Ignore the Clean Room and Let Your Damaged Media or Data Perish

That image is not very different from the picture of a ‘clean room’ (minus the motionless human body, cutting and sewing).

A ‘clean room’ is a temperature, lighting, humidity, dust free, human contaminant free and air controlled environment required to manufacture sensitive products and conduct delicate research. Clean rooms are required to prevent even the slightest trace of contaminants, magnetic fields or excessive air particles from damaging these highly sensitive products. Some industries that require ‘clean’ rooms are precision electronics, space research, biotechnology, optics, computing, nanofabrication, pharmaceutical, data recovery etc.

Clean rooms are classified according to the levels of air cleanliness consistently achieved by them (i.e. the size and number of air particles, permissible in a given volume of air). The first standard for classifying ‘clean’ rooms was introduced in the United States in 1963. It was known as Federal Standard 209. It is the most widely used worldwide benchmark standard, even in use today and continues to be known as the Federal Standard. However, different series numbers have been introduced over the years to indicate the upgradation of its standards. The current series is the 209 E.

This popular standard’s classification is based on measuring the air particles of 0.5 micron, present in 1 cubic feet of air (not the size of the room). An ultimate Class 1 room, in this standard, would not contain more than 1 air particle of 0.5 micron, in a cubic feet of air. A Class 100,000 room indicates that air particles of 0.5 micron do not exceed 100,000 particles in 1 cubic feet of air (most office environments commonly contain between 50,000 to 100,000 air particles of 0.5 micron, in a cubic feet of air). Hard disks are manufactured in Class 100 clean rooms. Optimal levels for a clean room are Class 10. However, the industry acceptable level, for critical product manufacturing, is Class 100.

Due to the gradual multiplicity of clean room standards, across the world, the standard called ISO (i.e. ISO – 14644-1) was introduced in 1999, to standardise the mushrooming standards! Yet it has not gained the same popularity as the Federal Standard 209 series.

A proper clean room undergoes regular maintenance, upkeep and annual inspection. Most clean rooms follow a standard procedure of:

(a) Not letting the contaminant in, from the outside. Air locks / air curtains / air showers or air cubicles direct the air flow, in order to get rid of most outside contaminants. Special protective clothing from head to toe prevents any leakage of contaminants that may have escaped the first stage. The clothing themselves do not give off any particles. No colds allowed inside, please.
(b) Contamination is not allowed to be generated by the machinery, raw material or the processes inside the regulated environment.
(c) Despite these efforts, when the first signs of contamination are noticed, the contaminants are immediately evacuated, automatically, by repeated filtering.

In terms of data recovery, ‘clean’ rooms are meant to ‘Do no further harm’ while trying to recover from or repair the damage, that has been already caused to your sensitive data storage media. Clean rooms also facilitate the recovery of data or storage media that have been subjected to sabotage (Data forensics is a specialised science on its own).

It is important to enquire with your data recovery company, about their ‘clean’ room facility and its classification, before entrusting your precious data to them, for recovery. A Class 100 clean room of your data recovery specialist will match the clean room conditions of most hard disk manufacturers. Once inside the clean room, the hard disk is carefully disassembled to inspect the type of damage and repair the storage media, for accessing your data. If this is not possible, then the magnetic storage patterns are retrieved and copied onto another media for retrieving your data. The clean room therefore greatly influences the positive chances of recovering your data and demands a high cost for this sensitive and crucial service.