Sculpture I made out of rare earth magnets.

As you might have guessed from the title and the above sculpture, I took apart hard drives to recycle them. We are having the carpets at the office cleaned on Friday, and in the process of picking things up off the floor under desks, I pulled out a box of old hard drives that I had taken out of computers before I sent them off to recycling. I had intended to recycle those drives for years. Some of the hard drives were over 20 years old.

I could have taken them to an electronics recycler, but they charge a fee to destroy hard drives. But I wouldn’t know that the drives were truly destroyed unless I witnessed the recycler destroying the drives. So I took the drives apart and threw the drive cases in one box, the tops off the drives in a second box, the circuit boards, the swingarm, and other plastic parts in a third box, and the platters in a fourth box. I put all the rings and turnstiles in a bag. It seems they could be used to make jewelry or other crafty things. Things like the “my little pillow” filters went into the trash, and all the screws were tossed into a plastic thingamajig parts drawer.

A Stack-O-Drives. Half of the drives I took apart for recycling. The start of the first rare earth magnet sculpture I put together as I took the magnets out of the drives sits atop the Stack-O-Drives.

Reflecting on a silver platter

Four platter drive. Depending on the size of the hard drives, they had one to four platters.

I was curious to see what a fast kitty 15K rpm drive looked like inside compared to the slow cat 7.2K rpm drives I’d been taking apart.

The first difference was the long screws securing the platters’ spindle and the swingarm. The second difference was smaller platters in a beefier case. The third difference was large rare earth magnets three to four times as thick as the other drive’s magnets, much wider and a whole lot stronger.

This hard drive’s platters were trashed on a couple of drives. The “my little pillow” filter was black from the dust that came off the ground surfaces of the platters.

“My little pillow” filters. Most filters were clean, but the drives with trashed platters had black filters. The drives also had little clear plastic cases filled with metallic-looking pellets that seemed like hard drive catalytic converters. They were most likely dehumidifiers.

That Platters ready to sing “I’ll Never Smile Again!”

Segregated parts of the hard drives ready for recycling.

The first two photos are of the rare earth magnet sculpture I put together as I took the magnets out of the drive. I knocked the first sculpture over, trying to put lights on it, and much of it came apart. The third photo is the second sculpture I put together with lights. I didn’t like that one, so I gave up on the lights and put together the sculpture in the lead photo.