ruggb wrote:
You have had your learning experience. HDD are assembled in a clean room with micron air filters. The reason is that the heads fly at a height of about 3 NANOmeters. ANY spec of dust on that surface will cause a head crash. Replacing a PCB on a drive is about the only thing you can do outside of a clean room. Now that you have breached that seal, remove the magnet and have fun with it. The drive is toast.
Hi ruggb, thank you for your reply. I am aware of what you said. but. There is no important data on this drive and I have done head replacement before - on my desk - and afterwards got all data off the "repaired drive". Believe it or not, some nano-dust particles will not immediate kill the drive. Of course I would not recommend this to anyone - agree - but my experience shows it is very well possible to read data after replacing heads without a clean room. Just my personal, poor, limited experience. I would not recommend it, of course, if there really is sensitive data on it.