Gizmodo
It's taken four and a half years, but the data recovery specialists charged with extracting data from a cracked, charred 400MB Seagate drive aboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia have done their duty, retrieving 99% of the information written to the disk. The Columbia burned up on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, over Louisiana and Texas. Computerworld reports that the drive was found in a dry lakebed and handed to a team at Kroll Ontrack about six months after the tragedy, but the successful recovery has only just come to light. So, you ask, what was on the drive that was so important?
Computerworld reports that the shuttle mission included conducting atmospheric tests:
One of those tests was an experiment for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to determine how xenon gas flows in a zero gravity environment.Phew, glad they recovered that data. No, seriously, it's apparently very valuable information. To someone. In fact, researchers just released the data in an academic publication.
The drive, already eight years old at the time of the mission, took a beating in the crash, and took another beating during recovery. Stripped down to the platter alone, it was placed in another mechanism and "carefully aligned" with a new motor. As it spun, it sustained more damage, but didn't crap out before Kroll could get the goods. More gory details, and a lot of great pictures, are over at Computerworld.
I know, I know: Why don't they make the shuttle out of the same material they make the drive? The non-standup-comedian answer is that two other drives on the shuttle were completely unrecoverable, so there's definitely a luck element here. [Computerworld]
Comments
Space pron?
I hope they consider switching to flash memory in the future.
@Gann: Lawl.
"Computerworld reports that the shuttle mission included conducting atomospheric tests: " That was one hell of an atmospheric test_
Also - Seagate should use this as a marketing tool - 12 year old hard drive and 1 shuttle explosion later and it's still readable_
This is why I take a screwdriver and nail it through any drives we dispose of.
I would just beam the info back to earth on a relatively constant basis... hey we do have satelites shooting info NON STOP, don't we? And there's gotta be a very safe encrypted frequency or whatever the hell Nasa uses...
So the recoverable one was a Seagate. The other two must have been Maxtor.
400MB??
I was sad when the Columbia burned up in the atmosphere, so all goofy comments about how their .Mac account must've been down before reentering the atmosphere is lost on me.
@Monty "I hope they consider switching to flash memory in the future."
Uh, flash would be WAY more susceptible to damage. Extremely impact and heat resistant. The small transistors would likely just evaporate.
it's not xenon gas flow,
it was zero gravity sex data.
IT'S THE FATE OF MANKIND, PEOPLE
@gsulaw: That's what I was going to say. Why only 400MB??
@NNTPgrip: Seagate owns Maxtor. I was thinking Western Digital. I've heard that MyBooks have an absolutely HUGE failure rate. For me it's been 50% (1 of 2).
@gsulaw: 8 years old dude. NASA. The shuttle systems run on old TI calculators or something, so I'd imagine 400mb seemed like 10Tb for them at the time. They probably planned the experiments in the 1980s and it took them that long to get it into space.
It's only 400mb because it's now 12 years old. That was a lot of storage in 1998.
Too bad it was a Seagate drive. Just about any other make could have been recovered in 1/2 the time.
If they are quick, they can raise an RMA with Seagate get a replacement for the next mission! Seagate Warranty is 5 years!
@drewdrawsPooh:
Yeah, my MyBook failed about two months after purchase. It never moved; sat on top of my China cabinet with my Airport Extreme. :|
Anyone know of any affordable data recovery solutions?
@uberfu:
If you consider having to completely remove the platters and pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to read them a good marketing point...
@rclafton: I suspect that, "Charred going 12,500MPH about 39 miles above the Earth's surface in a space shuttle accident," would not be covered under Seagate's warranty. If it is, I know which hard drive I'm buying next.
The data in DOS format and the drive is 8 years old. This comes into my mind "They don't build them as they use to."
@Monty:
NASA won't be getting anything new. No matter how much better it is. They have basically no funding, because right now no one sees the point. No one gives a shit about NASA and space exploration.
To be honest I find it hard to care myself.
Of course no one ever talked about the fact that the Columbia shouldn't even have been flying in the 1st place.
Way back in the beginning days of the shuttle program there was a mission flight cap for all shuttles, that NASA raised later on.
It pretty much makes being in a shuttle that over the original flight cap a very dangerous prospect. The original engineers knew what they were doing when they set the mission cap and as usual they have been ignored.
so the culmination of all space technologies relies on a 400MB drive for data collection? anyone else confused?
