Hi, it's tear down time in glorious 4k resolution if you've got the option to watch it like that. Anyway, we've got a Western digital uh, Wd60 Efrx for those playing along at home. Uh, six terabyte Western digital red hard drive that I had in my Nas here. And if you've been following me on Ev blog too, and you should be because that's where I dump a lot of interesting videos.

Um, and I'm almost like I'm only a couple of thousand away from a hundred thousand subscribers and getting that Youtube silver award. so you know, please. Oh, give me a sub on Eevblog2. Anyway, if you've been following along the saga and on Twitter as well, this is a drive that failed in my four drive.

Uh, Ds418, Nas synology, Nas drive. And it basically it had been there for just over three years. Yes, it's literally one month out of warranty. It had like twenty six thousand on 26 000 operational hours.

But technically I looked at my old receipts and yes, like one month out of the three year warranty? Don't Anyway, everyone said that they wanted to see a teardown of this so I might be able to still get like a warranty replacement for it. Maybe if I just you know, fill out the form, maybe they'll send me a new one. But anyway, a lot of people wanted to see it. So I'm going to sacrifice this puppy because you do have to return them under warranty.

So and you see the bill date here 18th of January 2018. But it has been in like 24 7 operation in my Nas. As I said, like 26 000 odd hour operational hours. The specific model we've got here, the Efrx.

This is actually what's called a Cmr or Continuous Magnetic Recording Drive. It's the technology uh, used to actually write the bits onto the platters itself inside and anyway, Western Digital like they all were Cmr, but then they sneakily in their Red series uh drives change them to uh, Smr or shingled magnetic recording drives which isn't as good. And it's apparently much slower than Cmr drives because in shingled magnetic Recording, the Uh adjacent tracks actually overlap each other. hence why it's called shingle just like Shingled Ruse.

You know, the shingled Uh tiles overlap each other. and apparently when you write a bite to this or a bit to this, you've gotta actually write the two adjacent bits as well. Not this one. as I said, this is Cmr, but the uh, Efax version, which I did actually unknowingly have one of these in my synology Nas: uh, driveway.

So yes, I am going to eventually replace that, but I have to reconstruct or resync my drive first with a new Cmr drive which is on the way. and then I replace the Smr one I've got with the Cmr anyway. Um, it's actually the Cmr one that failed, not the Smr which a lot of people are claimed. So anyway, that was just like an interesting aside.

Western Digital have now, uh, admitted that they did that and now, uh, the new. The reds are the Smr and their red plus is actually, uh, the Cmr type. So the new ones I've ordered, uh, uh, red pluses. So anyway, let's do a teardown of this, uh, bad boy and see.

Um, I will. Uh, here's a video. I will, uh, now try and record the sound from it. but unfortunately, I just did that and it's not as bad as it was.

But anyway, here's the video. Sound is nowhere near as bad as it was before. It's not sounding normal. You can hear this right across the other side of my lab when when it was failed in the uh, Nasa Norway, you can't hear these things.

Yeah, that's not as bad as it was, but it's still pretty bad. Like it should not be that loud. I haven't heard a hard drive that loud since, like, uh, the 1980s 1990s. So anyway, here's the bottom of the drive.

for those playing along at home. There's no bodge wires. There we go. We've got a flat flex going in there.

that's to drive the motor. That's a four wire jobby that's all gunked up. That's a not a hard potting compound, not a soft one and you know, do not block hole. It's got various vents or whatever.

I haven't torn down a hard drive, you know, donkeys years. Anyway, are they like screws under there warranty? seal screws or whatever. But and for those curious, no, there was no indication that this was going to fail. There was no bad sectors or anything like that.

None of my other drives have any bad sectors. Um, so that's not an issue. Oh, that. just.

oh, that's that's nice. I like that. No cabling whatsoever. Just a board to board.

Uh, pressure, uh contact? Look at that. That's beautiful. Got some foam in there. It's just for some, uh, anti-vibration uh stuff.

So that the, uh, you know board doesn't contribute to any vibration noise. I would, uh, presume. So yeah, I like that. So that's stuck down.

Let's take that off. So yeah, no, no indications at all. Uh, that this thing was going to fail. All I heard about it was that all of a sudden I was writing some video to it because this Nas drive.

I actually do read, write, edit all of my video on this. uh, Nas drive. I don't edit video locally. It's all done on my external Nas.

and no, it's not slower to do that. Trust me, I've done videos on that anyway. Yeah, so that's pretty cool. And we've got another uh, pressure contact over here on the Uh for the motor uh drive as well.

And they're gonna. That's also buggering off into there, so that's interesting. I'm not sure why they're going off under there. is there another? They're all in parallel.

So anyway, there you go. There's the main board there. I've taken off the uh, thermal pad on top of that. So like I won't go into into any details on the chips of the design or anything like that, but that looks, uh, very nice.

No worries whatsoever. You can explore that in your heart's content in 4k resolution. There you go. It just gives you some additional detail.

