Taking Apart a Hard Drive to See How It Works
hi this is Carl and today we have a video that I'm going to entitle fun with hard drives because we're going to actually take apart a hard drive to show you how it works now let me show you the hard drive before we get started so you can see here this is a one tbte hard drive it's old it has the red line through it simply because I I use backup hard drives only for a certain period of time literally less than one year and then I put them into long-term storage so I've got a permanent backup uh on that hard drive and then I take it out and I delete everything on the hard drive and then I format everything on the hard drive and then I take it apart and use it for other things now some of you will say well a 1 tab hard drive is actually pretty useful for a lot of things but once we take it apart and you see the insights and you see how it actually works you will see if you got in the wrong hands there are people who could quite easily get the data off of it and you can get the data off of a hard drive pretty much you know with enough tools and enough time and enough effort I don't know that my data is that sensitive but it's nobody's business so we're going to take this apart and I'll show you what I'm talking about we're going to start on the back simply to remove this circuit board we don't actually have to remove the circuit board because it's not going to get in the way of us taking apart the rest of the drive now having said that 99% of the time uh there might be some screw underneath there that need to come out but I doubt it partly you need to know that what I want to do is be able to save as much as possible of what's on the inside so it can be used for other projects when you flip over the circuit board you can see it was set up exactly so that these pins align with this piece of circuitry so this is an integrated circuit board that goes through to the other side we're going to see the rest of what that looks like when we take it it apart this circuit board controls this specific hard drive this is not Universal I have one from a very similar drive that actually has the same part number but it won't work on this drive because this drive has to have this specific circuit board it's actually encoded so it won't work with other circuit boards okay so now we're going to turn it over and oh let me show you so there's this one piece here all of these little silver dots are labels that are going to cover up the dust now this one the rest of them we don't have to worry about most of the time again 99% of the time those little ones are just the backside of where a screw goes through on the other side we're going to take the screw out from the other direction so we don't really care about them this one in the middle is a little bit larger and you're going to see that's in the center of a piece of equipment that we do want access to so we're going to loosen that now just so we don't have to turn this over again notice the little tray I've got here this is a magnetic tray if you don't have one of these go to Harbor Freight and get yourself one cuz they're pretty awesome these screws are all different sizes so you're going to need a set of torqux wrenches this is a T8 X4 the other ones that I remember using is T6 and the larger one is the T4 so we're going to take all of these off now generally speaking when you take a hard drive apart you probably are never going to be able to use it again at least not reliably if you think you're going to take it apart and fix something you might be a master Craftsman or you might work for the FBI but chances are once you get dust in there it's not going to be as reliable so what you're going to have to do is if you if it's broken and you somehow do some magic to get it working again you're just going to have to get that data off there as quickly as possible so now we've loosened all the top here and there might be a screw underneath here that we need to get access to that is possible so we're going to peel back this is just a basic knife we're going to peel back this label and see if there's something underneath there that we want aha there is now the rest of this label we could take it off leave it on it doesn't really matter the main thing is we got to get this one screw out of there after we get the label off uh let's go with that one I keep grab grabbing the the just one size too small okay again we're going to save the screws that one we won't need again but you'll see why and then this this is theoretically loose now if you try to pull it up and you pull really hard and it's not going to come that means there's another screw in here but I doubt that there's a screw there that we have to worry about so then you're going to take a little plastic tool or you could use a knife or even a screwdriver if you need to and basic basically you're going to break the seal once you do that you'll feel it sort of give might hear that noise and then you're going to pop this off and that's all there is to that the top is literally just a piece of metal it is magnetic uh so but the main thing is it just keeps all the dust out and there's a seal all the way around now we have let the dust in okay and I wanted to show this to you so that you can see how it works and I'm going to put this real close up this piece here is the head that moves back and forth and it has read and write heads that as the dis spins they move in and out and they can access any data that's anywhere on this disc now this because it's