Transparent disk platters???

Hello,

Yesterday, I opened a IBM ULTRASTAR 36gb SCSI disk that was technically dead as it was always "Not ready" to the controller. It wouldn't even show up in any software that I used. So with nothing else to lose I opened it to see if the heads were stuck or something.
What I found surprised me. It has a stack of 6 platters, but they seem to be transparent (or translucent I should say) as I can see through them. I know that some disks have glass platters, but the ones that I've opened before had a magnetic layer and they were not transparent at all. This is something new to me. Are there really transparent platters or is it the case that the heads crashed and kept turning at 10,000 RPM stripping the platters of the magnetic layer?

Thanks!
Gabriel

It`s often problem for this drives
I think this is DDYS drive, isn`t it ?

This drive is absolutely crashed, because magnetic layer into the air filter now :)
Information from this drive is unrecoverable

Yes, its a DDYS-36950 if I remember correctly. So, you're saying that what used to be the magnetic layer is now dust that was collected by the air filter, right?

hp9000 wrote: So, you're saying that what used to be the magnetic layer is now dust that was collected by the air filter, right?

Yes, you are right