What's Inside a Hard Drive

What's Inside a Hard Drive
Posted :: May 17, 2004 by Impact

Being a curious person, I tend to take apart anything I can get my hands on, just to see what's inside. Today I got excited when I found my stash of broken hard drives, which lead me to the question of the day:

What's Inside a Hard Drive?

This isn't so much a "why" or "how does it work" as much as just: "this is what's in there". Mostly because I don't completely understand how they work and I wouldn't want to give bad information.

The hard drive we are working with today is an old 30GB Western Digital drive.

Getting the top off was sort of tricky considering Western Digital decided to hide a few screws under the label. Once inside though, there wasn't a whole lot to see. Inside there are "platters" (the circular shiny things used to store data), some arms (two per platter, one on each side) that go back and forth to write/read data off of the disk, and a magnetic motor used to control the arms.

On the back of the hard drive is the interface board. This board converts the commands from the IDE controller in your computer to signals for the magnetic arms.

Overall, without a whole lot of knowledge about hard drives, the inside isn't overly exciting. What is good about it is the fact that it looks so nice (window mod coming soon).