Hard drive recovered from shuttle Columbia used to complete experiment

Although it's been several years since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it looks like some of the data gathered during the orbiter's final mission will be put to good use. A hard drive salvaged from the wreckage contains the results of an experiment to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity, and the results were published in the April edition of a journal called Physical Review E. The 400MB Seagate drive was originally thought to be destroyed, but workers and engineers reconstructing the orbiter from the remaining debris found it during the process and sent it off for recovery, where 99 percent of the data was extracted. It then took several years for lead researcher Robert Berg and his team to analyze the findings, but they're happy with the results -- we only wish they hadn't come at so dear a price.

[Thanks, Laura]

[(Unverified) Posted May 6th 2008 2:11PM]

It probably wasn't that hard to recover, considering the relatively good condition of the casing. They probably just transplanted the platters to a working drive of the same model.

[ianzehre Posted May 6th 2008 10:42AM]

The info on the hard drive cant be so much, that you would need a big hard drive. I'm sure the data is only text,graphs, and maybe some audio(speech).

[mikerm Posted May 6th 2008 11:07AM]

You are all assuming that it is a 400MB drive, when in the article it says 400MB worth of data. It does not say the size of the drive.

[(Unverified) Posted May 6th 2008 3:14PM]

Wrong. It says "The 400MB Seagate drive...".

[(Unverified) Posted May 6th 2008 11:36AM]

When are we going to see this up on Drive Savers website and will they bring it to Macworld next year for their booth. You know it had to be them.

[dagwud Posted May 6th 2008 11:56AM]

@Mike: From the article:

"...but the test depended on the full data, which was locked in a nearly 400-megabyte commercial hard drive ensconced in a metal "card cage" and housed with other electronics in a larger vessel in the shuttle's cargo bay."

'twasn't a specially designed hard drive, and may not even have been specifically certified. But it was 400MB and it was, apparently, large enough to store the data in question.

And the article says it was Ontrack Data Recovery, not Drive Savers.

[(Unverified) Posted May 7th 2008 5:27PM]

If the capacity of the hard drive worked for the experiment, then great. I'll bet it was a bit lighter than a 400 GB hard drive, which is probably 100,000 taxpayer dollars saved in rocket fuel. And if it is already proven to work then upgrading the drive isn't as important as spending money on the billion other things that need to be taken care of before launch. I think the name of the game when it comes to the shuttles or any space technology is minimizing everything while still being able to do what you need to. That applies to weight, volume, and complexity. But maybe not price. We need the X prize to get price down.

[(Unverified) Posted May 6th 2008 3:13PM]

Based on my experience with Seagate (I work for them), there's no way you'll see any cold-hearted promotion based on this.

[ThinkKnot Posted May 6th 2008 4:44PM]

They also found a set of Zip disks in a fireproof box in perfect condition but no data could be recovered due to a clicking sound when inserted into a Zip Drive.

[the steven Posted May 6th 2008 11:32PM]

Ah yes, the death-knell of the ZIP did sound like a "Click Of Doom"

[the steven Posted May 6th 2008 11:34PM]

I'm just thinking about the company that did the data-recovery work... After this, they'll be able to charge whatever they want going forward.