Hard Drive Dissection Part 5

While I was doing the final disposal of junk out of my old office, I found an ancient Dell Latitude XPi with a Pentium 120MHz CPU in it. From it, I harvested the next victimhard drive to be dissected: a 810MB Seagate ST9816AG that probably dates back to the mid 90s.

Underneath the cover. Looks pretty ordinary. Despite the huge advances in HD storage tech, the basics really haven’t changed all that much.

Like with most 2.5″ form factor drives, the magnets are pretty small and slim. Still pretty strong magnets though.

This particular drive was made up of 4 platters. Note the motor in the center made up of wire coils and magnets.

The read/write heads