Well, we didn’t cut it up for science… or did we? Poor Seagate, if they can’t get 20GB right, what hope do we have for larger drives? Just kidding! I know all drives have potential to fail. It’s just it always seems to be Seagate when I look at the label. Bad luck I suppose!

This particular 20 GB drive was already faulty, so I thought I’d take the lid off and have a look at what was hiding inside. After locating the obligatory hidden screw, we finally get a nice view of the platter, actuator arm and the magnets that help move the heads around.

The platter has a rather beautiful mirror finish, and you can even see the camera reflected in it. There’s also a mechanism for parking the heads safely when the drive isn’t being used. Quite a lot of clever engineering crammed into a little metal box.

Of course, after taking the mechanism apart, this particular drive wasn’t going to be reading anything again. Not that it had been doing a particularly good job of that beforehand!

All this talk of failing drives reminded me of something rather important: backups. At the time I had multiple copies of my important data, along with mirrored storage for a bit of redundancy. You really can’t have too many backups, especially when dealing with old mechanical drives.