Despite how many hard disk drives fail I’m surprised it’s so hard to find and exploded hard drive online.

Well my misfortune is to all of our benefit. Due to a head failure in my hard drive, hard disk data recovery was not possible.

Here is my hard drive, taken apart, piece by piece to provide a full exploded hard drive view for you to see.

The top of the hard drive as you can see when you purchase one (just missing the screws). Labels and screws basically.

This is the bottom. The board is the controller. The orange looking wires run to bottom of the spindle that the platters inside spin on.

No labels should be removed from a hard drive. They are used to make sure that nothing has been opened. Any warranty will be voided and you hard drive will be ruined.

The label tells you pretty much everything about the disk drive.

The Serial Number (S/N) is one of the easiest ways to identify a specific drive. As drives from a single manufacturer can be almost identical, this can help you tell them apart.

The box in the middle tells you most of the details, including interface (ATA/IDE or SATA), capacity, platter rotation speed (RPM) and other stuff.

Lets continue our look at our exploded hard drive.

The back of the hard drive has (for this drive) the place for the IDE plug, the jumpers for settings and the power plug.

The jumpers are used to pick from the different settings available. I have never used any setting besides the “master” and “slave” settings.

For your convenience diagrams are provided that show what the different jumper settings are.

Next, we’ll start taking apart our exploded hard drive.

My main obstacle in this procedure was the electronic screwdrivers. I managed to find slightly less sophisticated ways to get the outer six screws off.

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As you can see the final screw is in the middle, underneath the large label. You have to peal back the label (voiding the warranty). And to get my exploded hard drive, I needed to get it off in a normal manner.

Electronic screwdrivers only come in very small sizes. The end is shaped like a starfish, just with 6 legs. They are very small, and only a few larger sizes exist for other applications.

This is the pack I ended up getting. I cost around $8 for the set.

Next, we will look closer into our exploded hard drive.

Once all of those screws have been undone, the cover just lifts off. As you can probably imagine, it was quite hard to get good shots, with was was basically a mirror inside the exploded hard drive.

The orange colored stuff you see around the edge, and a little bit like a line with a kink in the middle is a sealant. Hard drives are completely clean inside. Due to how close the heads run to the disk, the smallest piece of dust can act like a grinder, literally cutting huge gouges into the disk. Gounges that are bad enough to render a disk unusable amy not even be visible to the naked eye.

This view of the inside shows a little closer. You can see the big disk platter on the left and the arm and head on the right.

The heads are located at the end of the arm. The arm itself moves with the help of a magnet, which is the big blob of metal at the left. The arm moves to find the right position on the platter, while the platter spins to get to the right position too.

Here you can see the arm in a position over the disk. The orange rectangle at the bottom right of the drive takes the wires needed to control the arm out of the inside and to the board on the outside of the drive. It has a rubber seal to keep things from getting contaminated inside.

This is the arm removed. The hanging bit goes out to the board. The gray wide part of the arm has a copper coil which you can see. That part sits inside the powerful magnets and is how the arm is controlled.

You can see the two inner metal plates, which are the two strong magnets.

I took out the platter and the arm to show you how they work together.

The arm, which really has two arms stretches out over the disk platter. At the very end, the two heads run extremely close to the surface to either read or write to the disk. One arm reads and writes to the top of the platter, the other to the bottom, making best use of what’s available.

This is another look at the arm by itself.

Well I hope you found something interesting from looking at my exploded hard drive. Besides the pain of losing all my data on that drive, taking it apart was really cool.

So don’t forget to backup your data. I wouldn’t like you to get into the same pickle as me.

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