Heat is a typical by-product of many of the devices we use on a dailybasis. Engines, for example, produce a tremendous amount of heat; as do itemslike washing machines, televisions, blenders and more. Anything that usesmoving parts or needs an electrical current to function will generate heat.Thanks to advances in cooling technology, overheating is now less of an issuethat it has been at any other time – but it’s not been eradicated in itsentirety… and hard drives and high temperatures are not the best of friends!
When any device is forced to operate in a hot environment, itsperformance suffers. As far as hard drives are concerned, this can come in theform of slow read/write speeds or an operating interface that is frequentlyfreezing or even shutting itself down. What’s more, these environments are alsolikely to result in hard drives becoming damaged. In some cases, the damage isso severe that the drive can no longer read the data it holds.
How overheating can cause data loss
Heat causes electrical components to degrade and potentially fail. Thereare several parts of a hard drive that can fail as a result of beingoverexposed to heat, including the part that actually stores data.
Do you remember chemistry lessons? More specifically, do you rememberthe lesson where you heated and/or cooled metal? Remember how itexpanded/contracted? All of the data that is stored on a hard drive is writtenonto metal discs referred to as platters and, when these expand and contract,they can damage other components and even cause ahead crash.
Even if expanding metal doesn’t damage any individual components, it’sstill more than capable of transforming a hard drive from a functional piece ofstorage media into an expensive paperweight. As platters expand and contract,they gradually become warped. Even though the distortion is minimal, this’ll bemore than enough to prevent the retrieval of your data.
As we said previously, all of the data that can be found on a hard driveis stored on its platters. The individual pieces of data that form a file –called bytes – are all stored in separate locations. When you save a file, thelocation of each individual byte is recorded by your drive. When you then openthis file, these individual locations are viewed, the bytes are read and thefile is reconstituted and displayed. These bytes are stored in microscopicsectors so, if the platter’s position changes – even fractionally – your filescannot be retrieved.
What to do with a hard drive that’s suffered heat damage
Whether excessive heat has fried electrical components, warped plattersor damaged anything else, successfully recoveringthe data held on a hard drive will be dependent upon it being opened withina sterile environment; Fields Data Recovery’s clean room, for example.
Oh, and we’ll diagnose the drive, workout how to recover your data and how much work will be required withoutcharging you a penny! Plus, after we’ve done all of this you’ll get ano-obligation quote and, if you don’t like the price, we’ll return your harddrive to you – all for free.
