How to open the top cover on a hard drive. How to disassemble a hard drive from a laptop - tools and a simple technique

Disassembly external hard disk, the process in most cases is not complicated and fast. But as it turned out, this does not happen with all disks. When I got my hands on an HP pd500a external hard drive, everything was a little more complicated. The disk after the fall did not want to be determined through the USB port and nothing could be obtained. Having decided to disassemble and try a direct connection to a computer via a SATA cable, to extract at least some files.

In most drives, simply pulling out the top part is enough and we got to the hard drive itself. In this case, it was not so simple. After several attempts, the case did not give in, and in order not to break anything, I looked for information on how to disassemble the external HDD on the Internet, but apart from instructions for connecting to a computer, I did not find anything else. Therefore, I decided to write a small guide, maybe someone will find it useful. Looking ahead, I want to say that the hard drive does not have the ability to connect standard SATA, USB is soldered to the board itself.

It was immediately clear that the body rests on plastic latches. Taking the pick for disassembly, I began to look for where to catch on to disconnect the case.

Disassembling an HP External Hard Drive Pocket

At first glance, a simple and convenient case on which there is nothing superfluous.

As I said, not seeing any cover or part that could be easily and effortlessly removed, I began to look for where the picks would catch on. After twisting it in my hands for a few minutes, I saw two slightly visible holes on the top of the case.

The place where we will start is found. Picking up a mediator you can use a simple plastic card, but do not use screwdrivers and other metal objects, otherwise you will damage the case), we try to disconnect the fasteners.

Prying and passing along the entire length of the upper part of the case, the cover should rise slightly.

Finished with top in a similar way, we are like a mediator on both sides of the body, our outer hard drive. In some places, you may need to make an effort, but do not overdo it so as not to break the plastic latches.

Having removed the upper part of the cover, it remains only to remove the hard drive itself from the case and remove the rubber stands that serve to ensure that the drive does not create unnecessary noise during operation.

In order to get the HDD, just lift it up. There are no more fasteners, so you can safely get it.

This is how it should look unassembled. On the top of the case, which is on the right in the screenshot, you can see nine latches that held our case so tightly.

As I said earlier, the USB port is soldered onto the board itself, but there is no standard SATA.

As you understand, it was not possible to connect the disk and check it, therefore, we had to send it to the service. Also, I want to say that you should not unnecessarily disassemble your external hard drive from the company. In any case, even if you do everything carefully, after disassembly, small cracks and small scratches may appear on the case itself.

Here is a small guide to disassembling external hard drives from HP. If something did not work out, leave comments, I will try to help you. Also, don't forget to subscribe to RSS or email to stay tuned for updates on .

Disassembling an HP pd500a external hard drive

Our little Drone got a 1 TB hard drive from western digital(WD10EARS). There are already hundreds of tests of hard drives on the Internet, but few people disassemble the hard drive to the screw. Let's take a look at our copy, shall we?

We failed to unscrew the screws with a hex screwdriver, so we had to resort to brute physical force, and ... a power tool! In fact, there was no suitable hexagon at hand.

The screws didn’t want to give up so easily without a fight ...

And the last screw was unscrewed by bending the protective cover.

This did not stop our little Drone!

Along the edge of the top protective cover is a silicone (it seems) seal. It was glued very high quality, it was not possible to tear it off.

Here they are... mirrored hard drives. Unfortunately, as soon as we removed the lid, the entire surface was covered with small dust particles ...

Reading heads are located in a special holder in the grooves. This arrangement prevents damage to the plates during transportation, as well as when the hard drive is simply disconnected.

A very heavy hard drive...

We remove the board from the back of the hard drive. Between the hard drive and the back of the case there is a special sponge gasket that dampens vibrations.

The engine is controlled by 4 contacts, and the working heads are controlled by a whole contact group. The contact interface is very thoughtful.

