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Long term effects of water damage/rust on hard disk

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(@wotsits)
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I have on a number of occasions seen examples where people who are worried about what their electronic data may contain have proceeded to throw their phone or hard drive into a bath tub or sink filled with water in some strange belief that the addition of this water is going to act as some cleaning agent to all of the data contained. While being submerged in water can in some cases damage the function of the screen or power supply, typically the data can be extracted no different.

However what would be the long term effects of water on a drive?

For example what if someone threw their hard drive into a river only for it to be recovered some years later…

What metal are hard disks usually made out of, thus how long would it take to develop rust? How difficult would it be to extract data from a rusty hard disk?

 
Posted : 02/07/2016 1:46 pm
(@c-r-s)
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Usually there's no corrosive effect on the hard drive platters. Any corrosion on the rest of the hard drive can be neglected, since water inside the device always leads to contamination of the platter surface that makes it necessary to disassemble the drive and clean the platters. At this point, there's no reason to care about the rest of the drive, but you can use new parts to rebuild it or alternative sensors to read the platters. Cleaning can be relatively easy, if the case remained intact and the drive was salvaged correctly, kept under water until disassembly.

 
Posted : 03/07/2016 1:57 am
jaclaz
(@jaclaz)
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Usually there's no corrosive effect on the hard drive platters. Any corrosion on the rest of the hard drive can be neglected, since water inside the device always leads to contamination of the platter surface that makes it necessary to disassemble the drive and clean the platters. At this point, there's no reason to care about the rest of the drive, but you can use new parts to rebuild it or alternative sensors to read the platters. Cleaning can be relatively easy, if the case remained intact and the drive was salvaged correctly, kept under water until disassembly.

… and good luck reassembling platters of a multi-platter (please read *all* hard disk drives) hard disk after having separated them for cleaning or using "alternative sensors" on any disk drive manufactured in the last - say - 15 years…

However it would be a nice experiment, just put a decent amount of - say - Bitcoins 😯 on each of 5 hard disks and put them in the river.
Then recover first disk after one year, second after two years, third after three years, etc. and see if you can get back your money…

Just to keep things as together as possible
http//www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=6580390/

jaclaz

 
Posted : 03/07/2016 4:07 pm
(@wotsits)
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Most 3.5 hard disks are made out of aluminium.

Aluminium doesn't rust in the traditional sense but it does corrode, especially in salt water.

Are you really saying that the effect of corrosion will have no effect on recovering data from the hard disk?

 
Posted : 04/07/2016 11:47 am
jaclaz
(@jaclaz)
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Most 3.5 hard disks are made out of aluminium.

Maybe. ?
But that is in any case the substrate, whilst what is exposed is the (last) coating.
Just for fun, build your own platter 😯
http//concave.stc.arizona.edu/thepoint/Interactive/hdlayers.html

jaclaz

 
Posted : 04/07/2016 2:05 pm
(@c-r-s)
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Most 3.5 hard disks are made out of aluminium.

Aluminium doesn't rust in the traditional sense but it does corrode, especially in salt water.

Are you really saying that the effect of corrosion will have no effect on recovering data from the hard disk?

For salt water or heavily polluted waters, I cannot tell. But in fresh water of an European river, 4-6 years don't cause any relevant damage to the platters.

 
Posted : 04/07/2016 7:32 pm
jaclaz
(@jaclaz)
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But in fresh water of an European river, 4-6 years don't cause any relevant damage to the platters.

Northern or Southern Europe?
I mean, does average water temperature affect amount of damages?
Lower temperatures should imply higher amount of oxygen dissolved into the water and these higher levels might imply faster (or slower) oxydizing of metals.

jaclaz

 
Posted : 04/07/2016 7:46 pm
Passmark
(@passmark)
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Some of the new drives are totally sealed. I am thinking of the 10TB helium filled drives. I suspect they might last for a very long time under water.

 
Posted : 05/07/2016 4:44 am
jaclaz
(@jaclaz)
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Some of the new drives are totally sealed. I am thinking of the 10TB helium filled drives. I suspect they might last for a very long time under water.

Well they are not yet very common AFAIK, and in that case depth of the water may come into play. cry

I don't know at which pressure the Helium is in the drive, but I believe it is a low pressure, as I have read (here and there) how one of the big issues with the manufacturing of those is to prevent leaking, and the cases are made of something like special non porous aluminium alloy or saturated with epoxy/*whatever* to prevent leakage through the metal itself, besides having an "airtight" gasket/seal obtained by welding via laser the lid, example
http//www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd-10tb/_shared/docs/helium-drive-launch-tp686-1-1602us.pdf

OT, but not much, it seems like someone is already experimenting with recovery of these hard disks
http//www.datarecoveryspecialists.co.uk/blog/data-recovery-for-helium-filled-drives
though I am perplexed ? by the

By developing a sealed clean tank filled with helium, our engineers can replace damaged components and reseal the chassis to avoid further damage.

It is of course much easier to keep the water outside than to keep the Helium inside, but it has to be seen whether these gaskets/seals are actually bi-directional and which outside water pressure they can resist.

jaclaz

 
Posted : 05/07/2016 1:30 pm
Igor_Michailov
(@igor_michailov)
Posts: 529
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I've extracted data from a phone which was in a wet ground for two years. The extracting was success.

 
Posted : 05/07/2016 1:35 pm
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