a pretty small hard drive only has one disc sometimes you take this apart and there will be four discs or sometimes five discs in there so there's a whole set of stacked heads that have to move in and out through all of the discs at the same time this is a neodymium magnet there are two of them there super strong magnets and what's interesting is because the circuitry is here it allows those magnets to have extremely precise control of exactly where those heads are so we are not going to take it apart any further in fact what I'm going to do is put this top back on just long enough for me to put the circuit board back in place that we just took off so that I can see if I can show you we're going to try to see if we can plug it in and make it work even though I've opened it I'm not in a super Dusty environment but it's sort of now in a fairly unreliable state but we're going to see what we can do [Music] now I'm going to take that off again and I'm going to this is just something to collect moisture so we're going to put that aside and now we're going to put this back in here so now even though it's open we have this hard drive ready to go and when we power it on it will read it and start to move around and you'll see how cool that is so now you see we have the hard drive set up and you can tell how very very shiny and reflective that is because it's coated and now I'm going to fire up the laptop and then I'm going to turn on the power to this and see if it turns on and is recognized oh oh no it turned itself off it may have something that that told it that it's open because I opened it I don't have something holding this down remember there was a screw that held that in place so I'm going to try to hold it in place and turn it on and see how much action we can see so you're not getting a full sense of what it's doing but you can see that that's how it accesses any spot on that disc and this is spinning super fast um and we've basically removed the piece that keeps the heads in place so we can try our best but you know it may not be very successful okay now let's proceed to take the rest of it apart which is just a matter of taking apart a whole bunch of screws now luckily on this one because there's only one drive one flat disc which is why this is a hard drive or a hard disc is uh we can take out that one one disc if we take this little retainer all this does is just hold it in place so we're going to take that out and if we can move the heads back enough we can get that disc out of there so let's see what we need to do to get that loose first we'll take off the [Music] magnet we're just going to pry it up just enough so that we can grab onto it and slide it out of there there we go and you saw the uh heads the head component came apart pretty easily you see there where you can see make sure I can turn the autofocus on a little better uh two heads little space between them for the disc to go into now this is loose on this spindle and we just need to take that little retainer off and we should be good to go so this retainer doesn't even keep it perfectly centered because that's what keeps it centered this keeps the spindle centered we should be able to just lift this up trouble is got to lift it up evenly on two sides at the same time well I can also just flip it over and it'll fall out so you can't see the zeros and ones but this coating uh is just filled with data it's literally everything on here is magnetized and the tiny little bitty uh heads on this uh head reader those are little tiny magnets the drive goes between them and then it's able to go back and forth and as this spins it's able to access any part of anything on that drive so you can see here these windings these are magnetic windings I get this over into the middle there we go the magnetic windings are something that create a magnetic field and then the niod demium magnets are super strong and that's how they can control that back and forth with perfection because you've got this little ribbon of data that goes down to to the Circuit that's underneath this hard drive has the layers that I put on there to erase the data but it also has all the data that I erased before it's a couple of layers down but again that's what I mean somebody who's a forensic computer technician can get data off that dis believe it or not all they need to do do is know how to read it now the reason that the circuit board from the other Drive didn't work on this drive is that it would be something where you would be able to encrypt it well the thing is once you go back to the zeros and ones all you have to do is copy the zeros and ones to something else somebody who knows what they're doing and has the right technology and the right tools will be able to do something with that data but in the meantime I can put my fingers anywhere I want on this because we're going to use this for a toy uh for something for the baby it's not sharp it's you know not going to be something that bends if she can't stick it in her mouth it's all good so uh and then I am going to take out this magnet which is a super good magnet um just because it's fun to do and I like having those parts and I have another video where I showed you how I took the mag it off of that piece of metal the metal on the outside is pot metal and is not magnetic it's got just a tiny bit of iron in it but nothing of any significance um but these two magnets when you get them next to each other they really want to stick together really hard and so you got to make sure you don't