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by dale_glass 205 days ago
> I just put it in a plastic bag into the freezer during 15 minutes, and works.

What's that supposed to do for a SSD?

It was a trick for hard disks because on ancient drives the heads could get stuck to the platter, and that might help sometimes. But even for HDDs that's dubiously useful these days.

3 comments

> It was a trick for hard disks because on ancient drives the heads could get stuck to the platter, and that might help sometimes.

Stuck heads were/are part of the freezing trick.

Another other part of that trick has to do with printed circuit boards and their myriad of connections -- you know, the stuff that both HDDs and SSDs have in common.

Freezing them makes things on the PCB contract, sometimes at different rates, and sometimes that change makes things better-enough, long-enough to retrieve the data.

I've recovered data from a few (non-ancient) hard drives that weren't stuck at all by freezing them. Previous to being frozen, they'd spin up fine at room temperature and sometimes would even work well-enough to get some data off of them (while logging a ton of errors). After being frozen, they became much more complacent.

A couple of them would die again after warming back up, and only really behaved while they were continuously frozen. But that was easy enough, too: Just run the USB cable from the adapter through the door seal on the freezer and plug it into a laptop.

This would work about the same for an SSD, in that: If it helps, then it is helpful.

Semiconductors generally work better the colder they are. Extreme overclockers don't use liquid nitrogen primarily to keep chips at room temperature at extreme power consumption, but to actually run them at temperatures far below freezing.
Complex issue- analog NAND doesn't work anything like the Logic in CPUs.

Far more often it's the act of simply letting a device sit unpowered itself that 'fixes' the issue. Speculation on what changed invariably goes on indefinitely

It could be due to a dodgy connection - changing temperature might make the two halves of a broken conductor touch again.