Western Digital Hard Drive 2TB Teardown
Taking things appart is always fun and mechanical hard drives are no exception. They are fun to take apart but doing so can also be practical.
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Destroy Platters - One thing I always like to do before throwing away a drive is to destroy the platters. This is a good way to ensure that the drives will not be readable by anyone in the future. Obviously, only do this if you are sure that all your data has been saved. Remember, you don’t want to just throw away a hard drive without destroying it first. Someone is likely do come along and browes through all of your data.
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Salvage Magnets - While you probably won’t find very many valuable parts inside to salvage you will generally find magnets. These are always nice to grab.
It is always good to have tools for this type of work. Also they come in handy for all sorts of other things. I would recommend something like this:
Generally, I wouldn’t recommend opening a hard drive unless you are planning to dispose of it. If you plan to continue using the drive you probably shouldn’t open it up.
It is possible to open drives, work on them, and potentially fix them. This is sometimes done for data recovery purposes. The platters from one drive can be moved to a working drive. This takes a lot of skill an knowlege. If you know how to do this correctly then your skills are way beyond anything that I could possibly cover on this page. If you are taking advice from me then you probably aren’t anywhere even close to this skill level.