What exactly is meant by the term “data recovery clean room”? Wouldn’t it make sense for the whole operation to be tidy? Are there other computer oriented businesses that operate “dirty rooms”? Why doesn’t every data recovery company that caters to small businesses have a clean room?
To begin, a clean room is an even more sterile environment than an ultra-clean, routinely sanitized room. It is a room that has been designed, ventilated, and monitored in such a way that there are as few airborne particles (dust, microorganisms, and other imperceptible bits) in the room as possible. These types of rooms are frequently found in the scientific and technological sectors of the economy, specifically in the context of producing or working with sensitive materials, so as to ensure that a risk-free environment is maintained. Clean rooms are often classified and operated to standards using the acronym “ISO,” which stands for the International Organization for Standardization. These standards are set by a non-governmental organization and dictate the maximum number of particles of a certain size that are permitted inside a clean room. No need to get into the math of the particle standards here, suffice to say that these rooms require large investments to maintain their rating.
The Origin Of Clean Rooms
Clean rooms were initially developed by Willis Whitfield in the 1960s with the purpose of assisting in the production of integrated circuits in a manner that was more efficient and posed a lower risk of causing harm to sensitive materials through the introduction of contaminants. Naturally, such an effective way to manage airborne contaminants wasn’t going to be solely usable by chip manufacturers, and soon, when hard drives became a thing, access to a cleanroom became essential for data recovery. In order to effectively recover lost data, it often is necessary to disassemble electronic components such as hard disk drives, solid state drives, RAID and NAS systems, and any other electronic components that are susceptible to being negatively affected by dust or other airborne particles. This offers the kind of safety and peace of mind that is really unmatched in the data recovery service industry.
The vast majority of data recovery companies, particularly those providers that seem to have a “location in every city”, do not have clean rooms located on-site because they prefer to outsource their data recovery projects to other facilities and take a “commission” instead of performing their own work. The process of recovering the data is slowed down as a result, and the pricing tends to be higher, as the “provider” is actually just a profit-taking middleman. In the vast majority of instances with data recovery shops, the individual who is in charge of diagnosing the problem is not the same person who actually does the work on the defective hard drive. At Hard Drive Recovery Associates, our priority is to efficiently retrieve your important data and provide it back to you as soon as we can afterward. The process of recovering data from a damaged hard drive that has been shipped from one location to another can take an additional three to five days at the very minimum, at least in our experience.
Hard Drive Recovery Associates has one of the only onsite ISO 5, Class 100 Cleanrooms available at a data recovery company on the West Coast that is independently owned and operated. In addition, we are the only non-chain business in Irvine, California to have achieved this particular distinction. Our customers work closely with our data recovery specialists, who diagnose each data recovery project and discuss it with the customers. Our on-site ISO 5 and Class 100 Cleanrooms are utilized for the recovery of all projects. The data of our customers are protected by this procedure, and the process of recovering lost data is not only far less expensive; it is also sped up as a result.