On 02 May 2005 23:07:44 -0400, Sam Goldwasser
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Dan writes:

I just had to post this. While ago the original hard drive went out
in my pc. I replaced it & all went well, and since I'd never looked
inside one of these, I took it apart. The beautiful, nearly
"industrial art sculpture" of the mirror platter assembly/aluminum
motor, casting, all held with cool fasteners was impressive enough,
but then I started playing with the magnets from the pickup assembly.
My god, they're strong! Neodymium, I think. So strong that I
actually gave myself a small blood blister when the 2 snapped together
as I played with them. About this same time, the door catch broke on
my faithful 20 year old clothes dryer. Not a chance of getting a
replacement catch, so for the past 2 weeks I've been propping the
unused base from my drill press against the door to hold it shut.
Then it dawned on me: "I bet those magnets from the HDD are more than
strong enough to hold this thing shut against the seal & force of the
door switch". Works like a charm, in fact I only need ONE of them!
Judging from the pull now required to open the door, it's actually
tighter than it was with the original catch! Further justification
for my "never throw ANYTHING out" policy ;-)

If you think those are impressive, you should see the magnets on early
'90s 5-1/4" full height high performance disk drives! (Or even earlier
8" drives.) Sometime before that, they didn't have neodymium rare earth
magnets, so not as impressive.

The voice coil magnet in the Control Data drives of the early 80s was
about 15 x 15 x 15 cm. It was a back breaker. I still have one
somewhere.


- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 's' from my address when replying by email.