On the newer Seagatew drives there is a plastic spacer between the platters that seems to be preventing people from swapping the platters. Does anyone have a workaround for this to enable swapping the platters to another drive? This is going to be a real PITA if more and more drives start to use that design.

I'm curious. I haven't seen this plastic spacer yet. How does it prevent platter swap?

The black plastic spacer surrounds and intrudes more than half of the circumference of the platters. The spacers also intrude into the platters making the use of a tool such as the salvation data platter extractor impossible. On these multiplatter drives you can not remove the platter one at time, they must come out together witout moving position. Atleast I've never herd of it being done with any success.

I've tried to attach a picture of a Seagate500GB drive withthe spacers. Ive outlined them in red in the photo. The drive in the photo is just for test purposes, not an actual data recovery drive.

I have another Segate drive here a that has been dropped 5ft and the the bearings are seized. We were going to swap platters until we found out about the spacers. Now we are gonig to try a bearing alignment tool to correct the problem. Hopefully that have some success because I'm not sure wheat else we can do to free up a seized motor.

Reguards

Wow! That's a nasty thing for Seagate to do... Maybe that will get Seagate's data recovery division more business....

I cut that spacer carefully to do platter swaping

DF

_________________
DF
www.datatracksystem.net

Does the spacer actually do anything? I thought it might have been for aiming airflow for head unloading. It's only purpose is to make platter swapping more difficult? Wow...

DF care to explain HOW you cut the spacer?
I have 3 of these drives right now that have frozen spindles

I am also interested to know how you cut the spacers? Got any photos of it being done?

Hey DF any update on how to remove those spacers?

DF it is impossible to remove the spacers unless you remove the platters, if you were to cut the spacers the dust particles will mess up the platters, if you were to grind off the screws, you still need to slide the spacers away which will scratch the platters. Unless you have a magic voodoo thingy

Hello friends.

Yes i have seen this spacer. but i was not talking about this type.

Can you post the disk model type. so that i can work on it.

Thanks.
DF

_________________
DF
www.datatracksystem.net

Barracuda 7200.8
ST3300831A

Seems like a tool could be made, similar to the salvation tool, that grabs the outer edge of the platters at only three points. Maybe right at the filter, directly under that, then at one other exposed point. At least thats what it looks like from the pic.