Once you have submitted your media for testing/data retrieval it is treated with the utmost care at all times. We operate in a 'clean room' environment to ensure your valued media and data is not subjected to further harmful situations. Read more about clean rooms below...

Clean Room Technology

Clean rooms are a work area with controlled temperature and humidity to protect sensitive equipment from contamination, of air borne particles. Usually they are built with plastic walls and ceilings, external lighting, and there is a continuous intake of clean, particle free air. The room is cleaned daily to prevent further contamination.

Different industries require the use of a clean room. Medical facilities, integrated circuit manufacturers, and hard disk fabrication plants are just a few. Any firm which is involved with data recovery, should have at least have a class 100 or better clean room to perform even the most basic recovery procedures, make sure you ask this question, otherwise they may compromise your data further! Any physically damaged hard disk must be recovered in a clean room. Without a clean room, particles can settle on the platters (the part which holds the data). After a hard disk platter has become contaminated (temperature and humidity can cause this also, which is called stiction), the heads (they read the data from the platter) can stick on these particles, which can cause a grating effect on the platter surface. This can result in complete and catastrophic data loss.

Any class 100 clean room must adhere to strict control of the environmental conditions in order to insure a quality room. The environmental conditions in a clean room are controlled by positive air pressure, which is cleaned by a Hepa filter.

Equipment and diagnostic tools used in a clean room environment depends on the level of cleanliness needed. Many fabrication plants adhere to the established, Federal Standard STD-209E. This standard outlines the airborne particulate cleanliness classes, so a class 100 clean room there would be no more than 100 particles (0.5 micron), in any given cubic foot of air.

The clean room is separated from the rest of the buildings air supply. It is ventilated with filtered air during construction to prevent contamination. Another risk factor is leakages in the system. To help guard against this, the Filter Fan Concept aids in the recalculation of about 96% of the total air volume within the clean shell and also ensures high flexibility.

Monitoring must be controlled 24 hr a day, and very closely during operation. Extremely sensitive measuring and testing equipment must be in place to ensure that the clean room is running properly, with no particulate above stated standard.

All operators are required to wear non linting body suits, shoes, gloves, head coverings and masks, our clean room, has a pass through air blast/docking station, and upon entering this removes particles to ensure minimal contamination of the environment, people represent the greatest influx of particle contamination.