The internal components of a HDD.
On most occasions, we consider it important to explain to customers what exactly has gone wrong with their hard disk drive. Given that most people have never looked inside a hard disk drive this can be tricky. We advise that under no circumstances should you expose the platters as shown in the picture below. Doing so is likely to make any data unrecoverable if the disk is not handled in an appropriate manner.
In the example below a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drive is used.
Key to Illustration Inside a Hard Drive:
- Air filter.
- Platter spacers.
- Permanent magnets.
- Platter landing zone.
- Platter motor.
- Data platter.
- Read/Write heads’ pre-amplifier circuit (in this case mounted on the side of the arm assembly).
- Read/write heads.
- Connections from the read/write heads through to the printed circuit board at the back.
