Sunday 12 January 2014

How To Take Apart Hard Drive

I have three old hard drives that used to contain media but also personal data. I ran an erasing program on them that overwrote every sector (I think it was DBAN but I forget exactly).

Anyway, I was curious to actually take the hard drives apart as well.

But first I needed a special screwdriver:

A Torx T8.

Torx means it has a star shaped head. T8 refers to the size.

The screwdriver was tiny so I ran into trouble when taking the platter off the spindle - the screws were just too tight.

So I wrapped some tape and bulked up the end with tissue and wrapped more tape around to make a big handle. It worked! lol!

I got into trouble trying to remove the arm, luckily this link was very helpful:
GEEK-TO-YOU: How to take apart a hard-drive (humor included) by darman12

I had no idea that hard drives contained a pair of very strong rare earth (neodymium) magnets. Pretty cool stuff!

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