Opening Up a Hard Drive

I have a deathstar IBM 40gig that just died on me. Instead of rather throwing it away I figure I want to open it up.....as I never opened up a hard drive before. Would it be bad to open it up while it running, one of the disk is not gonna spin and slice my throat is it? I saw those cdr drives spinning really fast on video and though for a sec.

Well probley not the best idea to open while it running since there is a screw holding the spindle down from the top side of the housing.

I know I did take apart a drive that I had (20gig) and did a nice little mod to it. I put a window in the top of the drive. Pretty sweet I might say that was quiet nice. Worked for a couple days before dying. I bet I got some sort of dust into the housing and it finally worked its way to the reader heads or what not.

For one thing after you open it, the disk probley won't spin for long if its hooked up. As soon as some piece of dirt, dust, particle hits the drive it goes haywire and shuts down.

I am pretty sure it is safe to run a hard drive while open. I saw a video of someone who turned a hard drive into a blender by cutting the platter into blades and sculpting a bowl around the whole thing.

I don't think it's a good idea to open any electrical device while it is plugged in and working. Too many things can go wrong. Why don't you just open it up first and plug it in to a power source after? It will be safer. And yeah working HD's can't be modded at home You need a uncontaminated area like in CPU factories where everyone wears a white environmental suit

If you're going to do this, definitely pull the cover off before (not during) running it. One slip of a finger into a platter spinning at speed while fumbling with a screwdriver/holding the drive could hurt a bit...

Another thing to consider....if you've got a matching drive, after you yank the cover, put a window in it (test fitting onto the dead drive to ensure clearances, etc...). Then when you know it'll fit and work right, swap it onto the working drive. I've got a 10GB Maxtor that I've been meaning to do just this with (lazy bugger...still ain't done ). It uses the exact same cover and chassis as a 20 gigger I've got handy. One o' these days I want to get one of those clear acrylic cases, and put a windowed HDD and optical drive into it.

secretweapon said:

I don't think it's a good idea to open any electrical device while it is plugged in and working. Too many things can go wrong. Why don't you just open it up first and plug it in to a power source after? It will be safer. And yeah working HD's can't be modded at home You need a uncontaminated area like in CPU factories where everyone wears a white environmental suit

Click to expand...

Sure they can. There's a number of guys that post here that have windowed HDDs.

The "trick" is to fire up the shower with the hottest water that'll run, and let the bathroom get steamy. Shut off the water, and as the fog dissapates, it takes all the airborne dust down with it.

Done quickly, you can pull the cover off your drive and put the drive into a bag (and then mod the cover, and repeat the shower deal when re-installing), or as I mentioned above, mod the cover on a dead drive, and just swap them after doing the shower deal...straight swap, done in one shot.

It's not for the faint of heart, but it's been done successfully by a number of folks around here.

Definitely not for the faint of heart, and especially not with files already on the HD You would have to time that perfectly with the dust settling and amount of moisture left in the air.. A neat trick though.

If you want to Mod your drives like that, just understand that Anything that gets in or on the platter will kill it sooner or later. smoke particles are even much bigger than the air gap between the read heads and the platter.
Thats gotta hurt!
I work for a hospital pharmacy in our clean room and on rare occasions the dust that gets throught the filters is surprising!
Play with that mod on some drives you dont mind losing. Its really lots of fun anyway.

That it is fun to try it out and amazing if it works after the mods done even. Now thats where you get some bragging rights I tell you. Definatly not the easiest thing to do trying to mod a window into a harddrive.

Don't forget the magnets

When you're done playing with it and before you dump it, be sure to extract the magnets out of it. I haven't pulled them out myself, but the pc guys where I work yank the magnets out of all the dead drives they come accross and leave them about for everyone to play with. Those little things are incredibly strong and will jump out of your hand to snap together if you get two of them close to one another. Maybe it won't impress everyone but I had no idea that such a little magnet could be so strong. If it gets stuck on your fridge you'll have one tough time getting it off.
May sound silly but try it.

Steamer

If you do the window mod on the HDD, one way to ensure reliablity in the future is to thouroghly exercise the drive. Use a diagnostic that performs random reads or random seeks. As the heads move across the platter they will knock dust particles off the media and into the dust filter. Heavy exercising of the drive right after the mod will "clear" the drive of most particles. Then if you run a format you are more likely to reallocate any bad sectors and be left with working media.

Now that I have been thinking of it, I have seen at Frys Electronics some hard drives with clear cover plates. I believe these are display but then again, I never asked.