Ever wonder what happens when a HD goes bad?

[IsaacHayes]

Ever wonder what happens when a Hard Drive goes bad? REALLY bad?

Like in the heads contact the platters?

I bet this was making some wicked noise!!



I recently got a torx bit set that goes from T20 down to T1 (!) so now I can open up small stuff. I had this bad HD my friend gave me to play with for a while now. I plan to shoot it with a shotgun slug with my friend through it for fun, then bring it into a computer repair shop and tell them that my HD is shot, and I need help. Then eventually say let me just show it to you and you can tell me what you can do. Then bring it out LOL.. "See it's shot!!"

Wow, these platters are FUBAR! lol. If you don't know, the mirror surface is how it should be all over. Black dust was all inside too.. MMMM HD dust!

After it's been shot, I'll probably cut it up for heatsink material for high power leds or recycle the aluminum in it. :P

[pocket-rocket]

Wow, that's seriously screwed. Another idea for fun is to send it in to a data recovery place. When the Samsung Spinpoint 80gb in my laptop crashed, I got quoted anywhere from $500-3k to have the data recovered. Needless to say, it's still sitting at the house here, and has never been sent in...

[SappySE107]

Send it to the manufacturer and tell them you want to copyright the new High Capacity platter. More surface area on a wrinkled texture. They have to figure out the laser to use with it:P

[onefastV6]

While you are out with the shotgun, go buy a big can of pickles, cheese, or something of the sort and shoot it with a slug. My brother and I shot a 5lb can of nacho cheese one day and it is still one of the coolest things I have ever seen....even though it only lasted a few seconds.

[91LQ1Lumina]

Food for thought, I work in the hard drive industry, and 10% of all the hard drives ever made end up like that before they leave the factory. It still amazes me that hard drive don't fail more often.

[IsaacHayes]

Ben: hmm, optical/magneto hybrid HD! lol

onefastv6: good idea. He has a bunch of duty ammo collecting dust. Even jugs of water would be cool to see explode. I've done that with my air cannon when I was young and it's awesome. If I end up with any left over electronic equipment it will be put down as well!

91LQ1Lumina: how come? bad tolerances on the head? The head on this was ground way way down, not sure how it got this bad. It had 2 platters and both sides of each were toast.

I took apart another bad HD. This one had one platter and still shiny. It just would loose it's data at random. I was able to just unscrew the motor too from this one (last one was press fit in maxtor) this is a seagate. I want to hook the motor up to 12v and spin something really fast but no idea what. I could bolt on some wheels or bolt it to a drive shaft and make a fast toy car? lol 5400 rpm geared down would be pretty cool. I could use the head too to steer the front wheels back and forth LOL

[91LQ1Lumina]

Yeah mostly due to tolerance issues, stemming from the fact that there are 20 microns in clearance and they are assembled in third world countries by people making $.60 cents a day. There is very little automation in the hard drive industry unlike the CPU industry.


From what I know about the motors they are a quad pole servo motors so hooking up 12v may only cook one pole of the motor.

[IsaacHayes]

Ah bummer about the motor. They have 3 wires is all I know with same resistance between any 2 wires like 2 ohms or something crazy low like that.

[pocket-rocket]

You could always leave the drive electronics hooked up so that it produces the pulses needed to run it. Also, on the comment above about hybrid hard drives..

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/support/brochures/downloads/hdd/hdd_datasheet_200708.pdf

[RedZMonte]

i worked for maxtor for a few years. Head crashes are quite common. hard drives are actually very delicate.. Alot of laptops hd's have head crashes cause they are allways throwen around. we had all kinds of jacked up HD's to mess with.

S

[pocket-rocket]

The one that was in mine, the platter motor went bad. I bought another just like it and swapped the drive electronics in hopes the drivers had gone bad, but it still failed to spin up.

[Baldeagle242]

...and they are assembled in third world countries by people making $.60 cents a day.

It amazes me more that we can't find GOOD help in this country at $14.35 per hour with benifits. Anyone need a job?

http://www.polezero.com/Careers.aspx

Ten bonus points if you can point me out in this video... (Hint... blue lab coat)
http://www.polezero.com/Video/#

[IsaacHayes]

If you had a dust free lab you could of swapped the motors if it was a screw in style and not press fit hehehe.

[DEI37]

I've done that before. Swapped platters on to another unit, and all was well.

[pocket-rocket]

Yeah, I lack the dust free environment, or I would have tried that already, lol. To this day it is still factory sealed I do have a back up of my laptop so I might try it just long enough to make a back up of what was on the old hdd...