Hard drive disassembly

DirectorX

DirectorX

Here's a question...

Does anyone know anything about taking a hard drive apart for the purpose of replacing its platter(s)? Besides obviously needing a Clean Room, I'm interested in how to actually take the drive apart and to safely remove the platter(s). There seems to be a shortage of good information on the subject. There's more to this, but just wanted to know if anyone knew anything about this so far. The reason for all this is HD failure.
 
Well I don't know why you would need to do this, unless it's for a film or something. Replacing platters isn't too easy. The magnets are so strong that you'll damage the platters.

Platters cannot have 1 spec of dust, no smudge, no impression, no magnetic field, nothing.

If you happen to get past all of that, you'll need to hope that they will spin correctly and not vibrate the drive to pieces.

So my answer is no, I don't have a procedure to replace the platters. Although, it sure is fun to take them apart and mess with the magnets.

If your hard drive failed, get a new one. I just had a mechanical failure myself. You can hear the heads smacking against something... I was told that a low level format will fix it, but I'm going to toss the thing... or maybe take it apart.
 
I was just tempted by the idea since I do have access to a Clean Room. I also do need to recover the data from the disk. I will most likely send it off to a pro data recovery center. I called a few and have been quoted up to $1900 for the service (after a discount!). Have to shop around a bit I suppose.

You should take your drive apart just for fun. If yours was making that noise the platters may be damaged. You should find out. With mine, from the sound, it sounds like the motor does not spin up anymore (it tries a few times then gives up).
 
I had one go out on me a week or so ago too.. just decided not to power on anymore.. damn thing was only 2 months old. So I cut my loses (all my mp3s grrr) and exchanged it for a new one at Best Buy. At least it wasn't further down the road.. it was still over 90% empty.. whew.
 
Argh. My drive just hit the 200mb mark (on a 160GB drive)... had to uninstall all my games, movies, demo programs...

/computer nerd joke
I couldn't even de-frag, that's how low it was!
/computer nerd joke

Damn man- good luck with that data recovery!
 
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