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.

All Pages: 1 2 3

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 by Peter at 10:15 pm and is filed under Hard Drives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.