Why Does My Hard Drive need a Clean Room Environment

The working components found inside hard drives are prone to damage when introduced to dust particles and other airborne contaminates.

Recovery cases that require head swaps or re-calibration, platter swaps, visual inspection, or involve head station where an engineer will open the drive case must be done in a certified clean room environment.

The read/write head assembly hovers just several nanometers above the platters, and are never supposed to come into contact with them. (A nanometer is million times smaller than millimeter!) If and when they do, they can scratch the platter, permanently destroying your data.

This means that most bacteria couldn’t fit between the platters and the read/write head! That’s how delicate they are! Every airborne particle is considered huge when considering the space between the head and the platter on your hard drive!

Hard drive platters rotate several thousand times per minute and because of that dust particles can cause a catastrophic head crash which will be fatal for your data