hard disk drives

[burgo]

i was bored and had a spare fooked one lying about so desided to take it apart :twisted: on having done so ive found a really shiny (metal) disk. thing is i have no idea how this can possibly work and also what are the disks made from??

[Dar]

What you want to do is take the heads out and undo the disc(s) from the spindle. Then power up the drive and see how far you can get the discs to go across the floor. Thats always fun if your bored.

Also HDD's contain rate earth magnets. Take it out and then take the magnet off its backing plate. Then stick it on your fridge. You will not be able to take it directly off! You will need to slide it off or pry it off. They are very strong. Unless you have nails that is. Then you can get them underneath it.

[Alex]

On a harddisk, data is stored in the magnetic coating of the disk. The head is used to write and read data. This disk rotates with a constant turn time, measured in revolutions per minute (rpm). Data is organized on a disk in cylinders, tracks and sectors. Cylinders are concentric tracks on the surface of the disk. A track is divided into sectors. A harddisk has a head on each side of a disk. All harddisks have reserved sectors, which are used automatically by the drive logic if there is a defect in the media

[burgo]

clever stuff then. ive found those magnets and yes they are rather strong lol. what is the disk made from though??

[Dar]

I knew the magnetic media was on another material, should have guessed it would have been ally.


In a hard disk, the magnetic recording material is layered onto a high-precision aluminum or glass disk. The hard-disk platter is then polished to mirror-type smoothness.

[Alex]

copied from the net:

Traditionally platters are made of a light alluminum alloy and coated with a magnetizable material such as a ferrite compound that is applied in liquid form and spun evenly across the platter or thin metal film plating that is applied to the platter through electroplating, the same way that chrome is produced. Newer technology uses glass and/or ceramic platters because they can be made thinner and also because they are more efficient at resisting heat. The magnetic layer on the platters has tiny domains of magnetization that are oriented to store information that is transferred through the read/write heads. Most drives have at least two platters, and the larger the storage capacity of the drive, the more platters there are. Each platter is magnetized on each side, so a drive with 2 platters has 4 sides to store data.

[burgo]

well what ever it is its very shiny and pretty lol plus its not magnetic :?