Yikes, that's more platters than I've ever seen in a drive. Those magnets are incredible though, I have a couple of similar ones on my refrigerator, you have to slide them off the edge to remove them or they warp the sheetmetal. Watch your fingers around them too.
and
Don't even get me started on that one, probably half the dead drives I've harvested have been Maxtor, I'd never buy another one. For a couple years Western Digital was making some real crap too, but they seem to have improved remarkably.
Finding a room that is truly dust free is a BIG challenge. If you had a true clean room, then you may have been clean, but most hard drives which have been in use for any amount of time will have accumulated a significant amount of dust on them. Just the process of opening such a drive in a clean room would have contaminated the room.
One can occasionally get away with opening a drive. I've done it, and I know others who have, but I would only do it with a drive which was already considered scrap or worthless, or, as a last resort, to try to get the platters spinning to copy the data off a hard drive that wouldn't start without help.
Anything else is just another form of Russian Roulette, with one empty chamber.
------------------------------------------------ Jim Adney snipped-for-privacy@vwtype3.org Madison, WI 53711 USA
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Exactly. But in the reply before yours, Dr. Anton T. Squeegee actually disputes that.
Go figure. Lots of shooting from the hip going on.
Yes I did, and I agree with that. But that's not what I was replying to and that is why I asked plainly.
Didn't you notice that the author you are replying to is John Doe?
Nope.
Apparently, consumer demand for greater capacity does not figure into your equation. In fact, demand for greater capacity increases.
The only one I have taken apart, over five years ago, had a single platter.
Why do you have to see? All you have to do is look at the maker's web site.
Nowadays they have that many for typical consumer sized drives. Just look at a maker's web site.
You are ignoring other factors.
... consumers want greater capacity, multiple platters increases capacity
... the electronics is always much faster than the hardware, so multiple platters means faster data transfer
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sci.electronics.repair:417697
Thanks.
Here is some further reading, for what it's worth.
"These [pre/early-IDE] drives also did not support sector translation, in which the physical parameters could be altered to appear as any set of logical cylinders, heads, and sectors."
I don't have to see, I'm not the one who took apart working drives, I was only chiming in that I've opened dozens of dead drives over the years to harvest them for parts, and statistically the newer ones have fewer platters than the older ones, I don't know why this is such a controversial statement as it's simply what I've seen in a random sampling of drives that have failed over the last 15 years or so.
Consumer demand has nothing to do with it. You can demand anything you want but until its feasible to build at a reasonable price, it won't exist. All any consumer can do is chose the an item somewhere in the range of what is offered. I'd love to have a 100 million terabyte data storage system with a 1024 bit wide buss and under a pico second access time, but it isn't going to happen in my lifetime. I'll be lucky if I live long enough to see really good OCR software.
Really? It takes time to switch between heads, verify the head location, synchronize the servo and collect the data. It would be like reading more books at the same time, rather than finishing one before starting another.
More heads slows it down unless you are reading each entire platter at once, one side at a time. I have never seen this, even in the old 5 MB hard drives that I started with. If you want more speed you use RAID arrays where you have multiple drives synched, and switch data access between them.
Yup same here - the 40GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 8. We've had literally hundreds of them go south within the warranty period. Failure rate compared to drives we've sold indicates >%7 failure rate.
What a dog.
Hang out in the homebuilt PC group for a while and listen to all of the sad stories people come and tell us about losing all of the critical information on their hard disk drive because recovery is going to cost USD1000. I'm not sure why they go there, but they do. Their crying is a very good teacher.
A backup hard disk drive is dirt cheap. And it takes a few minutes to do the backup.
Because you don't realize the cost of going without backups.
Sounds like something you and your boss should be discussing.
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GMT)
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Nothing at all.
Plonk!
In that case, just use a second raid for the backup. For mere mortals, a DVD-writer is indeed a cheap way to make backups.
Yup.
Well, you're obviously an idiot. That is, if you're talking about opening the lid of the drive itself. If you're talking about opening the lid of the shipping container, then I don't even know what you're talking about.
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