@mindshadow:
True... but worth a try!
400GB HDD 4 years ago cost a fortune
@cincifresh: As opposed to some super-magic ghost that memorizes everything for us?
Another non-standup-comedian answer for 'why not make it out of _____ indestructable stuff?' would be to point out that if you did, it would be so heavy that it wouldn't take off. And if it did, it'd carry maybe a crew. And even if the ship survived, the crew'd probably be scrambled on impact.
@Wison: "Why don't they make the shuttle out of the same material they make the drive?"
Interestingly, hard drives and space flight are almost exactly the same age, both around 50 (Sputnick 1= 1957; IBM 350 = 1956).
But in 50 years of space flight, humans launched only around 5000 objects into orbit. So the field, despite its age, is in its infancy. And the shuttle program itself was (is) deceptively experimental, with only 5 built for spaceflight.
By comparison, the first 50 years of hard drives has probably produced around 3 billion. So the field is relatively mature.
So… hard drives, 3 billion (or so). Space vehicles… 5,000 (or so). Shuttles… 5 (or so). Advantage: hard drive.
Will we now know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space?
If only Apple's iLife had been available back then.
Ontrack has been touting 99% recovery for that hardrive since early 2004. It was on there front page for a very long time. [web.archive.org]
@drewdrawsPooh:
Yeah, they do now. But that has only been in the last two years or so. I still hope they continue keeping the brands separate, plus teach Maxtor how to build drives properly.
Is anyone else sick of staring at Ashton's mug all day on this site?
To those snickering at NASA's use of [relatively] ancient tech: Newer isn't always better.
Last time I checked with NASA [in 2000] they would not fly computers newer than 386s IIRC, because the newer, smaller chips were too susceptible to radiation damage in spaceflight conditions...
man, my old seagate st225 was a big heavy mother, but it was reliable, and durable (not to mention it made all those cool noises errr-bepp-beep-errrr-grind-grind-grind-bloop!
I didn't know NASA was into studying Scientology.
When I first saw the small thumbnail picture, I thought Nemo was wedged in the corner of the drive... go look at the pic! He's there!!
@CCCombobreaker: they do have funding, it's just sort of microscopic compared to other concerns, like the military. I think the vast majority of funds are going to lunar and mars exploration projects. all those scientific experiments (like the one mentioned in this post) seem relatively minor, but when you put them all together.. they actually represent a significant portion of American tech/science superiority, which is evaporating.
I don't know the specifics obviously, but I do know that sending hardware up into space requires a lot of rigorous testing to ensure that whatever they bring up there can withstand the environment.
That kind of testing takes a lot of time and money, so the moment something known as top of the line starts the gauntlet, I would not expect to see it in operation for a few years.
Replacing older hardware brings in a whole host of new concerns...
The fact that this data was recovered says a lot about just how good that testing was, and the skill of the recovery team. :) .
I doubt it was DriveSavers...they couldn't recover 1 year worth of Adobe Illustrator files from a 2yr old HD...
As said before, new isn't always better. I have no problem recovering files from ancient zip drives, or from the drive in my first computer, built in about 1997. Today, hell if I can retrieve even one picture off my fried Hitachi drive.
BTW, Western Digital rules. I have one also from 1998 still chugging along.
@Woraug: In 98 a WD might have ruled, but these days they churn out complete shit. Those MyBooks are cheap for a reason. There are more BB posts about them failing than for any other drive.
Just wish I had seen that before I bought them.
@Woraug:
are you on 4chan? because if you do, I have some H that you provided that I want to thank your Western Digital HD for.
:D
@Roy_Alejandre: Obscure Simpsons reference to the episode where Homer goes to space.
@Blue387: Series 5. Deep Space Homer.
Four and a half years to recover 400M of data? Are these guys getting paid by the hour, or WHAT?
@dosguy: When you learn how to strip the hard drive down to just a platter and rebuild the rest of it (without killing it), then complain. I can do platter swaps and such, but it's still risky since I don't have a clean room (good old bathroom trick FTW). If the data was so valuable that they didn't want to risk killing it, then I can see why it took so long. Personally, I think it was a waste to even try to recover the data.
@geowrian:
Hold up... if you consider the price of sending the equipment and running the tests, I'm sure the recovery is a fraction of the cost.