Onno's Blog

Ever wanted to know where all those bytes go that manage to fill up your drive?

A few weeks ago I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook. Since then the old one had been sitting on my desk waiting for me to erase the data on it. This afternoon that gave me an idea: destroy the data on the drive by taking it apart and do some still photography.

Armed with various screw drivers, a tripod, a flash and a camera I set up shop on and around the dining room table to perform the operation (*). The hard drive plates themselves are of a very reflective metallic material so photographing them required putting them off center so that the camera didn’t show in the image.

As you can see this 320 GB drive consists of two double-sided plates and thus the arm has multiple heads to read and write data from and to the plates. Removing the metal case from the back side of the drive in order to get at the internals required some force so this drive this definitely dead and its data securely erased.

The 2.5" laptop drive

The processor plate

Back side

This drive has two plates

The reading arm

The plates removed

It is amazing that two of these thin 2.5 inch disks can hold 320 GB of data. Of course, the MacBook now has a 500GB drive of the same dimensions – the manufacturers continue to squeeze more and more in.

(*) One hard drive was harmed in the photographing of this blog entry…

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