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I got bored recently and took a few hard drives as far down as I could (thanks to past posts here, which were extremely helpful), and now I'm wondering what I actually have. To start, many of the covers are two-ply but after separating the layers I found they are both magnetic. I was expecting at least one to be aluminum, but is it possible they are both steel?

Next, the photos.
1. What grade are the components? Is the ribbon connecting them valuable at all?
2. These arms have coils that are either copper or the shiny, slightly gold colored metal pictured. What metal is that? The arm is shown just to show where I pulled the coil from.
3. I found the rhodium pickups on the end of the arm, but what are these wires? They are metallic, so maybe nickel? They are silver colored on one side and the other is either dark brown or gold colored, both shown in the photo.
4. These were connected to the motors, any value here? They seem to be gold.

The covers can be of 3 materials. Aluminum(non-ferrous), Stainless(can be non-magnetic 304-316 or magnetic 400 series), and Nickel. Nickel being the best for scrap price but you have to know how to check it or grind it to see spark.

The Ribbon can go of two categories , Peripheral if it has IC chips and Mlccs with the gold pin connector or just gold pin connector ends, if solely a connector.

The coils are Copper/Cu, can be coated with a ply or silica to give that color; anodized too. I doubt it's nickel wire or anything else but Copper.

The wires CAN be gold but also can be copper. The gold wire is usually at the very end of the arm where the rhodium is at. Small tethers down the arm.

The ribbons connecting the motor and pins are gold plated foils. You can cut them around the gold to save for your gold fingers, but I'm not sure Boardsort takes them as gold fingers anymore; Chris just wants PCI, slot, and memory fingers for that category. If no cut, throw em in peripheral

The pins are usually gold pins and can be thrown into the gold pins category, some are not though so be sure to check. You can throw it in gold pin connector as well w/o dismantle.

My assumption is, as I have neither asked nor been told, that Chris has found himself in the same predicament some other non-escrap yards I talk with who buy computer gold have run into. For a long while Chris, and by extension his scrap yard customers who sell to him, has accepted gold wire ends as gold fingers/gold edge connector rate.
Suddenly (and I do me quite suddenly) the industry as a whole wound up with a over priced category. It was a short while back but it happened very quickly.
People started every bit of “gold” from boards, wires, adaptors...! Led strip boards were being chopped up and mixed in. Gold etch from cell phone screens. Chopped up sound blaster cards. What was a kind gesture by a few yards went wild.
I don’t know if it was YouTube or one of the social media sites or what.
I’ll even admit that for many years I “bent” the wire end exceptions with some very selective printer cartridge ribbons. Not all, but ones I knew were worth the effort to Chris. Now clean gold fingers are back to the basic definition by default just about everywhere that buys them. I’ll take spence1015 at his word since it’s a world wide issue.

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Thanks for the help. For the ribbon, one end has a tiny board with ICCs and the other end is just a connector with gold pins (for most of the hard drives, anyway). How does Boardsort treat connectors that are just plastic with gold plated connectors like the ones in Figure 1 of the photo? If those are their own category, probably best to snip it off and toss it with the pins connecting to motors.