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PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 8:21 am 

Joined: Mon Nov 12, 2018 10:05 am
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Thanks SpaceCoastRecycling for the detailed explanation and to everyone for replying. I have about 500 hard drives, all smaller than 1 gig, I am tearing down to scrap. The information helps.


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 10:04 am 
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Two quick additions
There is a small market for permalloy in the scrap industry. Some yards will buy it beyond steel prices so it’s worth sorting initially. This is especially true of companies that buy other magnets such as cobalt.
It’s always good to separate magnets from the general scrap anyway unless your yard says you don’t have to. Magnets, being magnetic, stick to all sorts of places they aren’t welcome. Like sorting bins and conveyor belts. At the largest yards you’ll often be able to find a desk or wall with ‘magnet art’... designs built out of magnets by board employees. :D

Another test for stainless vs other metals is to use an angle grinder, Dremel, or sharpening/grinding bit for a drill.
Steel of any class will spark. Tiny orange tinted white sparks.
On the extreme of the process you could look up spark test guides which pair specific wheel materials to spark colours/shades for different metal blends: steel being an alloy. I use this method myself.
It’s also great for stripping a bit of the top layer off plated items to discover the base metal; and sorting heavy plated brass from solid brass. With practice you can even use grinders to test questionable aluminium, sorting cast from polished die cast based on the etching pattern.
There’s videos on Daily Motion and YouTube, free books and manuals on Scribd, etc. Even archive dot org has stuff on it.

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:29 pm 

Joined: Mon Nov 12, 2018 10:05 am
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I know most scrap yards want everything as "clean" as can be. I guess this question is for the people that scrap hard drives and for the scrap yards that buy them.

1. Is it even worth tearing these down any further by knocking the drive spindles out? or just leave them in?

2. If it is worth going further, how do you get the copper rings out (red arrow)?

3. Do you punch out the items in red circle?

4. With the spindles punched out, what class are the spindles classified? I think they consist of aluminum, metal(stainless?), and other materials.

5. With everything left in, are the cases classified extruded aluminum?


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PostPosted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 2:42 pm 
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Well, what you managed to do was literally break INTO the motor.
Which is why those rings of plated and or sealed copper are there.
You have gone an extra step early.
Getting the motors out isn’t convoluted most of the time. They are only attached one of three ways, regardless of if it’s a 22” drive from the 70s or a 2” drive from a camera.
The most common is glue. More specifically a thermal bonding paste. Flip the drive upside down. Position a cast iron or steel punch in the centre of the circle on the motor and give it a firm whack with a hammer. Out it comes. If it doesn’t work flip it back over, pry the top of the motor off, like you did already, to expose the copper, align your punch the same and try from the top side.

Less common but far easier. Screwed in motors. These have stainless steel screws, usually T7 or T9. Just unscrew it and bang the case a few times lol the motor falls out.

Finally, and it looks like these are them, is the case design that was flowed AROUND the motor. These are a pain; the motor is literally part of the case. Getting the motor out requires actually breaking the aluminium that has flowed over a lip or rim on the motor. These are a pain and I rarely go through the trouble.

These numbers are NOT accurate but generalised.
99% of hard drive shells are Wrought Aluminium. A VERY high grade. The larger scrap companies pay a premium when ‘clean’. 40č-60č per pound.
Leaving the motors in larger companies usually pay a high grade CBM rate from 30-60č

What’s left of shells are manganese in the majority, magnesium rarely.
You will never see die cast shells. The physics simply prohibit making such a die that doesn’t cause faults. Copper shells exist in heavy industry and aerospace where heat is a concern; but such cases are never for drives smaller than 5”.


If the yard is large enough motors/spindles will get a special aluminium motor rate.
If not and likely, a high end motor or sealed unit rate.

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 4:44 pm 

Joined: Mon Nov 12, 2018 10:05 am
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Ok, thanks for the reply. Make a long story short....leave the motor as is or knock them out? It is 50 miles one way to the nearest city with a population of 50,000. There ARE NO big scrap yards close to me, so most would look at me with a blank stare when I said anything about CBM.


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 01, 2019 4:25 am 

Joined: Tue Oct 01, 2019 4:09 am
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My laptop battery and hardesk are spoiled when i was working on my website but suddenly it is not working and hang automatically so can anyone tell me what can I do.


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 01, 2019 11:46 am 
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Given the situation: I’d replace the battery and try again. With laptops any battery spells doom: even if it’s plugged into the wall.

The first rule of laptop repair:
When in doubt change the battery.

As for the hard drive, when in doubt change the battery.
While you wait for your batter To arrive look up the manufacture web help for your laptop and find the bios/EFI/uefi option code.
Eventually install your new battery and plug your laptop into the wall. After an hours or so of charging; push power and hold down the boot keys you looked up.
EFI/uefi has a disk checking tool built in. Use it.
In bios...
Windows: use the dos prompt only.
Type chkdsk \*
Enter

Linux
Hit the number option for terminal
Type varmp * a
Enter

MacOS and Apple System
Open the recovery console
Chose verify drives

In Darwin and some BSD and most UNIX
Type - - on the menu to load the drive tool
Type mount
(a list appears) if your drive is bad it will show it as not mounted.
So Type the number for your unmounted drive and hit enter
It will attempt to mount it and then say ‘drive could not be mounted: attempt to fix?’
Type 2 enter

In all cases if the drive can be repaired the software will do so and then ask you to reboot. Do so
If it worked good. Make a fresh backup. I suggest you make a clone of the disk, reformat and start over with the drive clone image as well. Just in case

If it failed or it can’t be fixed:
You need to do some recovery work. You can pop your drive out and plug it into another computer and use a free tool like recovera or nodel to get some files back
You can use a use more expensive recovery tools like disk drill to do a through recovery. This will not only recover all the good data but also rebuild old and deleted files. Great program. You need some binary and hex skills to rebuild very old and overwritten files though. And such recovery is only partial.
You can spend $$$ and hire a recovery company that takes apart your drive in a clean room and manually rebuilds the binary data. Few hundred to a few thousand.

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