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I'm Scott Holewinski and I'm here to basically show
a little bit about the sensitivity of hard drives.
Something people don't realize is that on modern hard drives
everything is extremely important. Right down to how tightly the screws are all
screwed back on
so basically what I'm going to do right now is
take a healthy drive, show that it detects and that it's healthy, then take
the cover off
and not pay any attention to the torque settings of the screws when I put
them back in
and show that that simple act of taking the cover off, putting them back on
without paying attention to torque settings is going to make the drive click.
I'll then basically reset all the screws according to the right torque
and so that the drive then detects once again.
So, I'll get started by just showing that this is a healthy drive.
A simple way of showing that is we'll just look for it in disk management here.
Alright, the drive is spinning up. It'll take couple seconds to detect.
Eventually it should show up here in our disc management.
It's a healthy drive.
There you go. It is an 80 gigabyte Western Digital drive, so it's perfectly healthy.
I'm now going to actually power it down and simply just take the screws off which is
something very common
people are very curious about hard drives especially when it starts
doing some wierd things. They oftentimes want to just pop a cover off and don't
think anything of it,
you know what harm could it do, but without us actually having those
original
torque settings of the drive
sometimes it's very difficult for us to actually get it back into its original
condition when we need to do recovery work on it. I'm just going to take all the screws out.
The last screw that I take out is actually the screw that holds the headstack into
the drive
and actually keeps the actual read write heads secure. This is a common thing
people just kind of check out what's going on inside the drive
from this point
we'll basically put the cover right back on. Again I'm not
going to pay any attention to the original torque
settings of the drive
just going to screw them back in
Alright so I've got the cover back on here and what's going to now do is just
power it back on and unlike it sounded before nice and healthy and detected
over here. You're actually going to hear some pretty awful clicking noises
coming from the device
The sound that you just heard was the clicking hard drive that you often times hear referred to on the internet and
everywhere else
and basically all it is is the actual read write heads in the drive are not in the
correct position and they're actually fluttering from side to side trying to
figure out where the heck they are on the platter. So, basically what I'm going to do next is
actually
torque the
screws back down into the the correct torque settings using special a
torque
driver here
which basically allows us to set the torque
of the screws and basically when I set each one you actually hear a little
click because it's actually set to the right torque setting.
All of the screws are all nice and snug.
They're set to their factory specifications once again.
I'm just going to bascially power this drive up again and unlike that awful
clicking sound that you heard before, now you're probably going to to see that
the drive once again detects. So, it made the good sound, it sounded happy. Basically we're
just going to go into disk management here again
There you go, there's our 80 gigabyte drive that once again showed up.
So, what you've just seen is an example of what can happen when you do something simple like take
the cover off a harddrive and instantly put it back on
it seems very benign, doesn't seem like it did a whole lot to the drive but the
torque settings on the screws are extremely important.
That goes for all the screws on the drive not just the the screws that are on the cover.
All the internal screws
on the head stack are also very important
to pay attention to the torque settings.
Once again we put the drive back to it's original
specifications and as you just saw, it did detect.