So your hard dive died..

wait don’t toss that drive out, not only might it still contain information about you, there are fun bits and pieces inside that drive; that with a little creativity can be re-purposed, saving the landfill and your personal info at the same time.

recently work was going to toss out 150 or so older/dead hard drives; knowing what lurks in side, I asked to take them to rip apart.

Above shows the boxes of various parts: one just for scrap metal, one for any circuit boards (these need to be sent to  any place that does old computer/electronics recycling; you don’t want lead(Pb) in the trash),a general pile (for the moment) for the bearings, magnets, arms,screws, platters, and motors.

So lets dissemble a drive. not all drives are built the same so below I will show you what too look for.

Got stickers? they usually hide the torques screws (#10,#9), get rid of stickers or feel around for any indentions that could hid a screw.

I tend to take the cover off first and get an idea where all parts are mounted up. notice this 20G HD does not have any read/write heads on the top side the platter, a cheap way to half the drive size with out much engineering.

don’t have the right torques drive, or stripped it out, a Dremmel cutting disk can turn any  screw in to a flat head screw

once the disk is removed the heads, magnets and motor are exposed. not every drive is like this, I’ve come across a few and the heads needed removed first to get the disk out.

remove the circuit board off the back, notice there is another sticker hiding more screws, one for the arm and one for the magnet.

this type of drive uses the case to hold the arm bearing in place, to remove it use a punch and small hammer.

notice this small plastic piece has tiny magnet, I’ll save this too.

so here is all the magnets freed from there old homes; some of these are strong enough to hold a small catalog to a fridge. a note of caution: don’t get your fingers stuck in between, the pinch can be back enough to give you a blood blister, or even split the skin.

a couple hours of play got me started on a robot hand, using only the parts and pieces at hand. I’m going to shove these pieces off to the side for now, and lets some ideas bubble up.