Electronics > Beginners
Mysterious component found on most HDD PCBs
TERRA Operative:
It would be interesting to take the lid off a HDD and film it being dropped to see what happens.
TheGeologist:
Has anyone pulled one of these off to play with? Are they useful for other things such as collision detection?
Have many old motherboards and always interested to make use of them before I run out of space and have to dispose of them.
I wanted a rude username:
--- Quote from: tchicago on December 27, 2019, 12:43:24 am ---Thanks! Really interesting. I guess my next step would be to take some unneeded HDD apart and see how this feature works and how effective it is. Maybe Dave would have made an interesting educational video out of this :)
--- End quote ---
You can also test it on a working drive by performing a data transfer and monitoring it as you simulate freefall. I recall from playing around with this about 10 years ago that from the OS's perspective, the disk appears to freeze, but does come back after a few seconds. Tape a microphone to the drive and you should be able to clearly hear it park and unpark.
You can of course film a disk performing this feature, and that would make for good YouTube fodder, but be sure to set everything up 100% before opening the disk because it will start malfunctioning almost immediately due to dust.
tchicago:
--- Quote from: I wanted a rude username on December 27, 2019, 04:46:09 am ---
You can also test it on a working drive by performing a data transfer and monitoring it as you simulate freefall. I recall from playing around with this about 10 years ago that from the OS's perspective, the disk appears to freeze, but does come back after a few seconds. Tape a microphone to the drive and you should be able to clearly hear it park and unpark.
You can of course film a disk performing this feature, and that would make for good YouTube fodder, but be sure to set everything up 100% before opening the disk because it will start malfunctioning almost immediately due to dust.
--- End quote ---
I've operated the old HDDs with cover removed countless number of times, writing and reading data, random seeks, etc. They operate for amount of time sufficient for getting bored of watching it work, i.e. at least half an hour. Did it mostly for fun, but also studied the effect of a strong magnetic field using a strong magnet from other hard drive. I does not appear to be affecting the performance of HDD unless the magnet physically touches the surface of the rotating platter. That is probably because the magnetic head operates on a strong and very local magnetic field changing with the high frequency, so adding a significant external "DC" component to that field does not affect head's operation at all.
I don't have any good video filming setup, lighting, mic and stuff though, so it could be an interesting to watch if Dave can set it up. With a bonus of poking around with oscilloscope and seeing the output from those piezo sensors.
AVGresponding:
Very interesting... glad I'm a magpie and don't throw things away, these could be useful toys ;D
And their days are numbered, one impact they can't withstand is the growing ubiquity of SSDs, so salvage them while you can!
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