Unfortunately, placing a hard drive into a freezer will not bring it back to life. This piece of advice was valid for hard drives manufactured roughly between 1989-1995 and was identified as a way to solve a unique problem known as “stiction.” The word stiction is derived from the words “static” and “friction” and was used to describe an issue where the read/write heads stuck to the platters preventing the motor from spinning.
In theory, placing a hard drive into a freezer was meant to help free the stuck heads through the contraction of the metal components. As many people discovered, this wasn’t always successful. Today, modern hard drives are manufactured differently from those early days, and stiction is an infrequent problem.
With the massive amount of information available on the internet, the old “freezer trick” tip lives on even though it has no affect on modern hard drives.