Anatomy of a failed hard drive

Storage

Anatomy of a failed hard drive

By Bill Detwiler November 4, 2005, 3:40 AM PST billdetwiler

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Failed Western Digital WD200 hard drive

Erik Eckel

Failed Western Digital WD200 hard drive

ntThe failed drive, after thousands of hours of tortured service. This poor disk ran everything from Windows 2K to Red Hat Linux, powered desktops and later test servers, and gave its life trying to birth a new Fedora Core installation.

Erik Eckel

Screws removed

Eckel started by removing the screws, all requiring a proprietary bit to remove. Then he pealed back the protective stickers, voiding the (expired) warranty, to remove the last two screws.

Drilling out a stripped screw

One of the drive’s two remaining bolts refused to loosen. The head stripped in the process of extraction. The solution? A 3/8″ drill bit.

Removing the hard drive lid

Once the screws were removed, the lid slid away to reveal the disk’s innards. No scalpel required.

Internal hard drive components

Minus better tools, the dissection ends here. However, a precursory examination revealed no obvious failures: no dents, scratches, imperfections or foreign matter was present.

By Bill Detwiler

Bill Detwiler is the Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic and previous host of TechRepublic's Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show.

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