Freezing a Failing Hard Drive the Right Way

There seems to be a lot of controversy over the effectiveness of freezing a failing hard drive to recover data. One popular video shows a frozen hard drive waved around in ambient air with condensation forming on it then proceeds to open the drive and show even more condensation on the platters. Well duh! Talk about a red herring.  And they call themselves professional data recovery experts. For shame!
Other how-to's tell you to freeze the drive for up to 24 hours before popping it into the computer and hope it boots up and runs for more than 5 minutes. Some of these even go so far as to suggest putting the drive in a freezer baggie to keep it dry. Peachy.
But they are all wrong. Here's how I resurrected a failed drive not once but 3 times and had it running quite happily for hours at a time. -

This 250Gb drive came to me from a local businessman whose regular IT service had been trying to recover data for a month and had only retrieved just under 7Gb of 67Gb because it was overheating so quickly. And he had the nerve to charge the desperate businessman $400!
Taking them all at their word that the drive was heat sensitive, I rooted around and found an aluminum IDE external hard drive enclosure that I had but wasn't using. I mounted the drive in the enclosure and connected the relevant plugs, then buttoned it up. I put the whole thing into a spare plastic Wal-Mart bag, half knotted the handles closed and squeezed out most of the air. Next was a couple of small slits to allow the insertion of the power and USB cable into the corresponding sockets on  the HDD enclosure. Pop the whole thing into the freezer with the power and USB cables trailing out through the flexible door seal. Wait 20 minutes. (If a 3 pound mass of aluminum can't lose all its heat in a 0°F freezer in 20 minutes, somebody will have to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics.) Leave the drive in the freezer in its bag. Plugged in the power plug to the wall and the USB to my main desktop computer and Viola! it read the drive perfectly. The businessman had also provided a 1Tb (small form factor) external drive to copy as much data as I could get. I got it all. It took 6 hours for 67Gb to copy but it worked. I even got the 147 episodes of "Star Trek The Next Generation" he had saved up.
I pulled it out of the freeze still in its bag, disconnected power and USB and let it warm up overnight to room temperature. On a lark,, I reconnected the drive and... nothing! Refused to read or even detect. Back into the freezer for 20 minutes or so and it worked again. This time I was going to make a disk image of the drive since this was a bootable drive with an operating system on it. That took just over an hour to complete. Now, if the customer ever wants me to restore his computer onto a new drive with the disk image, it will be like the failure never even happened.
The third time was a week later to scrub the drive clean of all sensitive data.  Just for kicks I plugged it in and got nothing detectable, twice. Into the freezer we go and 20 minutes later I have a working hard drive purring along in its frosty home. Fire up Active@ Killdisk, point it to the tired old failing drive and let it write 0's and 1's for the next 11 hours.

So the short answer is YES, freezing hard drives sometimes does work.

Cliffs Notes version:
1:Place HDD in external enclosure.
2: Place enclosure in plastic baggie and put in freezer.
3: Leave drive in freezer and connect to working computer.
4: Copy/backup data.