Ask Lemmy

31290 readers

1139 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My external Maxtor drive won't be detected on my linux machine. I have the power cord all tight and I have firewire that I think that came with the Maxtor drive itself. It just won't be recognized. Any help.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

ext step is put the drive in your freezer for an hour or so then pull it

I've read that that doesn't work on drives these days, though I can't speak from personal knowledge.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/419677/that-old-freezer-trick-to-save-a-hard-drive-doesnt-work-anymore.html

What is the freezer trick?

At one time, a hard drive might suddenly lock up for any number of reasons, succumbing to the “click of death” or other failures. One of them could be what drive vendors called “stiction,” a fancy name for a drive whose lubrication failed. The drive’s platters essentially “stuck,” and the drive wouldn’t read data. That meant, of course, that any data stored on it was potentially lost forever.

The “freezer trick” involved sticking the drive in a waterproof plastic bag, and then into the freezer. If you left it alone for a few hours, the cold would cool the metal down enough to constrict it, and, in some cases, free up the disks to spin. The idea behind the freezer trick was to save the data by then quickly copying it to another device before another lockup occurred, Moyer said.

Stiction, though, is largely a thing of the past. Modern and more complex drives have improved lubrication systems and “off-platter parking” (where the drive stores its head off the surface of the disk, like a phonograph, when not in use), to prevent this problem from occurring, Moyer explained. “As a result, stiction rarely happens with today’s technology,” he said.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

At best it let's you get a few gigs of data out, at worst it doesn't work and you're back to where you were (which was nothing). Doesn't really hurt the drive at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

From the article I linked to above:

For instance, a side effect of freezing a hard drive is corrosion, caused by the transformation of water vapor inside the drive to ice crystals. Upon removal from the freezer, that ice will melt and foul the delicate electrical components inside the drive. If the drive spins up before the ice has melted, catastrophic damage will occur and data may be permanently lost.

ACS Data Recovery Services provides a bit more detail: As data storage densities have grown higher and higher, the height a head flies above the spinning hard disk platter has steadily decreased. In modern drives, the clearance between a head and the disk is is slightly less than 10 nanometers—or about four times the width of a single strand of DNA. If any ice crystals form, chances are that head will crash into them.

I mean, if the data isn't something that you're gonna try to recover by other means, sure, but it can cause damage.