Do hard drives fail from open covers?

Why would you open all 3 in the first place? Was one not enough? Did you think the GIGs in the other drives looked different?? Hard drives use very precise floating head. they are very close to the plattens. As much as you feel you are in a dust free area when you open then, there is still alot of dust. It is possible that the regular airbourne dust in your place has damaged the heads or plattens. Or the controller boards have just crapped out. Check the connections from the board to the heads, as these are usually delicate.

Yes. That's why it says: 'do not open' or 'warranty void if seal broken' on the sticker.

I accidentally broke the foil seal on one of my Western Digital hard disk drives. I tried taping it shut but it failed anyway. So then I tried spraying some WD-40 into it but that didn't do any good. So I sprayed a lot more in there and it just kept clicking and clicking. Heheh.

Yes, the fact you opened them and exposed the heads and platter, and then they failed is a good proof of what those who know will tell you. The required ultimate physical precision is probably why recovering data from a hard disk drive is so expensive. On the other hand, backups are cheap and easy.

Clean rooms have micron filters. The gap between head and disk is smaller than the dust particles!

It's just like throwing a shovel full of gravel on a vinyl record. Air is filthy. Harddrives are delicate. They are sealed for a reason.

Where did you find a dust free room? Did you rent a clean room or did you borrow a laminar flow hood?

Maybe this is a troll, but...

In general, there's no such thing as a dust free room. Hard drive heads fly over the surface of the disk on a microscopic thin cushion of air, and even tiny bits of dust will scratch the surface. They are assembled and sealed in a *very* clean environment. Even clean rooms where you put on a bunny suit and go through an airlock are questionable for the level of cleanliness you would need to open a drive. More appropriate would be the glove box approach, but you would have to clean the drive meticulously first, or the dust accumulated on the outside of the drive from the real world would contaminate the "clean" environment upon introduction. There are ways and means to do it, but all are beyond the realm of "out of curiousity". Do not open working hard drives! Doing so renders them junk.

Does anyone have that diagram DEC used to include with disk drive user/service info? You know the one - it shows the heads flying over the surface of the disk next to a particle of dust and cigarette smoke, which looked like boulders in comparison.

And that was in the days where the flying height was

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Yeah. That's the 1st thing that came to my mind. I tried to Google it, but I'm not finding anything. It looked like this: : View in monospaced font (Courier). : ________ : / : / : / : / : / : / : / : __________ | : / \ | human : / \ | hair : / \ | : / \ | :============== | dust | \ : |_____| ___ | particle | \ : head | | | \ : | \ / \ : air gap \ / \ : | \ / \ : platter | \ / \ :================================================================= :=================================================================

and

You may get lucky once in a while, but opening the cover will almost always kill the drive. Sometimes it'll die moments later, other times it'll go a few weeks then start developing read errors but once the seal has been broken the drive should never be trusted again.

The image included on this page by any chance?

"Steve Lewinsky" wrote

The 20 Gig contains two platters. The 130 Gigs contains 3 platters. How could 3 platters holds so much data? Straight from its factory wrapper, I crack the lids open inside a large clean, clear plastic bag inside a hepa filtered closet which still doesn't help.

That's the idea, but as Sam said it showed smoke and dust. (I'll add that it also included a hair for comparison.)

All the contaminants were shown as perfect circles to clearly demonstrate the relative diameters. It was a black & white line drawing IIRC.

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

...

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.

...

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.

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.

The contention that an older, lower capacity drive, may have more platters is certainly true!

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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.

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