Re: hard drive guts questions.

"J" <nospamplease> wrote:

Newbie questions way over my head, but here goes...

1) I have a newer sata drive dissassembled.

if you opened the housing which contains the disk plates, keep it as a
decoration, it will most probably never work again (dust)

The outside pcb controller
has a contact interface with an internal printed circuit cable leading to
the
actuator - about 20 contacts.. Mounted on the cable attached to the
actuator body is a small chip. the printed circuit cable has a couple
wires which head off to the actuator's voice coil, but the rest of the
fine traces enter this chip, and the other side of the chip has traces
leading out to
the r/w heads (16 traces - 4 to each head). What is this chip?

It is the amplifier(s), the signal from the heads is so weak that the
amplifier has to be as close as possible to the heads to minimize noise.


2) What kind of hardware would it take to measure and graph the voltages
present on the printed circuit cable's outter interface while issuing
simple
dd linux commands? Could I put it together with on a usb/pic chip
platform?

Best would be to use the hardware on the outer pcb which was designed for
that task. The signal you get on the leads to the coils has to be
demodulated, decoded etc.


3) The motor control seems to have 4 contacts. Are these 2 for power and
2 for monitoring?

see stepper motor


4) 4 traces to each head: is this a write pair and a read pair?


don't know, but perhaps differential signal and two traces for ground shield
or as you said 2 symetric signals read and write (don't think so)

If you can point me to a very specific reference, that'd be great.
Thanks in advance,
-JB

Yes, would be very interesting! but really. Too expensive equipment needed
to do anything with the information.

I'm not specialized on that matter, but think about the transfer rates of a
modern disk and you'll just say "wow, it worked and did cost me so few that
I even dared to open it and screw it up"!

kind greetings

.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: hard drive guts questions.
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  • hard drive guts questions.
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