Your right Terry- I think the trick probably is ages old; I know it was many years ago that I heard about it. I never did have the "luxury" of trying it before now though; the companies I've worked for in the past knew their data was mission-critical and always has RAID redundancy, extremely current backups, and/or spare controller cards that I could swap onto a dead drive. My clients currently are mostly small office/home office operations, many of whom I find to have little or no backup strategy in place... I guess that means I'll probably get to try this little trick again in the near future.


In the different discussions I read, people had varying levels of success, and many different "recipes" for the procedure, including freeze times ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours. Having already identified an overheating chip on the controller card (and not having a replacement card) I knew that the freeze method could be a one-shot, last-chance procedure for me, so I opted to leave the beast in the freezer overnight just in case.

One creative technique mentioned in one of the discussions was to rest the drive on top of one of those plastic "Blue Ice" reusable freeze blocks (the kind made for camping/picnic coolers) once you remove the drive from the freezer and hook it back up. The freeze block keeps the drive from heating back up as quickly as it normally would, thus extending your window of opportunity for getting all the data off of it.