What we do . . .

[jono-ats]

Here's a photo of a tiny read/write head from a laptop hard drive. To give you a better sense of scale, I've positioned it to look like a mustache on a dime, making Roosevelt's visage appear like his WWII nemesis.

A 2 TB laptop drive has 8 of these tiny heads in a stack. Sometimes we have to spread them apart and clean them . . . all under a microscope. The heads are very delicately attached to arms. One small mishap and the head stack is toast.

Attachments

Roosevelt small.jpg (133.72 KiB) Viewed 6480 times

[michael chiklis]

I've positioned it to look like a mustache on a dime, making Roosevelt's visage appear like his WWII nemesis.

[digitalferret]

nice scale comparison .... puts a perspective on the "should i take the lid off and.." type of questions we see.


"Little Britain" take
http://blogimages.project76.tv/blog/old/Waterman.jpg

[Dmitri]

A 2 TB laptop drive has 8 of these tiny heads in a stack. Sometimes we have to spread them apart and clean them . . . all under a microscope. The heads are very delicately attached to arms. One small mishap and the head stack is toast.

And sometimes we have to recover the data even when those heads look funny, not like a stack at all.

Attachments

WD20EARS with smashed heads

[seed.helper]

thanks for the pictures

[northwind]

And sometimes we have to recover the data even when those heads look funny, not like a stack at all.

Did this drive fall off a skyscraper or something?

[Dmitri]

And sometimes we have to recover the data even when those heads look funny, not like a stack at all.

Did this drive fall off a skyscraper or something?

Unfortunately, at this moment I can't tell for sure what was the story behind that job. During their infrequent spare time our guys also like to do different interesting things and taking such pictures is among them.
So I just pulled this photo, but the file name contained nothing besides the model. Also modification date is mid-2011, so no way to remember what happened back then.

But generally yes, that's either a physical influence or a power loss at an appropriate moment (quite possible thing for a drive with outward parking).

[hhddrec]

hi Dmitri!

i have sawn lot of this heads