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Clean Rooms and their Importance
By: James Walsh

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Any data recovery company worth its salt invests considerable sums in maintaining a state of the art clean room facilities. But don’t we all have clean rooms in our house? And even if we don’t, we could have an air conditioned room with a freshly scrubbed floor, clean walls, a dusted table and chair, and additionally, properly washed hands when we handle the disk. Unfortunately, this is no where near enough to ensure the safety of our hard disks if they are taken out of the casing (which in itself is very tough). A hard disk is ‘born’ i.e. assembled in a professional clean room, and in case of data loss, will have to be taken apart in a similar room.

History

The clean room was invented in the 1960s when precision technology needed to be manufactured and assembled for the aerospace industry including commercial aviation, special aircrafts, space shuttles, rockets etc. Given their usage and the delicacy of these parts, they needed to be made and assembled in an atmosphere that was as free of foreign particles as possible. Soon, the use of such clean rooms spilled over to other industries that had similar requirements. When it comes to the computer industry, the clean room is an essential requirement for the manufacturing and assembling of hardware, and an integral part of data recovery and data forensics procedures.

The Standards of Cleanliness

Whenever there is a commercial and highly competitive atmosphere, it is essential to set up a uniform industry standard. The clean room also has internationally accepted parameters to grade their level of ‘cleanliness’. There are two standards or conventions by which this may be done. The oldest one was set in the US in 1963, and it is the Federal Standard 209. According to this standard, there are six degrees grading a clean room. If a room contains 1 foreign particle of 0.5 micron in a cubic foot of air, then it will qualify as a Class One standard clean room. Using this method, there are clean rooms measured as Class 1, 10, 100, 100, 1000, 10 000, and 100 000. The last type of clean room is not at all clean by industry requirements, making it the least popular and definitely the cheapest.

A squeaking clean office in a normal building would contain five to ten times dust as the last one would - which gives us a measure as to how difficult it is to maintain a professional clean room. The least requirement of a good company would be a clean room of standard 100. The second parameter of judging the cleanliness factor of clean rooms came with the ISO rating. In 1999, the ISO 14644-I ranged clean rooms on a scale of one to nine. If we compare the two, an ISO 5 clean room would be the equivalent of a Class 100 clean room. Needless to say, but the ISO standards are much stricter and obviously less popular, as such rooms are unbelievably expensive to build or maintain. Any clean room will have the following properties:

  • It will have a given amount of foreign particles only in the air, as stated in the conventions above.

  • The factors of humidity, temperature and pressure would be evenly controlled at all times.

  • Any machinery inside has to be completely dust free, including the ones brought in.

  • Sweating, sneezing, yawning, handling the machinery with bare hands can all murder the hard drive and its delicate components. Professionals working inside clean rooms wear space suits or special suits designed specifically for this, heavy duty gloves, and special masks.


What is the Function of a Clean Room?

A hard drive is taken apart in a clean room and the problem is diagnosed. After that, an exact copy of the hard drive is created and the recovery work is done on it. The original damaged disk is kept intact. Ultimately, the new drive and the recovered data are handed over to the client. In the case of data forensics, the handling of the matter inside the clean room has legal implications. Apart from copying the disk, there may be other ways of rectifying matters, such as replacing a read or write head that has stopped working. 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.

Article Source: http://www.depositarticles.com

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

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