Last year, one of my hard drives died. I’ve got quite a number of hard drives, but it’s only within the last couple of years that two of my hard drives died. The first one had such huge read/write errors, that it was impossible to recover the data via normal means. I won’t get into the technical aspects of it, but my friend knew what he was doing. I left the drive with him anyway.
This second drive, I was luckier. I spotted the problems early, and backed up the drive before it went kaput.
Here, I’m removing the screws. I remember at one of the game companies I worked at, whenever a hard drive died, it needed to be destroyed because it had sensitive data in it. The IT guy would literally try to smash it to pieces with a hammer, but of course, the hard drive chassis are tough, so it was able to withstand most blows. Usually, the connectors blow out, and sometimes the motor, but for the most part, it could most likely be repaired, and recovered.
The screws aren’t the usual kind of Philips or flat screws, but the star-shaped ones. The original Xbox used this type of screws. The reason I chose to take it apart was out of simple curiosity. There isn’t any sensitive data on it or anything. (I think…)
The single piece of circuit board, with the connectors. This is connected to the bottom, and is exposed. Easy to smash with a hammer, disabling the drive. Easy to unscrew too.
This is a SATA drive too! All the IDE drives I have are still perfectly functional. They really don’t make things the way they used to!
A hidden screw behind the label prevented me from opening this thing up freely. But once it was removed, the drive opened up without problems.
The guts of the hard drive. It looks like such a pristine, precision device! Not for long! Muahahaha…
Tako Luka inspects. She’s DJing! wikki wikki wikki!
Look at all that dust! I really like the middle “axle”. It reminds me of a car.
Not sure what this is for, but it was screwed in.
The back mechanism is highly magnetic. These are WAY more powerful than fridge magnets! I should have kept it.
A demonstration of the magnet provided by Ritsu-Rin.
This is the drive head. It reads the platters. In principle, this is very much like how old LP records are read. Seems that while technology improves, the basis remains the same.
I accidentally broke this section. I was hoping that I could dismantle this drive without breaking anything. Oh well! 😛
Unscrewing the axle. These are also star-shaped screws, but much smaller.
The platters where the information is stored. Two platters! Nobody’s reading off THIS hard drive anymore! Care to guess how much storage space? I can’t remember. 😛
Everything in pieces. Tako-Luka, you made short work of that drive!
I’m pretty surprised how few components make a hard drive. Hope you enjoyed this little fun-fun-time! 😀
Read more!
You just reminded me that I should really, really back up my hard drives. Then again there is only one thing that I would cry over if I lost it and it’s up in some repository anyways. The rest is easily recovered as well.
On another note, I always loved how the actual discs inside look, so pretty.
yeah, it’s replaceable, but it takes time and effort to replace all that stuff, so yes, back up!
I agree. The disks are pretty. soooo prettyyyyyy…
Cool. Maybe I should open one to savage some metal parts. A hard drive is suppose to be completely dust free otherwise, it can’t be read. Once the disc is exposed, it’s game over. But man, those are shiny.
really? I didn’t know that about hard drives! Cool! That IS security then! 😀
LOLX
look at this thing make me have a lot of surprises. At least I thought hard drive should made up of many many components but NOT at here. ><
So few components to make a hard drive. Maybe I should try once……
Eh?! This reminded me something. Now my hard drive already in half dead, he(technician) said that there some scar on the one of the platters you just mentioned. Need to buy a new one and the old one would not last any longer anymore.
But I have doubt about it. He said these at last year September but now it's still functioning normally. How come???
Sometimes, a drive will “correct” itself of the data error. Sometimes it will block that sector off entirely to prevent data from being written there and corrupting more of the drive. Sometimes, it can’t be fixed.
But as soon as a drive starts to show errors, I usually back up the drive, partition a large section where the error is located, and never use that section again. And the drive then becomes a torrent drive.
But I still use it = =
Smash it, smash it! XD
TAKO SMAAAASH!!!!
Haha i was expecting you to open the hard drive and then take the hammer and smash the insides XD
..i was wrong =/ but hey it would have been funny in a way.
haha I’m not destructive enough to do that. ^^
I have 2 unused hard drive’s and i was planning on
throwing it off
maybe if i open one of my hard drives i can used those “platters”/other part for my gundam diorama 😀
but hey i think it would be fun if i smash the other one
cause i can release some stress ~(-__-“~)
sure why not? That’s a good idea! 😀
Yeah, I heard people say, they have to break the hard drive because there’s personal stuff in there. I think I was bored one day, and while I was cleaning my room, I found some old floppy disks. I never saw what was inside, so I decided to open it, but just found some magnetic tape. It’s cool to open electronics and take things apart though.
After looking at your circuit board, it reminded me of the OP of The World God Only Knows.
Thanks for the post =D
Yeah, I remember doing that too when I was a kid. I liked spinning the disks around, and using them as frisbees. ^^
Thanks for reading!
i don’t actually have any sensitive materials need backing up, so never gotten a harddrive.
Wow… nice.
I just finished backed up one of my dying hdd last week.
After the other hdd went kaput without permission.
Just wondering…
Usually to backed up the whole hdd, how long does it takes?
Good on you for backing up, but might want to do it more often next time… before it dies. ^^;
If the hard drive is already failing with cyclic redundancies, it could take several hours to back up a hard drive. It also depends on the size of the drive, the speed of the drive, and the amount of data you’re trying to back up – oh and the transfer method. USB is slower than SATA for example.
Lol maybe I should do the same thing! My lappy HDD has been causing huge problems… mostly pissing me off in the process. (keeps on getting a sh*tload of bad sectors)
I know that lap top hard drives are smaller, so it’d be interesting to see the internals of those. ^^
You better back up your drive SOON. bad sectors are bad news!!!
