I recently noticed that a ten-year-old hard rive was beginning
to sound more like a 747 sitting on the runway, cleared for
takeoff so I decided to retire it before it decided to pick the
day, itself.
I replaced it with a solid-state flash drive so it is
very, very quiet now. The only sound is the fan in the power
supply.
The old hard drive will never make noise again as I took
it apart for fun. It is the newest drive I have ever looked at
and here is what you find in your average hard drive:
Firstly, one must never open a hard drive unless you are
absolutely sure it is dead because they are sealed in a clean
room environment as the slightest speck of dust will cause a
head crash.
This drive was your typical IDE 3.5-inch-platter drive
that you find in many middle-aged computers.
The screws that hold the lid on and the circuit board in
are security screws that require a special tool. I used a tiny
screwdriver that can wedge in to the special head and turn it
anyway so that's how I got it open.
Firstly everything inside the sealed compartment is
extremely clean unless there has been a head crash and then you
might find debris from the crash.
This drive had not crashed, however, so it was nice and
clean.
What you see is a spindle in the center holding two
3.5-inch platters stacked like phonograph records used to be
back in the day.
The only other thing inside the enclosure is the head
stack or comb. It is two sets of two heads that read both sides
of the platter. They are on an arm that goes to a post that acts
like a pivot. If you look down on the disk platters, the arm is
like a see-saw on its side.
The positioning of the heads is done by what is called
a voice coil because it resembles a loud speaker. There is a
powerful magnet and right above it is the coil such that
electric current applied to the coil makes it attract or repel
the magnet and that moves the heads.
Except for the motor that continuously spins the platter
stack, that's pretty much it.
The magic is in the circuitry on the controller board
that applies the varying voltage to the voice coil in the head
stack and finds the right track on the four sides of the disk.
That part amazes me that it can work as well as it does for as
many years as it does.
This drive was loud enough as it ran to be kind of
uncomfortable to listen to near by and no telling how much
longer it would have continued to operate as it would sometimes
make additional strange sounds as if some object was getting
caught in the motor and then thrown. Amazingly, it still read
and wrote data but one would have been a fool to trust it.
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