Hi!

The thread discusses oxidisation of contact pads in current Seagate
and Western Digital hard drives.

I've seen minor occurrences of it and wondered what it was, but only on the
"one use" contact pads on the bottom of the drive's PCB. (My guess is that
these are used to set the drive up for its first time use and do some basic
tests to assure the new drive is functional.)

Some drives had more of this apparent oxidation than others, but all of the
ones I've seen had it from the moment they were removed from the package. It
hasn't gotten any worse and these drives continue to operate properly. I
checked a few at random and did not find a similar effect on the contacts
going to the spindle motor or headstack.

William