get your fingers in there these happen to be really tiny uh by at least old hard drive standards by today standards they're pretty good size but they're still very strong magnets and they will make an excellent toy uh for a baby uh if you know what you're doing and then this spindle uh if you wanted to take it out you could kind of a pain in the ne neck to get these out might not be worth it um I just take out the things that are pretty straight forward you loosen some screws and you're done I do want to show you what's on the inside again the material underneath this white piece here is just uh so that it can collect some of the moisture and make sure that you don't have um stuff accumulating inside the drive this little piece here once we pull this up you'll see that's where that circuit board connected so when we had the circuit board and we laid it down that's what it lined up with so that it could send the uh signals back and forth this is again sealed around here uh and it's sealed where this goes in touch with the case uh but you can see here it lines up with these lines with those lines um so anyway anyway that's that that's how the electricity gets the messages in and out of the sealed hard drive now I want to show you this on a somewhat grander scale okay so first let me show you on a much I would say a miniature scale this is a tiny little hard drive that was originally uh it was a it plugged into the side of a laptop but you can see see it is the exact same structure there's a disc in the middle there are heads and controllers and a tiny little magnet that controls the heads as they go back and forth reading and writing but you know there's my finger and there's the read right heads that we took out of the other drive so it's a it's a different scale altogether I got to put it in an angle so it doesn't uh reflect into the camera but so you could see the difference in scale now what's behind me this is a hard drive from a deck Alpha from the 1990s it has one two three four discs Each of which holds one megabyte of data you can see down here it's got the head system that goes back and forth it's got a big magnet if you took this thing apart that magnet would snap onto a piece of metal so fast you would be lucky not to have it break a finger that the magnets in here must be handled with extreme care so this uh spins obviously it's going to clearly not very useful today but uh if you spin it you you can hear the the vibration between the heads and the the discs so it's got those read WR discs between each of the four uh read right heads between each of the four discs here and now I'm going to turn around just just for fun to show you how this thing was driven and obviously the the top has been taken off of this so uh we're going to look at the backside which you may or may not be able to see entirely clearly but this is the electronic circuitry for controlling the drive and you could probably tell this is a drive that took there was a motor pressed against that with a piece of rubber literally like a motor like that goes up against there and that's what spins that and see the these little holes these are drilled in there these holes were drilled in there to balance the weight of this Center Drive so it is a a lot like what you would find on a car tire uh this is just mostly a fan area but I'll take a side view a little bit more you can see where a rubber from a motor pressed up against that wheel to spin the discs and there at an angle you see the discs themselves I get a little better angle so you can see that there's four of them I do have to say as a complete nerd it's pretty fun to see the exact same technology literally getting smaller and smaller and smaller this is the promise of Technology right that it takes up less and less space and becomes less physical with each generation well hard drives have absolutely done that I hope you found that interesting and maybe even a little bit fun kind of nerdy I do want to say today with tiny tiny little bitty uh SD cards and micro SD cards like this is 32 gigabytes of data versus that which was you know with all the discs 4 megabytes worth of data uh we've come a long ways it is interesting to me to see how the physical hard drive Works essentially exactly the same only smaller smaller smaller over time that's the promise of technology and when we go to this well that's there's no spinning Parts there's no moving Parts on these at all which is why laptops now come with only solid state circuits and you don't have to worry about the hard drive wearing out cuz it's really just the electronics have a certain amount that you can use them and that's a whole different video I also hope this helps you understand hey there's no problem taking apart a hard drive there's nothing in there that can hurt you and all you need is some Torx wrenches and you know you can get a set of cheap Torx wrenches on Amazon or Walmart or wherever and then just go to town you cannot hurt anything and some of them are harder to take apart than what I showed you but after you do a few of them pretty soon you realize oh there are some tips and tricks and you'll learn those along the way and then you get to make some fun toys for kids all right thanks for tuning in please like it if you like it give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel so you don't miss a thing and and I would love to have your comments and questions down below this is Carl palchuk wishing you the best of luck in everything you do [Laughter]
2025-03-23 23:23
