Clean rooms used are rooms that have been designed to reduce the level of particulates in the air like dust and airborne microbes. Clean room construction employs filters extensively. Staff would usually have to enter clean rooms through airlocks and wear protective gear while working inside the rooms.
For professional data and server 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.
There are different “classes” of clean rooms, with each class limiting permissible different numbers of particles per cubic meter, as well as the maximum sizes particles. Thus a Class 1 clean room is one where the number of particles should not exceed 1000 particles per cubic meter.
Clean rooms are not only used in data recovery operations though, they are widely found in all manner of industries ranging from medical labs to pharmaceutical manufacturing plants and of course electronics manufacturing plants. Rooms can be a few feet square or can encompass an entire manufacturing plant area depending on the operation in question.
Why Are Clean Rooms Essential For Hard Drive Repairs?
Clean rooms are used for data recovery to prevent dust, electro static discharges and such disturbances. These kinds of precautions become necessary because even microscopic dust particles can damage the image on the drive platters, and make data recovery difficult.
With each generation of disks, data is packed more and more densely on the disk platters. It is thus increasingly important that data recovery be attempted in exceptionally clean rooms.
Another consideration for using a clean room though is the warranty on your drive that will be made invalid if not repaired by an authorised agent or in a clean room environment although in reality the value of the accumulated data on most drives is by far massively more valuable than the drive itself, so all the more reason to ensure that it is only worked on in the cleanest of environments to prevent further damage.
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.
Visit Remac for more information on hard drive repair and Mac data recovery
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