Motor control

Control contacts of working heads

Component base printed circuit board

This, apparently, is the cache memory of the hard drive, manufactured by hynix

Whole fee

We notice branding, produced by Foxconn!

View from the back

The working head mechanism is located between two magnets. Apparently, the magnets are neodymium and have sufficient strength.

Coil of working heads. This coil generates an electromagnetic field that allows the mechanism of the heads to move in the magnetic field of the static magnets.

An excellent engineering solution, the beauty of shapes and lines… a perfectly polished surface.

Electronics of working heads. Look at the size of the contacts and the chip itself, imagine how accurate the manufacturing process must be.

Coil power wires

Parking slots. Please note that a 1 TB hard drive uses only 2 disks and 4 working heads. The discs have an ordinary thickness, up to 3 mm. The recording density is very high. Damage to even the smallest section of the disk will result in the loss of tens, hundreds of megabytes of data.

bottom magnet

The magnetic field is so strong that holding a magnet that is not screwed on can lift the entire hard drive.

Finally

In general, Western Digital's 1TB hard drive (model WD10EARS) has a fairly simple and well-thought-out design (which is very good), and at the same time, almost all components in it require pinpoint accuracy and complete sealing of the internal chamber. Opened at home, such a hard drive will certainly not work anymore!

We dismantled it solely in order to show its internal structure. Do not rush to scold us! Winchester came to us almost non-working. Further storage of information on it is no longer possible, tk. more and more appear bad sectors. This device has already served its owner enough, having worked out its price to a penny.

What is his future fate? Let's see... perhaps we will be able to find a new role for him, a new image.

Happy day, friends! After reading this article, you will advance somewhat in the field of understanding the processes that occur with a hard drive when its geometry is violated.

Researching the issue, I watched a set of videos on YouTube, which turned out to be on request "how a hard drive works." The author went through, somewhere, the first 50 videos and, in some of them, met explanations of one phenomenon. Namely: why, after we opened the disk after some time of work, it is “covered with bads”. They explained it with dust. Dust is, no doubt, evil for a disk, but if you take a closer look, then bads do not appear in random places, but in strictly defined ones. There is another one of the most common malfunctions of this type - the hard drive was not touched, but it stopped working. That is, it, as in the first described case, “became covered with bads” not just anywhere, but strictly according to a certain scheme: the areas that are most often recorded partially ceased to be read, while there was not a single defect on the rest of the disk space! And if you try to “repair” such a disk with a total recording of the surface, then almost all of it will be in bads. This situation cannot be explained by the ingress of dust and, as a result, the occurrence of a scratch.

I thought it would be good to set up detailed experiments showing the relationship between changes in the behavior of a hard drive before and after a mechanical violation was introduced, that is, removing / installing the cover. In the near future, the author has already planned a series of such experiments, but for now I will describe the fate of the hero in general terms - without laboratory experimental justifications.

So what happens when we loosen/tighten the screws securing the head assembly (rocker arm)? The axis of rotation is shifted. Such a shift entails the appearance of a beating track. Let's try to draw the geometry of the resulting situation.

On old disks, the calculation speed in the track tracking program was low and, when beating more than a certain value, it did not have time to respond to the track escaping from under the head and the disk began to knock.

But! Our hard drive is not in a plane, but in volume! There is also a tilt of the axis of rotation.

Therefore, for some heads, the offset is less from the original position, while for others it is more. And the lower head will be pressed harder, and the upper one is weaker. As a result, the flight height above the magnetic surface will decrease at the bottom, and increase at the top. It's like we used to read text at the same distance, and now the distance has increased, so we need to change the focus in order to read the text well again. But what if the focus has already been turned to the maximum, but the text is still unreadable? We get BAD sectors!

