Different people will have different ideas about what a clean room is and why it is actually such an important factor for data recovery. Essentially clean rooms are controlled areas designed to be free from minute airborne contaminants which could be a speck of dust or even pollen for example. Entry to a clean room is gained via an airlock and operators generally use specialist protective garments.

For professional data recovery companies a clean room is an essential asset as hard drive repair often requires the use of exceptionally clean working conditions.

Outside air is filtered to prevent dust entering the room. Filters and processes will be in place inside the room to remove internally generated contaminants during production and working areas are often further filtered locally such as laminar flow bench.

Cleans rooms come in a variety of classes depending on their usage and the class certification is an indication of the permitted number of particles per cubic meter that particular clean room is certified for as well as the actual number of particles that are permissible. Less and smaller is obviously best.

Clean rooms are used extensively in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor manufacturing and biotech industries. Data recovery centres typically use a Class 100 clean room that has an allowance of 100,000 particles per cubic meter (compared to 35 million particles per cubic meter in a normal room).

Why Are Clean Rooms Essential For Hard Drive Repair?

The internal components of a hard drive and in particular the disk platters (many drives have more than one) are exceptionally susceptible to further damage from airborne particulates once opened. Even the most microscopic particles can further damage the extremely sensitive platter surfaces as can damage from ESD, so a clean room environment is essential for a success repair in many instances.

Hard drive technology continues apace with drives being able to hold Terabytes of data but as this data becomes more densely packed on the platters, the chances of further damage are increased so it is essential that these hard drive repairs are carried out in the cleanest of environments.

Drive manufacturers usually specify that their product guarantee will become void if the drive is opened by anybody other than themselves, or their authorized agents. And typically, one of the conditions they impose on authorized agents is that the disks be opened in clean rooms meeting specified standards.

Thus clean rooms are necessary for data recovery on both performance and product warranty considerations. Disk drives should only be opened in clean rooms and kept there until the recovery is complete and the drive is closed. Data storage media are getting packed with data more and more densely with each new generation of drives. It is thus extremely important to attempt data recovery in exceptionally dust free rooms.

If you need to hand over your hard drive to a data recovery services company check the validation of their clean room. At the very least it should be class 100 certified although the top companies will have invested in even better standards, for example ISO class 3.