Uses for old hard drive platters?

Having made a prize winning "rocker cover racer"last year,(see my avatar and album) I have been asked to make many more for other folk. Enter my 12" high stack of hard drive discs,and large collection of bearings from same. As the wheels must not have any metal in contact with the track, I use the hard drive discs to strenthen thin plastic discs. One thing i must warn you all that the smaller discs from laptop hard drives are often made from glass,so not a good idea to throw them into the melting pot. Ian, once i got part way down the pile, quite a lot were 'wrung' togther.

Cheers Derek

Hi Derek,

I haven't come across any glass ones as yet, but will keep my eyes open for them now that you mention it, thanks. They probably wouldn't react well with my bandsaw blade!

Good luck with the rocker cover racers.

JD

I used to build disk drives at HP Bristol. Model No. C2490A (aka Wolverine 2) 2.1 Gbyte (cost about $4000 each back in 1994 ). The only thing I've seen disks re-used for is as somebody suggested, mirrors. How about melting them down and re-using the ally? Or coffee cup coasters.

With a ferrous coating it's a shame they can't be used as some kind of rotary encoder with the degrees written into the surface.

Thanks guys - some food for thought there!

Regards,

Tony

Hi Tony,

I have one in each of my tool boxes, for me the make great mirrors no fear of any broken glass.

One should always look ones best in the workshop!!

Cheers Paul.

Most recent HDD's have cast ali frames not zinc alloy which went out about a decade ago. You can give the frames a quick skim in a mill to give a thin rectangular slab which can then be used for all sorts of milling setups, if you need an extra hole or two then drill it!.

However before scrapping the drive it is worth trying recovery software such as Spinrite 6 to find out if the drive is beyond help. Mostly they are recoverable. Commercial recovery services do remove the platter from a failed drive to prevent further loss from damaged heads or electronics. They then mount the platter in their own equipment.

Drives made in the last year are unreliable, brand new drives from well respected brands often fail within a month so it is more important than ever before to run a RAID config AND to do independant back ups.

Billy.

Hi Tony, you could make a floating compass out of one, see photos.

Regards Nick.

I have just put some photos in my album,showing some discs,and some of the things i have made with them. The ornament earned me a few brownie points. I hope they may give you all some ideas for using them.

Cheers Derek

Hi Tony

I recently had my nephew over for work experirnce. Not a lot of work on so we started pulling apart about ten years work of accumulated hard disks. There were about two hundred and it took quite a bit of time. At the end we ended up with loads of chassis, some stainless and the platters.

I took them all off the a scrap yard to see what I could get for them and it turned out that we averaged $0.50/hr. A complete waste of time.

The platters are cut from very high purity aluminium, wash ground, sputtered with a cobalt based alloy and then burnished, spanked soundly and sent to bed without supper.

They are a problem like just about anything to do with dead electronic componentry.

Really they are several problems. Firstly they contain loats of useful very high purity minerals.

Secondly, they contain them is such small quantities that they it is not ecconomically feasible to reclaim those minerals.

Thirdly many of the minerals are toxic albeit in the single computer there is little chance of anyone getting sick.

In the 1850's here in Victoria we had a mamoth gold rush and many people from around the world decided to have a go. Included in those people wre many Chinese. The Chinese copped it a bit from the round eyes for all sorts of reasons, not least of which that they were Chinese.

We had riots, something Anglo Saxons are quite good at.

At the heart of the riots which killed many Chinese was the fact that the Chinese were prepared to work harder for smaller reward than the mostly British expats. The Chinese would go through the tailings and mullock heaps after the whitey's had finished with them and pick out the flecks that no-one else could be bothered with. The made some money and got killed.

The three most noticable minerals in a computer are steel, aluminium and gold.

I don't know of any metal recyclers who will take steel and pay you for it in quantities of less than 500kg. Aluminium is broken into several classes according the the amount of other crap there is adhering to it or incorporated within it. Thus you will not be able to convince your local metalo that the aluminium platters from hard drives are really high class items. You will get a reduced price for them. You wont get a decent price for the chassis because of the paint on them.

The stainless steel that makes up the lids has bits of adhesive which will recude their value.

The gold in computers is typically laid on in thicknesses of between 25 and 50 microns. There really sin't much of it and unlike twenty five years ago when it was thicker, it is now not really ecconomically recoverable, even with a gold price of over $1,500.00/oz

So, what do you do with them and all of the rest of the junk in a computer or television?

Currently a very large proportion of it gets kibbled and stuck into land fill. Personally I think that this is wrong. Economics is a very variable thing. Certainly we have not gone back to the days of rag picking or pure collecting but I can see a day not too far off when it will be ecconomically viable to start processing large quantities of kibble for the constituent minerals IF the kibble is readilly accessible. If it is scattered all over land fill, it will not be viable.

Therefore I reckon that it should be stored separately. Still in land fill if that is all we have (not suggesting that it is) but in one easily excavatable hole.

What can we do? I think we should continue to pull things apart prividing doing so means that the components can be stored more easily that way. A printer is mostly space as is a computer but uit turns out that the most space efficient was to store the components, unless you have a kibbler, is to just leave them assembled.

And then just leave then in the Dust Collection Corner until you have sufficient to do something about.

I appologise if this doesn't quite make sense, I am still working it out.

Nick,

I like the compass idea, but I have a steel bath

Neil

Hi Neal, it was actually done in a porcelaine hand basin, but of course it is totally portable as it only needs to be in a plastic or glass bowl or similar non-metallic container large enough to accomadate it freely

Regards Nick.

Mr Alush-Jaggs... whole heartedly agree.

Futher a report I once read states the "dust" swept up at roadside in cities now contains more platignum than the original ore!.

There will come a time when landfill constitues the richest mines on the planet....

BTW seawater is quoted as 1 to 2 mg/tonne GOLD.......

Actually I'm with people on this albeit on a lesser level.

In my capacity as an IT engineer I run into this kinda thing all the time. Now take a printer.

You can get a printer at PC World for about the price of a few beers (£25) but then the ink cartridges cost about the same every time. OK they have got us on that one but when the printer itself plays up?.....

I don't want to buy a new one, I want to fix the one I've got but can I get a tech manual anywhere??

I know its a minor fault but no way can I fix it without the tech manual so it ends up in landfill.

GRRRRRR