comador

I’m literally a subject matter expert (SME) on Enterprise Storage Arrays and can absolutely attest to ‘hitting it’ being an actual tier 3 support suggestion for spindle drives. It’s still a thing and will continue to be one so long as spindle drives continue to exist.

It was a method to unstick stuck drive platters, but hasn’t worked since HDD manufacturing processes changed a few years ago. May work for certain drives manufacted pre-Covid, but that’s it:

datarecovery.com/…/the-hard-drive-freezer-trick/

Been so long I had forgotten the freezer trick lol. Good memories haha.

Take it out of the Sabrent USB and directly connect it to the system, run lsblk to get the drive id and then check smartmontools using smartctl -H /dev/(whatever disk it is)

This will tell you if the drive is hosed or not.

If it is hosed, can always dead drop it from one banana worth of height on a table to see if the drive heads unlock, then try again.