DiskUsage

From UoWiki

2002-12-09 Monday

Prof Morrison gets down on one of the Hard Disks we salvaged last week with Sauls electric drill / screwdriver and various other odd tools...

A nice little IBM drive was that part of a machine that was found in a skip, having reached the end of it's useful life some time ago was the special guest for this weeks class. It had sat in a pile of other ex-skipped machines for months until last weeks classs, when we cleared the space and boxed up all the useful parts.

This week it was removed from the box, wrenched away from it's siblings and opened up to so we could see how it worked... we saw the controller and buffer on the circuit board, and we saw the platter (that stores data) and its arms with the heads that read the data.

Saul took some pictures which you can see at http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/images/workshop09122002/

If you'd like to read up on a little more detail, and see some naffer pictures, then check out http://www.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm

Once we'd ripped it apart, we thought it would be fun to connect it up to a power supply and see how it span. The first time we connected it, we got the connector the wrong way round and the drive took on it's own little R2D2 style personality and couldn't quite make up it's mind which way to spin, and made a very cute squeaky noise... maybe one day we'll hook up a bunch of them for a dorkbotesque "Symphony of 3.2Gb in IDE Minor" or something similar.

Next week we'll be looking at FileSystems and how they work to retrieve your pr0n (or whatever other data) from your disks.