Did you know that everyday you have several plates whirring at 7,200 or more revolutions per minute several inches away from you? That’s faster than most motor car engines. Where, you ask? Meet your hard disk drive. Within the hard disk casing of every hard disk lie three to five rigid glass or aluminium platters which are coated with a magnetic material.

Your data, be they Outlook PST mail files to video AVI, MPEG, DivX files; from Excel spreadsheets, Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Access files to photographic JPEG, TIFF or RAW files, all resides on just this thin layer of magnetic material that is spinning at a tremendous speed.

Because of the speed of the platters and the extreme tolerance required for the heads, they are kept in a sealed enclosure. The casing protects the hard disk mechanisms from dust, condensation, and other contamination. The hard disk's read-write heads fly on an air bearing which is a cushion of air only nanometers above the disk surface. The disk surface and the disk's internal environment must therefore be kept immaculate to prevent damage from fingerprints, hair, dust, smoke particles and such, given the sub-microscopic gap between the heads and disk.

To get a sense of the extreme accuracy required in an ordinary hard disk, the diameter of a human hair is tens of thousands nanometers. Even an average bacteria can measure a few hundred nanometers. Hard disk heads operate just a few nanometers above the platter surface. It is like a more than 70 metre long Boeing 747 Jumbo flying at 100kph just 1.5mm above the runway.

Our slider-airplane will fly at the altitude of only a few mm at the speed of approximately 65 mph periodically landing on its belly and taking off again about 50,000 times. And still the surface the airport, which consists of a few mm-thick layers will stay intact for years...

Data has always been encoded horizontally or longitudinally. With data being packed more and more densely, a physical barrier called the “superparamagnetic limit” is faced. With longitudinal recording, the current limit is at 120 GB per square inch.That’s a point when the magnetic grains on a hard disk platter get so microscopic, they are not stable enough to resist being demagnetised resulting in data loss. At that high data density, it is possible that over a few years, the data encoded on the magnetic grains can become corrupted, and make the the storage device unreliable and unusable.

A recent development, perpendicular recording, is helping to push the limits to 230GB per square inch or more which may lead to a ten-fold increase in data densities over current technologies. How does a 60 GB 1” drive sound? But the sober note of caution amidst all these sexy technologies is this: sure, it works … but for how long? If a single hard disk sounds complex, imagine if it is a nest of hard disk assembled into a RAID and acting as a single storage entity.

Contrast this with the first commercially-avaliable hard disk came from IBM in 1956. It was the size of two refrigerators, as tall as a man and weighed a ton. It could hardly hold two MP3 songs. It was noisy and so expensive, you could only lease it. Today, 100GB 2.5” hard disks in notebook computers are fairly commonplace. The first terabyte (thousand gigabyte) hard disk is around the corner, and the word for tomorrow is petabyte – millions of gigabytes.

Now that we know how extremely delicate a hard disk is and how complex are the technologies within, we can appreciate the kind of skill, expertise and labour required to recover data and how any opening of a hard disk enclosure should only be done by trusted professionals with approved facilities like a full-fledged Class 100 clean lab facilities. If your data is important to you, you simply need to get the best. And there is none in region, more trustworthy and professional than ADRC, located in heart of Singapore’s technology hub, the Singapore Science Park.