Clean Room And Its Importance In Data Recovery

Author: James Wallis
Source: articledashboard.com

The height of cleanliness would be an air-conditioned room with a freshly scrubbed floor, a clean table and chair, and from our side, very properly washed hands. Unfortunately, this is not enough to ensure safety for our hard disks. A hard disk is assembled in a clean room and, in case of data loss, will have to be taken out in a similar room.

The clean room was born in the 1960s when precision technology needed to be manufactured and assembled for the aerospace industry – including both commercial aviation and special aircrafts– space shuttles, rockets etc. These machine parts needed to be made in an atmosphere that was as free of dust as possible. Soon, the use of such rooms spilled over to other industries. When it came to the computer industry, the clean room is an essential requirement for manufacturing, assembling, data recovery and data forensics. Therefore, it was quite natural that a standard would be needed to grade the ‘cleanliness’ of clean rooms. There are two standards by which this is measured. The first one, the Federal Standard 209, was set in the US in 1963. According to this, there are six standards of a clean room. If a room contains 1 foreign particle of 0.5 micron in a cubic foot of air, then it is a Class One standard clean room. In this way, there are clean rooms of Class 1, 10, 100, 100, 1000, 10, 000, and 100, 000. The last room mentioned is not even clean by industry standards, since a really clean office would contain five to ten times dust as it would, which makes it not exactly useful, and the cheapest. Usually, a good company would have a clean room of standard 100. The second parameter to judge the cleanliness of a clean room is the usual ISO rating. In 1999, the ISO 14644-I was developed, that graded clean rooms on a scale between one to nine. On a comparative scale, an ISO 5 clean room would be equivalent to a Class 100 clean room. The ISO standards are much more exacting and, therefore, less popular, as such rooms are terribly expensive to make. A clean room has the following properties:

• It has a certain amount of foreign particles only in the air, as stated above.
• It controls humidity, temperature and pressure factors.
• All machinery inside it must be completely pollution-free, including the ones being brought in.
• Sweating, sneezing, and handling the machinery with our hands can all kill the hard drive and its components. People working inside these rooms wear space suits or special suits designed for this purpose, heavy duty gloves, and masks.

Why are They Important?

A clean room is the place where your hard disk is going to be taken apart. Whether it is a case of hardware or software failure, the problem will be diagnosed here. Thereafter, an exact copy of the hard drive will be created (if required) and the recovery work will be carried out on it. The original damaged drive will be kept untouched in this way. Finally, the new drive and the data in it in the form of CD or DVD will be handed over to the client. In the case of data forensics, this is the room where the ‘post mortem’ will happen, and the exact details of the crime would be revealed. In some cases, there may be no need to create a copy of the disk. This happens when there is an electric failure or something wrong with the read or write heads, or the cards plugged into the disk. The component must be replaced with an exact matching one, but sometimes it still may not work, as there are software issues and new problems of adaptability that arise with each new generation of technology. In general, software-related failures are easier, faster and cheaper to deal with than hardware-related problems. Needless to say, merely having an excellent clean room is not enough, the experience of the staff, their level of expertise and constant upgrading on part of the company all contribute to the effectiveness of the data recovery process.