Introduction

We disassembled a hard drive to show you the main components you will find on a hard drive.
Hard drives have two kinds of components: internal and external. External components are
located on a printed circuit board called logic board while internal components are located in a
sealed chamber called HDA or Hard Drive Assembly.

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Figure 1: A Hard Disk Drive.
You cannot open a hard drive or you will make your drive unusable. Hard drives are assembled
in clean rooms (cleaner than surgery rooms) and then sealed. Any particle of dust inside the
HDA can destroy the surface of the discs, because the discs spin at a very high speed (at least
5,400 rpm nowadays). This would not only lead to data loss, but also the physical destruction of
the disc surface.
So, there is no serviceable part inside the HDA at least for the regular technician. Only data
recovery companies with clean rooms can open and replace components inside the HDA.

Anyway, before exploring the components located both the logic board and inside the HDA, lets
take a look on the connectors found on a regular hard drive.
Logic Board
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On the logic board you will find all circuitry in charge of controlling the hard drive. In these days
of highly integrated devices, you will find just three or four big integrated circuits on the logic
board, as you can see on Figures 4 and 5. Take a look on the pictures as we will explain more
about the circuits pictured below.

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Figure 4: Logic board from an ATA hard drive.

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Figure 5: Logic board from a SATA hard drive.
The big circuit is the controller. It is in charge of everything: exchanging data between the hard
drive and the computer, controlling the motors on the hard drive, commanding the heads to read
or write data, etc.
Optionally there is a Flash-ROM circuit where the hard drive firmware is located. Firmware is
the name given to a program that is stored inside a ROM (Read Only Memory). The hard drive
firmware is the program its controller executes. Sometimes this device is embedded in the
controller, as it happens on the hard drive in Figure 5.
The controller doesnt drive enough current to turn on or move the hard drive motors. So all hard
drives use a motor driver chip. This chip is a current amplifier. It takes the commands sent from
the controller to the motors and passes them to the motors, but with a higher current. So, this
chip is located between the controller and the motors.
The fourth main chip you can find on a logic board is the RAM (Random Access Memory) chip,
also known as buffer. This chips has an ultimate role in the hard drive performance. The higher
its capacity, the fastest the data transfer between the drive and the computer will be. You can
find out the capacity of your hard drive buffer on the chip manufacturers website. For example,
the memory chip in Figure 4 is a Hynix HY57V161610DTC chip. Going to Hynixs website at
http://hynix.com/datasheet/eng/dram/details/dram_01_HY57V161610DTC.jsp you can find this
is a 16 Mb (Megabit) chip. The capacity of memory chips is given in Megabits, while we use
Megabyte to refer to memory capacity. Thus we need to divide the value given in Megabit by
eight in order to have the value in Megabyte. So, this chip is a 2 MB (Megabyte) chip, so this
hard drive buffer is of 2 MB.
In Figure 5, you can see another chip, which is a SATA/ATA converter chip. A lot of
manufacturers instead of designing Serial ATA controller chips simply pick ATA controller
chips and add a converter chip to convert the hard drive Serial ATA interface into regular ATA.
This is the case of the hard drive in Figure 5, which uses the Marvell 88i8030 converter chip. So
even though this hard drive has a Serial ATA interface, it is not a true Serial ATA hard drive
(it is not a native Serial ATA hard drive), since its controller chip is still ATA.
You may be wonder how do we know the function of each chip on the logic board. Actually it is
fairly simple and you can learn the trick from us. Just type in the numbers located on the first line
of the chip package on Google and it will return a lot of information about the chip! For
example, for the Flash-ROM used on the hard drive in Figure 4, just type in M29F102BB and the
first item returned will be a page on ST Microelectronics with all technical details of this chip.
Spindle Motor
In Figure 6 we show the H.DA after we removed the logic board. There you can clearly see the
spindle motor and its contacts which connect this motor to the logic board , and also the
contacts from the devices inside the HDA, namely the heads and the voice coil actuators.

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Figure 6: HDA without the logic board.
On hard drives targeted to desktops, the spindle motor rotates at 5,400 rpm, 7,200 rpm or even
10,000 rpm, depending on the drive. The faster this motor rotates, the faster data can be read
from the platters. Hard drives targeted to laptops usually rotates at 4,200 rpm
Inside the HDA
We removed the hard drive cover to show you how it looks like inside. Do not do this with you
hard drive or you will damage it. If you are curious, open only defective hard drives (our hard
drive was defective).

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Figure 7: Main parts inside a hard drive.
The connector you see in Figure 7 is the opposite side of the connector in Figure 6.
The hard drive can have several discs. The one on our picture had three discs. There is one
read/write read for each side of the disc which is also called platter. The heads are stuck
together in an arm. So, all the heads move together.

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Figure 8: Several discs inside a hard drive.
A motor (actually the correct term is actuator) called voice coil moves the arm. It is called
voice coil because it uses the same idea behind loudspeakers: a coil inside a magnetic field
provided by a magnet. Depending on the current direction on the coil the arm moves to one side
or to the other side. And depending on the intensity of the current, the actuator will move more
or less. We removed the top cover (actually the top magnet) from voice coil and you can see it
disassembled in Figure 9.

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Figure 9: Voice coil actuator.
We removed the arm from the hard drive. You can see it in Figure 10. While we were removing
it, we broke one of the heads (ops!). So, it should have six heads there but you will only see five
(sorry, chief!)

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Figure 10: Hard drive heads.