After 100 days frozen in my ice rink, I finally thawed out my Seagate FreeAgent Go disk drive and plugged it in. I won’t spoil the ending – watch the video to see what happened.
Random thoughts (without giving anything away):
- Cutting the drive out of the rink was probably the most fun I’ve had with the project all winter
- It took 22 hours for the block of ice to melt at room temperature
- The project was a great obsession distraction over what turned out to be a long winter
So…what should I do next with/to/about/around a disk drive? The crazier ideas the better.
Here’s the entire 100-day experiment:
I think it is awesome that you attempted this and posted it….
Yeah, I am not happy that MY Seagate (Maxtor) drive failed, but still good to see you follow thru.
SPOILER =)
Do you think the bag issue modified the outcome?
How long did you let it ‘thaw’ before you connected it to the PC? (As in, did the drive ‘core’ get up to room temp?)
Any possibility of having some Seagate techs look at it to determine the exact cause of the issue?
Pete–This is a very interesting post. Love the part where you cut the drive out of the ice! Looking forward to seeing future experiments, and I hope you find out the root cause. A somewhat related topic is that there’s a move in green IT towards saving on cooling by simply opening windows. This assumes that the equipment is perhaps less delicate than originally assumed. I have a short post on this: http://onlinestorageoptimization.com/?p=248
[…] – Pete Steege – I thawed out my disk drive. Did it work? Amazing footage of Pete Steege taking a chainsaw and cutting a disk drive that he had frozen into […]
What on earth possessed you to package the drive in only a single (yes?) plastic bag? I won’t even store food that way for any significant length of time. I would have tried to do some serious layering on that puppy before submerging it. (And maybe throw in a desiccant?)
I hope you can get a root failure analysis done. My bet would be that you got internal moisture from condensation. Have you tried the drive again now that it has possible had more time to “dry out”?
@Pete Steege
I’d try it again before sending it off to failure analysis.
I “washed” a bread machine last fall. In the process some of the soap and water got into the circuitry. I plugged it in a day after and got no response from the machine. It was dead.
A few days (?) after that, I got weird non-functional behavior. Maybe two weeks later, it worked again and is back “in production”. 😉
A hard drive is, of course, a LOT more complicated so odds are it really is toast. But seems like it might be worth trying again “just in case”.
As for next year … you probably have access to better advice from Seagatishy folks about whether a desiccant makes sense or not. Only suggested it since they seem to ship them with one.
I’d probably triple or quadruple bag it … with an inner layer of bubble wrap for good measure.
But I’m also “just a bit” OCD and maybe that’s the side of me where my suggestions are coming from. 😉
-irrational john
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