Brian's Brain

Speaking of hard drive and solid-state drive reliability, check out this photo:

This is one of the pieces recovered in the wake of the February 1, 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy, wherein the shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere. Specifically, it's a 400 MByte Seagate HDD (already eight years old at the time of the crash) that was being used in an on-board physics experiment (Slashdot discussion) designed to evaluate Xenon gas flow characteristics in microgravity environments. Computerworld has an indepth writeup (thanks to Gizmodo for the heads-up) along with more pictures. After painstaking disassembly, repair, re-assembly (complete with a new motor) and extraction, a team at Kroll Ontrack succeeded in recovering more than 90% of the stored data, sufficient for researcher Robert Berg and his team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to complete the experiment and publish results.

Amazing. But I feel compelled to also relate a rotating magnetic-vs-solid state storage reality check. My friend Saul (who I mentioned in my earlier writeup) also saw the coverage and reminisced about an experiment that Hamilton Sundstrand conducted back in 1990. This was back when a 1 Mbit flash memory was the biggest, baddest chip in Intel's product arsenal. Sundstrand built up a solid-state drive from an array of flash memory ICs, mounted it inside a howitzer shell, and fired the shell (from unknown range) at a 30 foot thick brick wall in order to test the impact of sustained negative g-forces. So what happened? In Saul's own words [which I've slightly edited for grammar]:

The 'flash drive' was toast, as expected. The chips all popped off the PCB, and the IC package bond-attached wires popped off each flash memory die. However, with careful reconstruction, the data was fully recovered.

I daresay Sundstrand's data recovery process was probably more straightforward than Kroll Ontrack's, to boot!