Question: Apparently you can kill a USB hard drive by moving it from a cold to warm environment and powering it up. The killer being internal condensation.
Q1: How real is the risk? What kind of temperatures are we talking about? I don’t want to waste time “acclimatizing” my hard drive every day if it’s not necessary.
Q2: Are there technologies/solutions available to mitigate the risk?
Surprisingly, I’ve found nothing useful on the internet that decently answers the above two questions.
Answer: Condensation is a real danger for hard disks.
You can see in a real-life youtube demonstration of a data-recoveryspecialist, what a hard disk looks like when taken out of the freezer and briefly turned on, just full of scratches :
Such scratches could possibly damage the disk to a point that even a data-recoveryspecialist will be unable to recover the data.
A Control Data (later Seagate) factory packaging manual for hard disks says:
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If you have just received or removed this unit from a climate with ?temperatures at or below 50 F (10 C) do not open this container until ?the following conditions are met, otherwise condensation could occur ?and damage to the device and/or media may result. Place this package ?in the operating environment for the time duration according to the ?temperature chart.
It seems that dangerously low temperatures start when the computer is broughtfrom below 50 F (10 C) into room-temperature, and it may need several hours foracclimatization.This long time is explained by the fact that in a mechanical disk, the head issupported by airflow entering through special air-intakes.These intakes are heavily filtered against dust, but not against humidity.They are also small enough, which slows the evaporation process of internalhumidity.
You could possibly minimize the acclimatization time by wrapping the diskin watertight plastic while it is acclimatizing,to reduce the humidity that would enter via the air-intakes.You should allow for some drying-off time after unwrapping the disk, for the humidityin the air already contained inside the disk.
This is not the only danger, as explained by data-recovery specialistReWave Recovery :
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A hard drive is at risk for sudden temperature changes including ?overheating and condensation.
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A sudden change in temperature that causes condensation inside the ?hard drive can cause the material on the platter to evaporate which ?causes the read/write heads to stick to the platter and stop it from ?rotating. ?
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Overheating can also be an issue. Overheating can cause the platters ?to expand which makes the read/write heads travel farther to read the ?data. The expansion of platters can cause friction which can lead to a ?head crash.