I thought I’d share pictures I took when I took apart a 250GB dead hard drive.

Rest in pieces my WD2500AAKX

I got this hard drive as part of a Dell Optiplex 780 and used it as a server for my internal network. It worked great until it wouldn’t boot. I checked on it and sure enough, it was stuck in ubuntu server boot recovery. I tried to recover it but I think I did more damage than good. I decided to move to a Windows computer and tried to recover the data with Recuva which didn’t do anything because it couldn’t pick up the disk, so then I moved to TestDisk which was able to see the drive and partitions but never got past profiling the disk. So then I decided to take it apart.

First I unscrewed all the screws, there is another screw holding the read/write head under the label.

After that I took it apart a little more, it has one platter internally and one big old magnet which I kept.

Interestingly there seems to be a metal piece on the bottom and side of the hard drive which I think is for easy destruction. CrystalDiskInfo said it had 29202 hours on it and 2875 power ons, nearly exactly the same as my ST2000DM001-1CH164 T2B hard drive. The smart data also had warnings for its Reallocated Sectors Count.

It’s in the bin now. Thanks for reading.