Theory says that this scenario cannot occur, so it's actually not a theoretical scenario.
Temperature is defined as the brownian net motion of a bag of particles. No reference point is involved.
How do you make that zero temperature? Are these particles zero-motion with respect to themselves? Then they aren't with respect to the planet, or the sun, or the galaxy.
Are they zero-motion with respect to the sun? Then they're hot enough to melt in seconds.
The conceptual idea of zero-temperature is not a real thing.
These people doing their fake-wise "but weird things happen at zero temperature" are just snake oil salesmen plying false knowledge.
There is no such thing as zero temperature.
In the meantime, there's nothing theoretical about the practical scenario, either. Voyager's hard drives have been in the absolute zero of outer space for more than half a century. Its heater, which did not reach the hard drives, has been off for more than a decade.
Those hard drives have been sub-1-kelvin for years and nothing changed.
These people are trying to speculate about what would happen if in a situation we've already had a dozen times, because they don't know the truth, and are filling their lack of knowledge with guesswork.
When it's presented to them that facts exist, they attempt to move the goalpost to theoretical limits which physics says aren't actually real at all, and then from there try to lean on their depth in physics.
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> So if you were to cool it as close to absolute zero as possible it would require turning it into something which was not a hard drive
This is a fantastic point, and something I hadn't even thought of.
I like this a lot.
I'm still wondering about "what, you think ball bearings in a vacuum don't work when it's chilly?"
Like I can't even think of why they think it'll fail, except some magical belief that the fact that it's cold just causes magical breakage
The operation of the damn drive is friction based. It'll heat up! Crimeny.
But one specific mechanism exists: at a certain point there's entropy in simply the structure of the macroscopic object which prevents lowering its temperature further. So if you were to cool it as close to absolute zero as possible it would require turning it into something which was not a hard drive (again, this is something would occur far below the current achieved temperatures with even microscopic objects).