Clean Room

Class 10 & 100 Clean room technology

What is a clean room?

Clean rooms are required in the manufacturer of hard drive media as particles entering the disk enclosure may cause damage to the surface of the media and render the product unreliable or useless in the worst case.

Modern hard media are designed with GMR (Giant Magneto Resistive) head technologies which ‘fly' at a height of 1 micron or less a dust particle typically would be 50 microns in size.

Contrary to popular belief the media is not totally sealed as the device would cease to function as it was designed there is a semi sealed breather hole which allows for the correct air volume inside the cavity.

Class 100 clean rooms are designed to never allow more than 100 particles (0.5 microns or larger) per cubic foot of air.

Class 10 Clean rooms; have been designed to exceed the above standards to no more than 350 particles of 0.1 microns in size.

Do you have this technology?

Absolutely! Xytron has invested in a class 100 and a newly commissioned class 10 clean area which is used daily for recovery of physical failure types such as clicking, ticking or noisy drives which require head and preamplifier work to be carried out, anyone or company that tells you that they are unnecessary or sales gimmick should be asked the question, if a hard drive was assembled in this environment why should a faulty drive require less?, perhaps they will be happy to demonstrate their ability to work on opened media without clean area facilities?

Working hard drive media in some instances and model types such as older drives may work for a short period of time while open, however new drives with lower tolerances for failure due to higher density will fail almost immediately opening them in standard room conditions, and that is for a working drive!

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