Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the help of woodworking tools
About 15 years ago I made quite a bit of money recovering data from damaged HDDs using various low-tech means.<p>It started when I threw a very expensive (at the time) 1.5TB HDD.  It had various things going on with it but I recall it wouldn&#x27;t spin up and once I was able to get it to spin up, it wouldn&#x27;t function for more than a few minutes before it would error out and the drive would become unrecognized by the PC.<p>I remember I made it spin up again entirely by accident.  Figuring the drive was toast, I&#x27;d removed it and while fumbling with the cables it slipped out of my hand and landed on the hardwood floor.  I hadn&#x27;t noticed when I was holding the drive, but it felt like something was &quot;stuck&quot;[0] and after picking it up off the floor, it felt like the components were moving again.  On a whim I plugged it back in and it worked.<p>The second problem, I knew, was thermal.  The drive got incredibly hot very quickly.  Being that it was a 1.5TB drive at a time when &quot;that was big&quot;, I&#x27;d need the drive to be functional for hours to complete copying the data.<p>I had a dorm fridge in my office and debated putting it in one of my external cases and running a cable from there but knew that the moisture wouldn&#x27;t play well.  Because I kept very little in this fridge, it was filled with a few cans of soda, coffee creamer and about ten of those blue gel bags that people freeze&#x2F;put in coolers in lieu of ice.  I did this <i>mainly</i> because the fridge was really loud and keeping it stocked with <i>anything</i> made it run a lot less.<p>The upshot was that the size of these &quot;bags&quot; was just a little larger than a 3.5&quot; HDD, if left out they maintained their temperature for hours[1].  I grabbed two, placed the drive on top, put two more on top of the drive and managed to image the whole thing.<p>It was so simple, I popped an ad on Craigslist and $200 &quot;I&#x27;ll get your data back or you don&#x27;t pay.&quot;  Out of 30-40 drives, there were less than 5 that were beyond help.  About half were software issues, many of which were simple to resolve.  Very few required a tool like photorec, but it did the job when needed[2].  The rest were handled with an extremely stable power supply, four gel bags and patience.  Except for one of my own drives, I never popped screws and generally didn&#x27;t resort to &quot;applying physics and gravity&quot; in hopes that if I couldn&#x27;t recover anything, I&#x27;d at least give them a drive that was &quot;no more damaged than when I received it&quot; (they still signed a document covering me for any liability).<p>The whole experience made me realize how <i>critical</i> keeping &quot;components other than the CPU&quot; cool is.  Every drive I&#x27;ve experienced hardware failures on[3] has had something heat-related coinciding.  I remember one time I couldn&#x27;t figure out which of the 8 drives was indicating failure; I saw one of the three fans in the drive cage wasn&#x27;t spinning.  I shut the server down, pulled out the fan and its 3-drive set, figured <i>has to be the middle drive</i>, swapped it and it started rebuilding the array on reboot.  I guessed right. :)<p>[0] If you take a drive, lay it flat on a desk and spin it, you&#x27;ll hear things move ... this one didn&#x27;t.<p>[1] Provided it&#x27;s just sitting on a wooden desk.<p>[2] There was <i>one</i> customer that I&#x27;ll never forget and he was a reason I stopped doing this entirely.  I told him I could recover photos&#x2F;videos&#x2F;specific file types from his drive but it will recovery everything it sees including files that may have been intentionally deleted.  He said &quot;Oh, no! Don&#x27;t do that. I&#x27;ll pick up my drive.&quot;  I still wonder, to this day, what kinds of horrors I would have been in for (I rarely did more than a spot check on the data, anyway).<p>[3] I still have a pretty massive custom built storage server with an older LSI MegaRAID controller and a mess of SAS HDDs.  For what it&#x27;s used for, the speed is more than adequate the individual drive costs are substantially less (even taking into account SAS over SATA) and they outlive my SSDs.