Re: [tlug] "Seagate 80GB HDD Autopsy"

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

I made several changes to the text:
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PDF/PDF_History/PH_01/SeagateHDD.html


"Seagate 80GB HDD Autopsy"

I like to take apart broken machines before wrestling them kicking and 
screaming into the garbage or - giving up the fight - putting them into 
a drawer to sleep for years until a still working part finds a second 
life in another machine.  And so I started loosening screws on the front 
and back covers of my dead 80GB Seagate hard drive out of habit, but 
without really expecting to get very far due to past experience with 
bank vault hard drives that required a sledge hammer and blow torch to 
open.

[Photo at site of drive parts]

I was pleasantly surprised (in a melancholy way of course; I would much 
rather have that drive alive and still working) to discover that it 
wasn't taped, welded, riveted or glued shut, but came apart quite 
easily.  The dissection of the device then turned out to be far more 
educational than I had expected.  More than anything, I like to get the 
hard drive disks as very cool mirrors and figured any problems were 
within the IC chips and absolutely impossible to see, so imagine my 
surprise to discover a couple of what I consider to be design faults in 
the drive:

1) The bottom cover shouldn't be there.  It's probably to make the drive 
quieter, although the cover itself claims:
    "This SeaShield (TM) helps protect your drive from electrostatic 
damage and makes installation easier."
    But whether it's actually there for electrostatic protection or for 
noise, and regardless of whether it was actually the cause of the 
drive's catastrophic failure, it, with it's blue foam right up against 
the chips of the drive's circuit board, has got to elevate temperatures, 
and high temperatures are an enemy to long life of electronics.
    There's a simple solution to this though - if you have a similar 
Seagate drive, just remove the two screws that hold the steel cover (the 
bottom, not the top!) with it's insulating blue foam, and remove the 
bloody thing!  I've been looking at hard drives with exposed circuit 
boards for years and years, I think that's probably the best way for it 
to be, with the chips out in the open and better able to cool.  Unless, 
of course, the cover is there for a mechanical reason, such as to add 
physical force on the circuit board to keep sufficient(?) pressure on 
the badly designed contact points (see #2 below) that electrically 
connect the circuit board to the rest of the hard drive.
   (Disclaimer - If you remove that cover on your Seagate drive and 
anything happens, including fire, smoke and flaming hard drive, I am NOT 
responsible.  I'm just expressing my opinion here about the heat theory- 
it's your responsibility whether or not you agree with my reasoning!)

[Photo at stie of Seagate drive contacts]

2) A real shocker - I discovered a no-plug, by-pressure-only set of 
connectors for the drive's circuit board (this has always been a proper 
plug in other drives I've taken apart).  While I haven't seen this 
arrangement in any other hard drive, it was used for a certain model 
Sony AM radio I bought about 12-14 years ago.  That radio would work for 
a few months and then it would cut out from time to time and you'd have 
to hit it to reestablish contact with either/or the speaker connectors 
or battery connections.  Twice I took it in for repairs and they just 
cave me a new one - which ended up with the same problem after a month 
or two.  The third time they gave me that same bloody design, I wrote to 
the factory and explained that the design was defective and they 
actually answered my letter and the next time I got the radio back, they 
had soldered the speaker and battery connectors - and finally actually 
fixed the problem (the next model of the radio had a different design, 
if I remember correctly).
    Now - a cheap radio with a design that is obviously designed for 
easy assembly and not long life is one thing, but using that inferior 
and bloody overoptimistic design in a hard drive is begging for disaster 
I think!  Seagate?  Hello?  Cut that nonsense out already!!!

I haven't dissected the type of 120GB IBM/Hitachi drive I'm using now, 
but I expect (hope-hope-hope) that it is of a more robust design.  We're 
talking about the hard drive after all!  The one device in the computer 
that really should be overbuilt.  A burned out sound card is one thing, 
but loosing the hard drive is a traumatic experience.

Lyle H Saxon