> why does freezing the drive have any effect at all? Good question, in short, I'm not too sure but I have a rough idea. Technically, (and if you think about it)
Electronics run better when they are cool.. so .. [in my case the PCB is assumed the fault because the disk works fine, just won't detect when it's faulty.] It's Faulty, maybe, due to chemical breakdown from heat, and age. If a HDD is too hot, like hot to touch, it's going to fail right.. .. so as it gets older, and the chips and bits wearout the 'too hot' threshold lowers to the point that room temp is enough for the circuitry to fail, just like it would in a normal Drive if it were to get 'hot to touch hot'. When the electronics are cooled, maybe the connections are improved resistance is definitely lowered by cooling of electronics.. NOTE: Now that my drive is warm again, it doesn't work So if I want to use it I have to cool it. Improved performance from cooled electronics is one of the reasons why cooling, via water or other means is used amongst overclockers, simply for the fact that they get less noise and better performance. (googleing on this topic would give AMPLE amounts of reading). On another note, cooling may also work when the drive detects but fails to spin.. or even has bad sectors and you can't read from them. and there are theories to why it works in these scenarios as well. take a read of this URL for lots of opinions.. http://ism.ferris.edu/students/j/jenseng/techproguild/200ways.htm maybe Dr. Karl might be abe to answer it better ;) Here were some reasons from that URL above (that seem plausible, some are laughable) Disk not detecting etc... <quote> (head geometry, electrical resistance lowered, electrical contact points adjusted, etc., assumed to be the miracle here). </quote> - Faulty disk not spinning, or not reading <quote> Metal contracts when it is cold.... so the platters shrink and increase the clearance for the read/write heads. </quote> - Ramon. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
