Storage

Cracking open a Maxtor hard drive

By · April 23, 2007, 1:50 AM PST · markwkaelin

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  • Maxtor hard drive teardown

    I've always wanted to open and hard drive and take a good look at the insides. So when this old spare hard drive came along I decided to satisfy my curiosity by making a gallery for our Cracking Open series.

    The sacrificial lamb in this case is a Maxtor 10GB drive circa 1998.

  • Circuit board

    First to come off is the circuit board. The arrow marks the screws.

  • Underneath the circuit board

    Underneath the circit board is some padding and two sets of contacts. Interestingly, there are no plugs.

  • Contacts

    A good look at the contacts.

  • Flip side

    Turning the drive over, you notice that Maxtor makes liberal use of tape. Never underestimate the power of duct tape.

  • More tape

    Back on the underside, after removing the circuit board padding, what do we find but more tape. It looks like it is time to start peeling.

  • Tape removed

    I'm not sure why there was tape on this side. Revoving the one piece of tape reveals the underside of the plate chamber. The drive, if it worked before, does not work now for sure.

  • Hidden screws

    Removing the circular tape from the top side reveals two more screws that were hidden before.

  • Open

    The lid is removed to reveal all of the inside parts. The metal pieces in the corner are magnets. The purpose of the chamber with the white cloth piece escapes me. Perhaps it is a sound baffle?

  • Armature

    A side angle look at the armature. There is not much room for error.

  • Magnet

    There are two magnets in the armature drive housing. The magnets are surprisingly powerful. I thought magnets were a no-no when it comes to hard drives, but I guess the problem is really random magnets.

  • A closer look

    There are no moving parts on the armature --- no gears or belts. The armature is driven by the electromagnet created by the coil of copper wires (arrow).

  • Circuitry

    This circuitry controls the movement and tells the read/write heads what to do.

  • Both magnets

    It takes a great deal of strength to separate this housing when they are together --- much more strength then I would have thought was necessary. I passed it around the office and watched my colleagues sttruggle to separate them --- it surprised all of us.

  • Caulking

    The gasket around the top of the drive is tacky. It must make a solid seal.

  • Plates removed

    The memory plates slide onto a central hub separated by the metal rings. The entire setup is seemingly very simple.

  • I see me

    The plates make excellent mirrors.

  • Shine on

    There is a gash on this plate. I don't know if it was there when I started this project, but if it was, the drive was dead.

  • Shell

    Not much to the shell.

  • Read/write heads

    Here is a closer look at the read/write heads. As you can see they are very delicate. The mere act of removing the armature mangled the ends.

  • Another angle

    Here is another angle looking at the heads.

  • All the parts

    Here are all the parts. The drive was surprisingly simple in its design. But the precision to make it work and the delicateness of the internal apparatus cannot be underestimated.

  • Chips

    The chips on the circuit board carry some famous names: Sanyo, Texas Instruments, and Lucent to name a few.

Maxtor hard drive teardown

I've always wanted to open and hard drive and take a good look at the insides. So when this old spare hard drive came along I decided to satisfy my curiosity by making a gallery for our Cracking Open series.

The sacrificial lamb in this case is a Maxtor 10GB drive circa 1998.

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By Mark Kaelin

Mark W. Kaelin has been writing and editing stories about the IT industry, gadgets, finance, accounting, and tech-life for more than 25 years. Most recently, he has been a regular contributor to BreakingModern.com, aNewDomain.net, and TechRepublic.

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