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| PAUL JONES/ADVANCE Technicians at DriveSavers work within a high-tech “clean room,” a facility designed to minimize dust and static electricity to allow precision work on exposed electronic equipment. The new clean room is the largest dedicated to data recovery in the world, and cost over $2 million. |
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July 1st, 2009
Largest data recovery lab is in Novato
By Paul Jones
Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 2:01 PM PDT
Drive Savers in Novato, one of the leading data-recovery companies in the country, recently began operating the largest data-recovery dedicated clean-rooms in the world. The over $2 million facility, one of the cleanest environments on earth, is used to allow technicians to work on sensitive computer components, mainly hard drives, without fear of microscopic contaminants corrupting data or damaging delicate mechanical components.
According to Ed Sit, Clean Room Manager for the company, the new, second-story facility replaces the company’s smaller, original clean room completely.
“(Originally) we were working out of a smaller facility on the first floor that has since been converted into a shipping and receiving area,” he said. “This is now the largest clean room facility - that is dedicated exclusively to data recovery”
Sit said that extra space is essential to handle the businesses’ increasing load of clients, which include celebrities, various businesses, and even FBI recovery jobs. The techniques used by the company can’t be employed in a normal environment, he said.
“One of the special things that we’re doing in the room is opening up drives - we have to replace internal components, or to observe them running, so if the drive is degrading, we can - stop it right away (to prevent additional damage),” said Sit. “You can’t do that if you have normal room dust accumulating on those platters - it’s like gravel sitting on top of a record player while you’re trying to play - once they start demonstrating unwanted symptoms - damage occurs very quickly.”
The room is set up like a quarantine system, with several levels, each one more filtered and controlled than the last.
“We have the rooms set up so there are different zones, and as you pass through them, each one is cleaner. This is a class 100,000 clean room, meaning within one cubic foot of space, you would have no more than 100,000 particles greater than a half a micron,” said Sit. “A micron is about the (width) of a human hair - All the benches in the third area have ion filters - the tables are grounded, the chairs are grounded, the suits are grounded - The air handling is what makes the room clean.”
The first room contains drives and related hardware sent in for data recovery by clients.
“We call this our staging area,” said Sit. “Drives that have come from shipping are prepared here, they’re removed from laptops and towers, so the only things that go into our cleanroom are things that need to - This is the first area where stuff will get triaged in terms of how damaged it is.”
The bare essentials are then wiped down and cleaned, before being taken into the second area to await recovery. The second area is also where new components are stored. According to the inventory manager, Pamela Rainger, damaged drives not only need replacement parts for recovery, but tend to break or damage parts as technicians try to make a raw recording of the data on the original disk.
“(The drives) are going to kill any parts I throw at it,” said Rainger. “I need to have everything at most a day away by FedEx.”
Sit said, “We have a much more extensive inventory than a normal (recovery center) might have - Having this inventory really makes it possible for us to meet our commitments - I can’t afford to be looking for a part for a week - If you start working on something, and you need a part, it’s a lot easier to go to the shelf, get the part you need and go back to work - Even if Pamela, who is great, takes a day to get me a part, I’ve lost my train of thought (for solving that problem).”
The room is also where workers put on “bunny suits,” or clean body-suits designed to isolate the contaminant-rich human body from delicate electronics.”
“These suits are state of the art, they ground through the hood, gloves, through the suit to the floor, and the floor is also grounded,” said Sit. “(The next room) is a class 10,000, 10 times cleaner than this room. The room after that is a class 1,000, and then the last room is a class 100, again, 10 times cleaner than the room before - It is moisture controlled too. All the air handling is done by the units up on the roof. And temperature, we try to keep it at a nice cool 65 degrees.”
“Ion bars” pour down streams of electromagnetic particles designed to attract material in the air into heavy cluster that fall to the ground, rather than drifting onto sensitive drive surfaces. Sit said the room was actually a separate structure housed within DriveSavers larger office interior. The isolation can have a strange affect on some people, he said.
“What we did here was start off with an absolutely clean facility - this is a room within a room,” he said. “The windows are outside of the walls - the walls are all return-air - Do I have allergy attacks when I leave the room? Things like that do happen because I spend so much time in the room. And then I go out into the world - I work in this environment, then the world is filthy, so you’ve got to watch yourself - you need to get re-acclimated.”
Despite all the stringent protocols, even the cleanest of facilities accumulates debris over time, Sit said.
“(Periodically) we bring in a micro-cleaning team, and they’ll wipe down the floor and walls and everything,” he said. “(But) because of what we do, I don’t even trust the cleaning crew to work at the desk level - each person is responsible for their own workspace.”
The last stage is the “class 100 room,” where the most intimate work is done on some of the more delicate retrieval cases the company works on. Sit used an air-tester to count microscopic particles, demonstrating how motion could create turbulence, increasing the concentration of matter in a given area temporarily. Ensuring the facility stays at specific levels of cleanliness requires constant attention, he said.
“I have ten tons of air conditioning on the roof,” said Sit. “The controls are hidden under roof tiles and behind locked panels - and I’ll test the room in the morning. The protocol’s pretty solid.”
For its extreme cost and specificity, President Scott Gaidano said the workspace was important due to increasing sophisticated data-storage technologies. While an expensive standard to meet, that reality also mean DriveSavers is increasingly competing in a more exclusive environment, where it is poised to capture a larger percentage of the market.
“I’d say it’s the largest investment we’ve ever made - Our business is doing well, but of course like all businesses - it’s not doing as well as if there was no recession,” he said. “Serving businesses (is where we grow the most). It’s not like losing photographs, they need that data now. We have a very large market share, and there’s fact that we’ve been here (in Novato) now twenty years doing this.”
Contact Paul Jones at pjones@novatoadvance.com.
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