Here is my video on details of scrap hard drive.
This is not a video on how to take a part a hard drive.
If you want to see that, Watch my first video.
Taking of the retaining ring it is held in with 4 or 5 aluminum machined aluminum.
If you have a bag of them they sell quite well on Ebay.
They can be used in arts and crafts.
Here is the read-write actuator.
It moves back and forth reading and writing information on to these very shiny platters.
Now these platters are made of either aluminum or glass and are coated with cobalt and then
a very thin layer 1 micron thick of palladium or platinum.
These discs have to be absolutely perfect or they do not work.
The manufacturers put the palladium on the disc, by a process called sputtering.
I am basically saying it is an oxidized layer of palladium.
Do not waste your time trying to recover the palladium.
You need 1000s of discs just to get one gram!
Now here is my favorite part of every single hard drive I take a part.
The neodymium magnets.
this is the most valuable part for me in scrapping hard drives.
If you put 10 of these together, you can get anywhere from 15-75 dollars on Ebay!
The neodymium magnets are mounted on a bracket made of MU-metal.
When scrapping hard drives for profit leave the magnet attached to the bracket.
Here is the read-write actuator.
The actuator is made up mainly of aluminum.
It has a copper coil at the end and a ball bearing assembly in the middle.
I took this macro shot just to show you the size and scale of the read-write actuator
tip.
This shows you actually how much gold is in there.
It is not a lot, but as you can see it is quite bright and pretty when you can get a
close up view of it.
Now attached to the side of the actuator, is a ribbon and in that ribbon there can be
gold tracing or copper trace wiring, leading up to the data connections.
Now the metal actually inside the ribbon is copper.
You will find gold plate leaf underneath the ribbon around the data head.
the gold leaf is extremely thin and separating it from ribbon is extremely tedious!
the only way I can see to efficiently separate the metals from all of the plastic and the
ribbons, would be to incinerate them.
Then seperate the metals chemically.
Here is the second half to our pair of magnets.
What makes the neodymium magnets so great is how strong they are.
They are VERY powerful, for their size and EXTREMELY fun to play with!
If you can get hard drives from the early 90s, the magnets are much larger.
on newer drives you are going to find, smaller magnets.
But just as powerful.
Now the next part is what most scrappers go after.
Some people just unscrew the logic circuit board and toss the rest of the drive into
the aluminum pile.
the hard drive circuit board is where you are going to find most of your precious metals.
Starting with the gold plated connection pins.
The layer of gold on the connection pins is actually quite thick in comparison with typical
gold plating.
You are also going to find contacts with partial gold plating.
Where just the tips of them are gold plated.
Manufacturers have gotten pretty good over the years at using less and less gold.
In the end all data connections and pins are gold plated.
Now on these high grade boards yor are going to find large square and rectangular chips.
If you were to take the top of that chip and remove it, you would find multiple gold bonding
wires, 1 micron thick.
Attached to each one of the silver contacts on the side of the chip.
Next valuable item located on the board is the monolithic ceramic capacitors.
these rectangular shaped components can vary in size and in color.
They will be marked on the board with a "C" and then a number.In this one "C45".
they are extremely valuable due to the silver and palladium content.
They can easily be removed from the board with low heat and a spatula.
here is the bottom side of the hard drive motor.
You will find gold leaf contacts.
There is not a lot of gold here.
Now this is an older hard drive.
On newer hard drives you will not find screws to remove the whole motor.
The only way to remove the motor is with a punch and really not worth the time.
This one actually had three screws holding it in.
You are not going to find many hard drives like this anymore.
If you get a bunch of them, you can sell them on Ebay.
If not they go straight into the aluminum bin.
here is the forged aluminum housing.
this particular housing weighed half a pound.
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