The next question that an inquisitive reader will ask is why, in fact, does the shift in the position of the axis of rotation affect anything at all? The fact is that the marking of the tracks (here you can tell a lot about the difference between physical and logical formatting, but we will leave this story for the future) is already done on a fully assembled disk. Therefore, the mutual arrangement of circles-tracks and centers of rotation is, as it were, fixed and the tracks do not “run away” from under the head. If we change the distance between the axes, then, as shown above (Figure 1), beats will appear.

Previously, the hard disk management program could not take into account the displacement of the axis of rotation, because the sum of the runouts of the bearing on the rocker arm and the bearing of the spindle motor for an undamaged disk was less than the track size. As soon as the sum of the beats became larger, it was already necessary to implement the software prediction of the beat and its compensation by moving the head with the voice coil in the direction opposite to the head leaving the track.

There is also a situation when the beat prediction system breaks down, which leads to the fact that the disk stops being read ... But more on that some other time, since in most disks the obscuration of fortune tellers with astrologers leads to a slowdown in reading speed and an even greater slowdown in write speed rather than a complete loss of the ability to read.

Everything was great as long as the data was written to the same head. But, starting from about 1 Gigabyte disks per surface, separate read and write heads began to be used. And we already have two arcs!

The read head goes along one arc, and the write head goes along the other. When shifting between the centers of rotation, the recording head will no longer fall on the track on which it fell before. In other words, the program thinks it's writing track number 10, but it's actually recording track number 9! And, since the data on neighboring tracks are slightly rotated relative to each other and / or its number is used in the calculation of the checksum of the sector, the disk will no longer be able to recognize such a sector as healthy.

We get the conclusion: as a result of changing the distance between the rotation axes, writing data leads to the fact that in places where the data should be written, they remain old, and neighboring data is damaged!

However, in fairness, this conclusion is too ideal. In reality, the data is written in zigzags, so both tracks will be damaged, one that we write, and the other adjacent. But they are also read in a zigzag (from the beating of both / two bearings), so the picture is obtained: multiple reading repetitions allow subtracting some of the sectors.

But on disks with volumes of more than 250 gigabytes per surface, the situation has become even more complicated due to the advent of a head flight altitude control system by heating a spring with a resistor, which measures this height by the quality of the signal from the surface. So, when some of our orientation points are damaged, the flight altitude is calculated incorrectly and the entire head either bites into the surface, or flies too high and does not see the data (the above example was with focal length and reading text)!

And now, not like just now: piezo positioners have also been added with their own behavior in the event of axes displacement - darkness!

I think the inquisitive reader has already understood how complicated everything is interconnected and that it’s better not to breathe on a hard disk ... No, you can still breathe on a closed disk! :) In any case, we made a modest attempt to integrate experimental experience, study patents and etc. In the future, the author will try to put well evidence-based experiments on different disks, confirming and supplementing the conclusions of this note.

Good time everyone! This article is devoted to the topic of the device hard HDD working through the SATA interface and is for informational purposes only! We will clearly see how to disassemble a hard drive. We will simply disassemble it and visually study its device.

Therefore, immediately

WARNING: do not disassemble the computer hard drive! Never and in no case do with your "hard" what is described in this article! Next, you will see and understand why it is impossible to disassemble a “working” hard drive. In this article, we will disassemble a completely faulty HDD, which can no longer be restored.

Let's start with an external examination. The front side with a metal cover and a sticker looks quite nice. I draw your attention to the fact that this cover is fastened with special screws under the "star". However, absolutely all nodes of the hard drive are attached with such screws.

But what you and I see from the reverse side (bottom) will shock any radio amateur, and any person who has at least some relation to electronics. Deep scratches on the control board are clearly visible, as well as the absence of a cable from the engine control controller.

So the conclusion is unequivocal: our "hard" was in the hands of a vandal or, most likely, a small child and is not working with a 100% probability.

And the second conclusion: the hard drive is a fragile thing and requires special handling. Therefore, you can not drop it, throw it, throw it, disassemble it, and, even more so, leave it alone with small children.

