Cracking open a Maxtor hard drive

By Mark W. Kaelin April 23, 2007, 12:54 AM PDT

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Maxtor hard drive teardown

ntI’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.
nt
ntThe sacrificial lamb in this case is a Maxtor 10GB drive circa 1998.

ntnn

Underneath the circuit board

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

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.

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.

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.

By Mark W. Kaelin

Mark W. Kaelin has been writing and editing stories about the information technology industry, software, hardware, gaming, finance, accounting, and technology geekdom for more than 30 years.

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