What is clean room data recovery?

By Jeff Graber

When we clean our rooms, what is it we are trying to do? By removing all the pollutants out of the air and by giving ourselves clearer and cleaner workspaces, you are removing these factors from the air which can be a key component in fixing a computer. If the air in a room is too thick, too humid, or too warm then the hardware itself can really become affected.

In the 1960s, the aerospace industry exploded and clean rooms became a thing of the future – offering a way to keep your room clear of anything you don’t want in there like dust and germs, it seemed to be the perfect way to live. Today, this type of technology is heavily used in manufacturing and research centers as it provides a purified workplace for employing the type of work required without compromising the equipment itself.

Clean rooms offer a much better chance of successful repair and recovery of hardware. Without anything in the air to damage the equipment further, it’s a lot easier to create a solution and get the fix you need. Even the smallest of contaminant landing on a piece of hardware could cause lasting damage. A spec of dust so small you will never be able to see it can be the overriding factor in the death of your hard-disk drive, so high-precision cleanliness is required in the majority of work labs to ensure safe repair and construction.

Of course, depending on the project these rooms can be as big as a soccer field or as small as an office toilet. It’s all down to what is actually required to fit into the room and how many layers of air filtering is required in that room. Alongside filtering the air, the whole environment is further sanitized by air locks and air showers as well as a regular upkeep operation carried out inside the room to remove anything that could be construed as harmful.

Ironically, people are some of the biggest contaminants that can be in a room. From skin flakes to snot and all the way down to the deodorant that you wear there are many factors on the human body that can damage hardware. Therefore it’s important that in a clean room data recovery operation that everybody is well covered and that any of these implications can be avoided.

Clean room recovery is a popular method of repair hard-disk drives that have been compromised by traditional usage. These services usually fall under Class 100 of the Federal standard, meaning they maintain the highest possible standards of cleanliness and functionality.

(This article is courtesy of The Mac Support Store, Brooklyn’s first Apple repair shop.)