I found this on the page hazelnut mentioned in her post Be careful with your flash/thumb drive and thought it was interesting. Might be worth a look if you're curious how a hard drive operates and what is inside one. It's surprisingly simple for such a precise and important piece of hardware.

Inside Your Hard Drive

i ve taken a 2gb harddrive desk and chucked it at somone like a frisbee.

Many many years ago, I picked up a old 80's hard drive. It was bigger than todays 3½" hard drives. It contained big orange metallic that was very hard, and I tossed them around, and threw them, they was very hard!
Makes me think of those discs that the Predator uses.

It also has powerful magnets.

I've got one of the discs that they use for hard drives (Dad picked it up at his work @ Hitachi)... nice and shiny, could use it as a mirror

Curiosity got the better of me once, and using only brute force and a philips screwdriver I demolished a HD.

Amazing the technology that is in them, and how (almost) indestructable the discs are. I was not expecting a solid material (for some reason I was thinking floppy-like !), and especially that it feels like glass... delicate but strong.
But they don't seem to break by bending them ... but, just like glass they will melt in a fire. (well I was sure I couldn't put it in a recycle bin lol )

Think I may have posted this hard drive seek demo a while back but some may have missed it.

The speed and precision of the seeks makes you appreciate the technology put into a hard drive.

Hard drive seek demo

thats pretty fast!
is it true that if you move your computer around while its running, it could damage the HD?

I thing the seek arm floats on a cushion of air so any jerky movements can cause it to touch the platter resulting in damage.

Best to be safe than sorry and turn off before moving.

well, curiosity got the best of me tonight.
i had to finally see what was inside a HD.
i started taking it apart then i pried on that arm because it was in the way and it shot up in the air then came back down and landed right next to our cat!
i got inside it and noticed that theres actually 2 disks in mine.
same with you guys?
(it was an older computer)

That sure sounded like an easy question. The answer was kind of hard to find for some reason. Maybe everybody already knows the answer except for you and me . Then again I've never heard anyone mention 2 disks in a hard drive or seen a picture of one that has 2 disks.

I wasn't doing too well searching for "2 disks inside hard drive." Then I thought of searching for "2 platters inside hard drive." I figured if a hard drive could have 2 platters it could have 2 disks. Turns out platter and disk mean the same thing. So yes there can be two or more disks in a hard drive.



I like how you guys are coming up with new uses far an old hard drive like a mirror, Frisbee, various forms of weaponry, etc. Kind of like a Swiss Army Knife of computer hardware, lol.

This guy came up with a pretty cool idea.

thats pretty cool.
hes got too much time on his hands.


orange? never seen those before.

does anyone else think that they got the idea of the CD from the HD's?