So, armed with a star screwdriver, unscrew all the cover screws. For some reason she does not want to act! It turns out that another screw is hidden under the factory sticker. We unscrew it, remove the cover and admire the beauty of this engineering miracle. Beautiful, isn't it? It looks like some expensive turntable. Although, in general, in fact it is so.

The basis of our “hard” is made up of two aluminum discs coated with a ferromagnetic layer (the discs can be made of any other non-magnetic material, for example, durable glass, only the coating matters). The second most important part is the movable rod with the head of the record / read.

The principle of operation is similar to a conventional turntable: the discs rotate and the head moves along the discs, reading the magnetized areas. Recording takes place in exactly the same way, only the head itself magnetizes / demagnetizes certain areas. However, if in a player the head is equipped with a needle for reading sound from a plate and, as it were, crawling along it, scratching, then in a hard disk the head does not touch the surface of the disks - everything happens electromagnetically.

The rotation of the disks is controlled by a small motor controlled by a controller on the board (the cable from which is broken in our case). The movement of the rod with the head is carried out according to the principle of an electromagnet. In the back, it has a coil, which is fed electricity. The coil itself is located between two permanent magnets. Depending on the strength of the current, the strength of the electromagnetic field changes and the bar deviates by a certain angle. This mechanism is controlled by a separate controller. See the plume in the picture above to the right of the bar? It is through it that control takes place, as well as data exchange between the head and the board (the brain of the hard drive).

As we have already noted, in the “hard” design there are two disks put on the engine spindle and separated by bushings and a special bulkhead. Since there are two disks, there should also be two heads. An-no! There are actually four heads, since writing / reading occurs on both sides of each disk.

The board, unfortunately, could not be carefully removed, since the "stars" with which it is attached are much smaller. So I just broke it off as neatly as possible.

On the board are:

• a chip, like a BIOS, that records the manufacturer, model, capacity, and other factory settings
• multiple mechanical controllers
• cache (small RAM) for data exchange
• the data transfer module directly, including via the SATA interface (contacts from it are visible at the bottom of the board)
• microprocessor that controls and synchronizes the operation of all modules
• other auxiliary microcircuits

USEFUL:

Summing up, I would like to say two things.

Firstly The article is for informational purposes only. It simply demonstrates how you can theoretically disassemble a hard drive and demonstrates it internal organization. It is impossible to disassemble a working, normal hard drive.

second moment associated with the first. I would really like the reader, now already knowing about the device of the hard drive and having clearly looked at what parts it consists of, once again, trying to connect your drive to another computer (no matter how) or during production, understand that the hard drive - the device is electronic and at the same time electromechanical. It contains many small and fragile parts, open fee, many moving mechanical parts. However, this "device" is not cheap. Therefore, my friends, be softer with your "hard", love it)))

But seriously, be extremely careful when connecting and transporting hard drives in order to extend their service life as long as possible.

P.S. you can see a full photo report on how this hard drive was disassembled.

How to disassemble a hard drive- a look at the disk drive from the inside brought interesting revelations in terms of the overall design and puzzled with some details. I have two external USB disk Samsung 1.8″, which I used to Reserve copy all your work. Their capacity is 250 GB.

I kept one of them in a safe, used the other one and swapped disks once a month. But now I have solid state drive 1 TB. I recently pulled Samsung drives out of the box to make sure they still work. One of them worked, but only once. After copying a bunch of music files to disk, it lived for a few days and then just hung up my Windows 7 laptop. It was a great excuse for an engineer to take it apart (Figure 1).

What I immediately liked about the drive was its size (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Samsung 1.8″ drive has a built-in USB controller and is powered only by the USB connector

The principle of disk disassembly

It is smaller than a deck of cards, but at the same time it kept the results of all my work. Thanks to availability of USB I could take the disc to work if I needed old file. One of the reasons I took it out of the box was to see if it could supply music to my new Joying Android car stereo and also to understand how to disassemble hard drive.

