

A good analogy for how close the disk head runs to the platter is this:

 

[Coldblackice]

I've opened up a 3.5" drive just to see what happens. It ran OK (lid off) doing a scandisk in Windows XP for about 15 minutes but then started getting disk errors all over and died completely within 30 minutes.

I have successfully recovered data from a click of death 2.5" HDD by removing the lid to free the actuator, That drive lasted about another week before click of death set in again.

A good analogy for how close the disk head runs to the platter is this:

Cool idea (testing on a lidless drive to see how long it lasts). I think I might try that myself.

Cool analogy, too. Thanks.

So does the danger of contamination "snowball"? In other words, if a few dusticles land on the platter, and the head grinds over them -- is that the end of the damage, assuming that there were no further contaminants that fell on the platter? Or would it somehow "snowball", where once the head runs over some contaminants, the head is then out of line, and will continue crunching and scratching around?

Again, just pure curiosity, trying to understand the mechanics of the situation.

 

[Aesma]

If the head crashes on the platter, all bets are off. The coating of the platter can start separating, or the arm can be bent and the head stays in contact with the platter, or several other failure modes. Now it can also happen that when the drive spins up the dust on the platter flies off and you're good, at least for a time.