I keep my OS on an IDE drive while everything else is on SATA drives, like you said, they don’t make things like they used to 🙂
I was given a whole bunch of old drives one time and I took them apart and made a stereo speaker system with them. It sounded horrible, but it still worked. If you’re interested just Google “hard drive speaker”.
That is actually a pretty good idea! Though I don’t think my motherboard actually supports IDE lol technology…
You made a stereo speaker system with hard drive parts?! That’s so wicked! Too bad for the poor sound quality, but it’s an interesting novelty, and makes me think about “how it works”.
You could use two drives in a RAID 1 array for some redundancy. In RAID 1, all data is mirrored to both drives in the array, so if one of them fails, you simply replace it and the data from the intact drive gets automatically copied over and you’re up and running again.
Of course, for serious backup you need a source of storage outside the computer, preferably in another part of the house, and critical stuff ought to be off-site (in case of fire, flood, or other disaster). Buncha services out there like Carbonite, Amazon’s S3, etc. Not having a backup is just asking for trouble, especially if it’s sensitive data!
It is fun to take drives apart. I have a collection of the rare-earth magnets from hard drives; they’re fun to play with! It’s also fun to simply remove the platters with the axle intact and spin it up, holding onto both sides of the axle. Gyroscope!
Speaking of fun magnets, if you get the chance to check out BuckyBalls, do it! They’re great fun:
http://www.getbuckyballs.com/
I have a friend who worked in a data recovery center in Indianapolis. He ran a service on the side where he would take new drives into the clean room, take the tops off, and replace them with a clear acrylic panels so you can see the innards working in your case (provided they’re mounted to be visible through a case window ofc). He was doing this long before Western Digital started offering their “windowed” Raptor hard drives.
But yes, even the tiniest speck of dust will introduce pretty bad write errors. The areal density of WD’s modern “Caviar Black” series of hard drives is right at 400GB per square inch, so even a microscopic speck on the surface could blot out like ten albums worth of data.
I had thought about a RAID setup before, but I didn’t really know how to do it, and didn’t like the idea of having two hard drives perform as one drive. Especially since I don’t need to back up absolutely everything anyway. If I had a server though, I’d definitely be using RAID.
Good suggestions on cloud backups. So far, I have a drive that I back up to externally once every couple of weeks, and store off-site. It’s mostly my critical stuff only though. I might invest in a cloud service at some point in time. ^^
I remember playing with BuckyBalls a few years ago. They’re neat! 😀
I actually do have a couple of Caviar Blacks. They’ve been great so far. 400GB per square inch is A LOT. Wow. I never knew that! But mine is a 1TB drive, so 400GB per square inch doesn’t sound plausible?
If it’s the most recent model it has two 500GB platters inside. The most recent one does indeed have that 400GB per square inch density. The previous generation had 320-some iirc.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19330
Wow, that’s some shiny stuff! I’m also surprised at how there are so few internal components. Hahaha, taking things apart once they have busted is always fun. 😀
yeah, it is quite surprising how little there is inside a hard drive!
I love taking things apart, so this was indeed great fun. I took apart a busted digital camera once, and that was the best. There are so many little screws and components, and the LCD scree was neat. 🙂
Amazing to see the guts of a Hard Drive. Shiny discs are shiny :3
I’m lucky enough that none of my HDDs failed on me yet. My portable HDD has been with me for more than 4 years now :3 (although not constantly using it prolongs its life too). Don’t think I have any sensitive data to protect though just… torrented videos and music. Oh and my photos ~_~;
Oh and I’ve been meaning to post a comment on your JB post… but I am still not making sense. So bear with me. ._.;
lol precioussssssss. 😀
Knock on wood, girl! It’s good to hear that your drives are okay, but seriously, better safe than sorry, especially with irreplaceable photos!
Hey no worries about the JB post! Whenever you have something that you want to voice, I’ll see it for sure. ^^
Your lucky. I burned through 5 in my first laptop and now I’m on my third on this laptop.
FIVE?!
You know that if you’re drive is spinning and you move your laptop, you’re risking scratching the platters, right?
That piece that you had standing up that you mentioned was screwed in is fairly important. It reads and writes data to the magnetic discs you found. Usually, it’s what makes that clicking noise inside of your laptop when the hard drive starts to go, because its scratching those discs. It normally sits on a cushion of air above the disc (the metal case is there to provide an airtight seal so the hard drive stays good). And now I can prove I learned something in college!
It seems with so few components to a hard drive, ever piece is critical to its function, and if one breaks down, the entire drive fails. Yep, that is the drive head you’re talking about – it’s very similar in function as a record player is, actually.
you reminds when I open my broken Hard Drive years back need to satisfied your curiosity right,justlay finger on them already make them broken!
hahahahaha it totally is about satisfying your curiosity! XD
Just opening them up makes them broken with the dust around! lol!
This was all about getting your toes wet in the utter destructive side of your creativity pool wasn’t it?
haha yes.
So that’s what the internal workings look like.
After I was on the sight yesterday, I started having hard drive problems. Was able to create back up, I have a few more tests to run sometimes these things are intermittent. 🙁
Tako, Have you ever thought about either Dropbox or Carbonite they are both relatively cheap for cloud backups?
Every hard drives gives away, its just a matter of years for each one. It would be best to replace them every 5-3 years, though I’ve had hard drives that lasted longer. Since you use them for work (at least most of us do) you can’t really take the chance on replacing it late so good thing you managed to back it up fast.
Smashing a hard drive to pieces seems really fun though. I wish you smashed it after you removed the chassis.