Hard Drive Teardown

Do you know how a modern hard drive works? If you don’t you should have a pretty good idea after watching this video. In only five minutes [Bill Hammack] manages to describe a hard drive in awesome detail without using any unnecessary scientific jargon.

The video teardown explains how the flying head “flies” how voice coil motors work and provides a basic introduction to how the binary data is stored and processed in the disk. The way the flying head maintains the miniscule distance from the plate is particularly clever. You may remember the LCD monitor teardown by the Engineer Guy, equally as detailed and interesting. The video after the break is definitely worth a watch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiy_eHdj8kg&w=470]

6 thoughts on “Hard Drive Teardown

  1. The video is nicely done, he explains some concepts that are interesting(like the floating head) but the real tech behind it is on some totally higher level…
    I’d call it good for those that are totally parallel to technical stuff…

  2. “until something goes wrong”.. and it always does, in the most annoying devastating way, like your primary HD dying and the very next day your backup doing the same…

  3. Is this the dumbing down of hackaday? Who here doesn’t own an edition or seven of my good friend Scott Mueller’s work? Hasn’t every hardware hacker torn one apart at the least, if not more daring things like adding a window…and internal lighting?

    “…describe a hard drive in awesome detail without using any unnecessary scientific jargon…”

    Not only is that not possible, unnecessary scientific jargon is what geeks and nerds and especially hackers live for.

  4. I’d hardly call this “dumbing down”, it was an interesting video with good animations to illustrate each point. I’ve taken apart several hard drives and still learned some new things, like the way that the head is designed to self-correct.

  5. Some people are just elitist,and don’t want to spread the knowledge around to make more of us. Videos like this can get someone started down the road to hacking and making.

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