When I worked for a small computer place years and years ago we'd sometimes "tap" a drive as it was spinning up if freezing it didn't work. Tapping it with a screw driver handle rarely worked, but it was always a last ditch effort to save having to send a drive out -- which most people wouldn't pay for anyway.

I did that with a drive in my computer fairly recently. Although I didn't so much tap it as shake it on startup. It did finally start spinning enough to insure that I had the last few bits of data transferred to a new drive, though. :)

While they may make legitimate points in the article, it's hard to consider someone that makes money on HDD recovery like the authors of the article having an unbiased viewpoint here.

Ah, interesting! Thanks for the correction. I was off the project before we put in the drives obviously. ;)