Do hard drives fail from open covers?

Your mistake was in opening drives that you wanted.

There are loads of smaller drives that people don't want, which would have fulfilled your curiosity. And ironically, you might find that the smaller the capacity the more the platters.

But you didn't need to open the drives to find out how so few platters could hold so much capacity. Indeed, opening them didn't do a bit in answering that.

Michael

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more the platters.

That might be interesting trivia if it were true.

Click on the Configuration tab for each of the sizes and look at a number of platters.

If you can find data for a series which supports your contention, please post the link.

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To be clear. No hard disk drive should be trusted. Doesn't really matter what the apparent condition or known reliability/MTBF/whatever. Always keep backups of data you consider important, preferably on removable media.

Especially if you have any idiots anywhere nearby that think it's "ok" to take the protective cover off and gawk at the insides.

hepa

Modern drives are available at up to 100GB on a single platter.

There's nothing you can do in your home that will make it safe to open a drive, the moment you crack the seal, the drive is junk. If it doesn't fail immediately it'll fail within months.

I've opened a lot of dead drives to harvest the magnets and it's true, older drives which are often smaller as well typically have more platters than newer drives. I took apart a 4 gig SCSI drive once that had 7 platters in it and it seems like I once opened a 1 gig 5.25" SCSI drive that had 10-13 platters.

Are you suggesting that small, old drives have more platters than large, old drives?

Are you suggesting that the typical number of platters is decreasing? I cannot imagine why.

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sci.electronics.repair:417688

Because designers get better at higher density.

Look at floppy disks. 8" were relatively small capacity, though

The biggest hard drive I've taken apart hasn't been bigger than 1gig, and I think it's more like a maximum of about 500megs. Generally they've been much smaller. And a good portion have been 5.25" drives. I may be exaggerating if I've found any with more than 3 platters, but I've definitely seen those, and I have 160meg Quantum in front of me that has 2 platters. So at the very least density has increased dramatically if one can get gigs of storage on 2 or 3 platters.

Checking a chart in an old book, it's easy to see listings for drives with 8 heads (ie 4 platters) with capacity of 60Megs, and even 20megs.

They just got better at making higher density drives. If that hadn't happened, the drives would be getting bigger as capacity goes up, rather than getting smaller. And cheaper, for that matter.

I suspect that 1gig SCSI drive, nice and thick, that I recently found in a Mac Quadra 950 and has a date of about 1994, must have a fair number of platters. That's still fairly large for the time.

Michael

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sci.electronics.repair:417691

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So if everyone wanted the same capacity as before, the number of platters would decrease. But users want higher capacity.

The reason for multiple platters is greater capacity and also because the electronics is so much faster. With multiple platters, the electronics do not have to wait as long for a single platter/heads to retrieve data.

Haven't used them for years and I just bought a 256 MB USB flash drive. The floppy disk drive is dead, at least here.

Current CDs/DVDs are the same size as a 5 1/4" inch floppy disk. Yes, of course the capacity is greater.

Consumers pretty much dictate how large a device can be, according to its usefulness/function. Consumers dictate how much space the computer can occupy. When the electronics gets smaller, if the consumer has the same amount of space, the consumer buys the same size, more powerful computer.

Have fun.

Think RLL 40 MB drives. :)

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ Mirror:

Note: These links are hopefully temporary until we can sort out the excessive traffic on Repairfaq.org.

Important: Anyth>

But technology is changing so fast that indeed, a drive that appears similar on the outside may have a different bit density on the platters.

Do bears s*it in the woods

-- Marcus

I like people, they are bio-degradable !.

incorrect. i had WD drives in the past that performed translations and i am sure the're still drives out there today that still do.

Yes. Besides that, the faillure rate on those Maxtor drives seems a bit above average anyway.

You can read from the drive's serial number (2nd digit) how many heads a Maxtor drive has. Divide that by two and round upwards to the nearest integer number to know the number of platters. No need to destroy a drive for that. By the way, there is a small chance the drives failed because you didn't tighten the cover screws with enough torque. Might try that before tossing them.

They have been, mostly before the IDE interface was introduced. Some early IDE drives reported the true number of heads/sectors as well.

Oh, please. The context was that of a guy who opened 3 new drives to see how much data they held. The point of the first remark quoted above was that you can't tell that way. It wasn't a comprehensive statement about all hard drives, their capacity and the number of platters.

Didn't you and John Doe notice this? Why bicker?

Meirman

-- If emailing, please let me know whether or not you are posting the same letter. Change domain to erols.com, if necessary.

You're reading way too much into what I'm saying. All I'm suggesting is that older drives typically have more platters than newer drives, and it's because of much lower data density on the platters. I didn't see single platter drives until just a few years ago, before that they almost always had 2-4 for typical consumer sized drives.

The typical number of platters has been decreasing because platters, heads, and the associated electronics cost money, as soon as they can bump the data density up high enough to reduce the number of platters they do it, that's why 120 gig drives which are currently the largest single platter drives available are also generally the lowest price per gig.