Fujitsu Hard Drive from Vaio Laptop

I promised my roommate I would either erase the data on this HD with a stereo magnet, or take it apart making it useless. Needless to say, I opted for option 2. Its s a fujitsu HD model # MHW2120BH - a 120GB drive discontinued according to Newegg. I've always heard hard drives are fun to take apart, but this was my first opportunity. It did not disappoint.

It started easily enough - with a few screws and the protective cover removed. Gotta say, I do love when I come across the royal blue circuit boards rather than the plain old dark green.

The circuit board removed pretty easily as well. It looks a bit like it could work as a light switch cover with minimal modification. A beautiful piece.

Here's where I ran into some problems though. Really, one problem: A specialty star screw right in the middle... taunting me. I contemplated leaving it at that for a few days, but eventually broke down and went to buy a Torx screw driver to undo it. Curiosity was too much.

With the Torx screw gone, the metal casing still took a good bit of prying to get open - there was an adhesive strip around the whole outer edge which I originally thought was to make it harder to open for people like me. You know, because I could be "stealing secrets". But my other roommate informed me that he thinks HDs are usually sealed to prevent the data disks from oxidizing. Sounds plausible.

This little guy was a bit of a mystery. I thought it was an RFID tag for a second (the things put in CDs and movies to prevent theft from stores), but I opened it up and turns out it was just a pad for shock absorption.

Man that's a mirror finish, my goodness. That disk you see is where all the 1's and 0's live.

Check out all the cool stuff. The long arm just above the disk is what moves across the disk and writes the data to it with what I believe are some sort of magnetic pads on the end. Didn't take the time to look up how it all works exactly.

And look! another Torx screw. At the store I almost didn't buy the screw driver for it because I thought I could just unscrew the first one there discretely. Now I'm, glad I did get it.

Well look at that. There seem to be two data disks in there, one on top of the other.

Next, I popped out the writing arm. It seems to be attached to what appears to be a rather important little chip in the corner there. There are little pins on the chip's underside which plugged into the circuit board from before.

Interesting, There were two sections to this little piece, hinged onto itself.

The chip removed.

The writing arms appear to be in a cluster of 4 - one magnetic pad for writing on each side of both disks. I would assume that larger capacity HDs would have 3 or 4 disks each with its own pair of writing arms. The tiny screw seen in the photo didn't do a darn thing when unscrewed, by the way. Shame.

The entrails and organs of the poor thing.

A rather simple take-apart, but each piece was impressive in its machined precision. I would imagine these pieces are made to at least +/- a few thousandths of an inch. I expect a fair number more of HDs to come my way in the future, so it'll be interesting to see how each one (and each manufacturer) differs.