A Clean Room offers an environment that is free from dust, chemical vapours and other possible pollutants. It finds its use in scientific and technical fields where work is carried out using equipments that are sensitive to such pollutants. These fields include biotechnology, manufacture of computer hardware and semiconductors, life sciences, etc.
Measures taken to Obtain Required Levels of Cleanliness in a Clean Room
- To obtain this control over the pollutants, various measures are adopted such as filtering of air that enters the Clean Room. Also, the air that circulates within the room is filtered at regular intervals to remove the pollutants that may have been generated due to the work carried out there.
- A clean room needs to contain all the necessary equipments such as mops, writing materials such as paper and pencils or even furniture that produce lesser amount of dust.
- Even the staff members have to wear protective clothing such as hoods, gloves, masks, coveralls, etc.
- As a protection against air leaks, some rooms are maintained at higher air pressures so that in case of an air leak, the polluted air from outside cannot enter the room.
- In case of Clean Rooms where work on devices that have electrical components is carried out, humidity controllers are used. This is done to ensure that no electrostatic discharge takes place.
- Also, the Clean Room itself is enclosed within another room to ensure further protection.
The classification and standard of a Clean Room is based on the number of particles present in it per cubic metre of space and also the size of those particles. A standard system of classification assigns names to these rooms such a Class 1 Clean Room, Class 100 Clean Room etc. For example, a Class 1 Clean Room allows a maximum of 35 particles of diameter less than 0.1 micro metres per cubic foot of air. For data recovery processes, a Class 100 Clean room is usually sufficient. In short, in a Clean Room the environment present during the manufacture of the data storage medium is replicated.
Now, let us see why exactly do data recovery companies need them?
Requirment of Clean Rooms in Data Recovery Companies
As you would probably know, data recovery is a tricky process that requires extreme care and caution. One of such precautions is the use of a Clean Room in data recovery. This is essential because the storage media from which the data is recovered are highly sensitive to dust particles. When retrieval of data from the storage media is carried out, it requires dismantling of the device and there is a risk of further damage due to dust particles. So any work on them that involves repair of physical damage to the medium requires a Clean Room.
Let us consider what happens when a hard drive is opened in a room that is not free from dust. Here the dust that is present in the rooms may settle on the hard drive head. This will cause friction and may cause more scratches. The same may be experienced with tape drives as well though the effects here are more prominent and frequent. Even one such particle might lead to permanent data loss especially if the storage media has already undergone any physical damage. Generally, Class 100 Clean Rooms in which less than 100 particles of size less than a micron are present per cubic foot of air is sufficient to carry out the process.
Also, from the measures mentioned above regarding the maintenance of Clean Rooms, it can be seen that they are quite expensive. Therefore, usually only those companies that work on a large scale can afford them. So even if many companies claim to offer Clean Rooms services at an extremely low cost, examine carefully. Check if these companies do not have any hidden charges for the clean rooms included in your bill after you choose their service.
So, before choosing a company make sure it adheres to these specifications. Also, check if the company has a reputation of delivering the quality of services that it promises the customers. With the help of Internet, you could visit various forums and have all these details verified.
The Last Word
When your data is too precious to be lost and you have decided to spend whatever it takes to have it back, do not hesitate to do the necessary groundwork. Clean rooms spell all the difference between retrieving your data and losing them permanently! Clean Rooms are also essential to Computer Forensics (also known as Digital Forensics) specialists to examine digital media to determine whether it has been hacked.