What is a clean room? A cleanroom is an environment where airborn particulates are controlled through an exchange of highly filtered air using a high efficiency particulate air filtering system, and through minimization of activities that generate particles. A class 100 cleanroom maintains less than one hundred particles larger than 0.5 microns in each cubic foot of air space. In addition to particle control, the cleanroom is temperature and humidity controlled to 70F snd 45% RH respectively. Opening hard disk must be in at least Class 100 clean room. For added security a clean-flow benche that further filters air can be utilized in the clean room.
Why is a clean room important to data recovery? Inside a hard drive closure, there are two main parts: heads and platters. The platters are magnetic disks, and they’re extremely sensitive, both physically and magnetically. Even a small dust particle settling between the platters and the read/ write head can cause the disk to crash.
When a drive is opened in an unsafe environment and exposed to pollutants, the platters can become contaminated. Even a single speck of dust can be enough to potentially ruin a hard drive, making any sort of data recovery impossible, even on the sectors of the drive that weren’t touched by the dust.
We have Class 100 clean room facilities in house and keep it running and maintained constantly and carefully to achieve the best-possible environment for data recovery.