It turned out that Joying, in principle, sees the disk and plays music, but I killed my drive for it, because I formatted it in NTFS a few years ago. The forums have explained to me that most car stereos require external storage file system FAT32.

Figure 3. Rubber shock absorbers cushion the drive inside its plastic housing

The actuator was mounted in a plastic housing with two embedded rubber shock absorbers (Figure 3). Consumer goods manufacturers seem to love polyimide film, as evidenced by the small piece attached to the USB connector housing.

Elegant interiors

Figure 4. The unfolded parts of the disk drive show high precision production of a consumer product in a large-scale production environment

The internals of the drive are elegant and very well constructed (Figure 4). How to disassemble a hard drive and the disassembly sequence is shown in the pictures. On the left, an injection-molded top case cover with a black damping pad in the center. The gasket and part of the screws are scattered in 8 different places in the photo. The label is visible above the lid. Next is one of the rubber shock absorbers. Then we see the top part of the drive housing stamped from sheet metal with the spindle nut and one of the "pancakes" above it.

They are followed by magnets and a block of heads. Above is a washer separating two “pancakes”. Next, we see the lower part of the stamped body with the spindle motor installed. To their right is the orange head parking mechanism, as well as another rubber bumper. Even to the right lies the printed circuit board on which all the electronics are mounted. In general, to understand how to disassemble hard drive- there is nothing difficult in this

To make the drive as thin as possible, a large hole and corner cuts are made in the board. Above printed circuit board there is a metallized overlay that is electrically connected to the USB connector housing and covers the USB bridge chip. In the far right corner lies the bottom cover with an insulating gasket separating the printed circuit board from the drive. The black damping pad remained in its original place.

Drive circuit board

Figure 5. The shape of the printed circuit board of the disk drive repeats all its insides

Via holes, which are sewn through the entire perimeter of the printed circuit board, prevent the emission of electromagnetic interference from its edges (Figure 5). This is the back side of the PCB. On the left is a connector for connecting floating heads. The quartz resonator and the JM20335 USB-ATA bridge chip were covered with a metallized gasket.

Figure b. On the reverse side drive circuit board also has components and connectors

The TLS2309 controller chip from Texas Instruments is installed on the inside of the printed circuit board (Figure 6). This chip controls the spindle motor, which is plugged into a connector on the top corner of the board. A large tantalum capacitor standing nearby provides the motor with a pulsed current. Below we see the Marvell 88i8038 chip - the PATA interface controller (parallel ATA) and the read head interface. In the right corner is a USB connector. Below it is a blue LED that lights up when a drive is connected. Under the LED is a voltage regulator chip.

Figure 7. The four-pin connector for the spindle motor is a sophisticated design connected to a flexible circuit installed in the housing

Flat cable connector

The spindle motor's flat cable connector is very cleverly designed (Figure 7). A screw running straight through the middle of the connector ensures that constant pressure is maintained on the pins. All contacts appear to be gold plated. The black insulating gasket is in its structural position. It probably also serves as a sound absorber. In addition, it can be conductive enough to shield the spindle motor, which emits electromagnetic interference during operation.

The spindle motor is epoxy bonded to the metal case and left in place (Figure 8). The rocker arm and floating head connector are made in the form of an independent assembly unit. This allows you to check them before the final assembly. You can see the loop of wires between the magnets that keeps the heads moving. The magnets are made from rare earth compounds and are very strong. The rocker was fixed to the body with three screws.

Figure 9. The function of a small piece of black plastic in the upper right corner of the case is a mystery

Inside the disc was a mysterious piece of black plastic (Figure 9). The underside was vented to the atmosphere. But the inner cavity seemed to be sealed from the inside of the disk. Maybe the white film on top is a permeable membrane that allows air pressure to equalize inside and outside the actuator. Another mysterious detail is a small white overlay. It was covered by a black plastic part, but I can't figure out what it could be used for.