Hard disk platters aren't aluminum any more. Who knew?

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wfooshee

wfooshee

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So a customer hands me a known defective drive and asks me to destroy and dispose of it. My normal process for this is a big supermagnet (makes the subwoofers in your car look tame) we keep handy for such occasions.

Well, for some reason I thought I'd be different and spike this one into the ground. It landed flat on its cover and bounced a few times. When I picked it up it rattled.

Curious about the rattling, I opened it up:

DSC00084.JPG


Seems newer drives use a glass/ceramic substrate instead of aluminum, which can be made thinner, and stands up to heat better. Not so good for serious drops, though (or being thrown very hard into the floor!)

I wonder what OnTrack would say if I called for data recovery . . . . . :sly:
 
Well... Yes... I knew that last year since I went to an internship where I took broken school computers(Mind you that some of the these computers had Pentium 4's. That means they are more than 5 years old) apart and destroyed hard drives. It's not really a new thing actually.
 
My 25+ years of PC work has been spent building and fixing them, especially servers and networks. I've never actually tried to destroy a hard drive beyond the SuperMagnet before. I really had no idea they weren't still metal platters.
 
They've been using glass for some time now. In addition to the heat resistance (which I don't believe is a major factor although I could be wrong), they can get a much smoother surface with glass than aluminum. This allows the heads to fly closer to the surface, increasing data density.
 
Nope, thats new to me. My job used to be safely destorying hard drives out of pharmacy computers and they all had the aluminium platters. Nothing a handy sized sledge hammer cant fix :D
 

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