What are Clean Rooms?

During the recovery process, data recovery engineers open each storage device to inspect for physical damage and repair delicate components. Tiny airborne particles can accumulate on the open hard disk drive platters, causing read-write heads to malfunction and damage the platter surfaces. When this happens, valuable data could be lost forever.

Clean rooms are where we, data recovery specialists, and manufacturers work on devices. They work by removing all the potentially damaging particles from the air protecting the platters from being exposed to dust and other harmful particles. They cost a lot of money to install and maintain meaning it is impossible to make one in your own home.

The myth that a clean room can be made in a bathroom by simply closing the door and running a tap is completely false. The idea that the steam accumulating in the air picks up particles causing them to stick to surfaces may be true to some extent. But much smaller particles will not be picked up and the moisture can do just as much if not more damage itself! You don't want your hard drive getting wet as this will damage it further.