Not sure you can see the part number on that, if anyone cares. All I want to see is the big gouge taken out. Hopefully, um, taken out of the platter inside this thing. because when you get the grinding noises like that, the old click of death from these things, Um, then yeah, that's the head doing some nasty business.

Um, against the platters inside. I don't know how many platters these modern six terabyte drives use. Got no idea we'll find out. Take out that? Yep, there's the other screw, so I'll take out all of them.

No, you only need one, don't you? really? I mean, you can't. You know. Take out every single screw to take this off. I guess it's just harder to, uh, fake.

You know, six of them instead of like five of them or whatever instead of one. Now, of course, this is not something that you'd ordinarily do in a, uh, just a normal, uh, lab with normal air and stuff like that. Because if you get any dust and crap in there, yeah, you'd want to do this in a relatively, uh, clean air environment if you are like looking to get the data off it or repair it or do whatever. But yeah, not one care given here.

But anyway, uh yeah, you can probably see they got some sort of gunky seal under there like that. So I've missed a screw under here. Oh yeah, might have Sneaky bugger? yes. And the bloody.

Another one under there. and this one looks like it's smack in the middle of the platter. That's kind of important. No, I thought that was another one under there.

That's an air vent, is it? Yep, I'm pretty sure that shiny thing in there is the platter. I'm sure there's some trick to this. I don't know. Sorry, don't Uh, take this video as how to take apart hard drives.

It's not my business. I did expect there to be a lot of force on that, uh, rubber gasket holding. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. there you go.

I think you need a big white ass screwdriver like I'm using at the moment. That seems to be the go. Yeah, yeah, it seems to be popping. Okay, yeah.

can't use the little piss out one I used before. Once the seal's off. Yeah, it's done. Come on, you can do it.

Tada, we're in like Flynn. Look at that. There's our platters. Geez.

There are quite a few platters. Let's have a look on the bottom. there's some sort of pad I guess to stop it if There is any vibration or wobble in there. I don't know.

Like a you know, these are incredibly, probably the most complex mechanical device you own would be a hard drive. I, I think there's probably no doubt in that. All right there you go. that yeah, that's our big rubber seal around the thing.

It's like, oh, it's like it's not even rubber. it's some sort of gel kind of. I don't know if anyone knows what type of stuff that is. Yeah, let us know.

And silly me, just put a mark on the uh platter. There it is. That's the mark on the platter that unfortunately, um, yeah, dumbass Dave, you probably scream at the camera that came from this, which was, um, yeah, don't do that. Anyway, good thing is, I'm not trying to recover the data from this thing.

Well, I don't see any damage to that top platter. I yep, highly reflective these things, but don't know. I expect to see like some maybe some big grooves taken out of this thing somewhere. So there you go, you can see the entire platter.

Of course it's going. It's just going to reflect absolutely everything because these are the mirror. Finish on these is just absolutely incredible. And there's our head array.

Five six, um, arms on there. So that would be uh, 12 surfaces. So 6 platter, 12 surface on there. So beautiful.

And yeah, there's a little parking frame over here for the heads. Very nice. And of course, like as I said, the technology which goes into these is absolutely incredible. The most precise engineered product uh that you'll ever buy.

It's just like people don't realize the insane materials technology, the engineering, uh, the production technology that goes into making these hard drives and six terabytes is, you know, not a big drive these days. You can get much bigger and denser and you can get them in smaller form factors and all sorts of things. And yes, they do contain, uh, very powerful neodymium magnets. So uh yeah, you can get those out and have some fun.

Down in there. you can see the coil just a, um, like a Dc servo motor. These are all like. these aren't stepper motors.

I believe. These are like, you know, Dc servo, uh, controlled and just no. I like. I don't know the resolutions involved in something like this, but it's absolutely ridiculous.

So I'm going to say not a huge amount in there, but a huge amount of technology goes into that. It's just absolutely incredible. Anyway, Unfortunately, Murphy says that the top of this disk does not have any marks. Of course it doesn't, so we're going to have to go further.

But what I'll do is, I'll actually plug it in like this, see if it does anything. Now I assume that these are like filled with an inert, uh, gas. Um, let me know. in the comments down below.

There we go. and there would be no Um sensor and I don't know. Would there be a pre and are they pressurized? Would there be a pressure sensor in there? Probably not. Oh, there we go, it's seeking.

Haha. Beautiful. Jeez, It sounds much louder without the uh case on oh, it's going back to park. Oh, is that normal? I don't know.

does anyone know, But there you go. It's trying to do the business it's trying to like. Read the exact point is that where it keeps the Um disk index or whatever. But yes, this, this drive does not work at all.

and I think this is only like 5600 or 5200 rpm or something like that. It's not one of the fast jobbies. There you go. It's working, doing its thing, and it's just done.

this. Shut down and it's going to stop spinning. Stop spinning. Stop spinning.

Stop spinning because it's realized that whether or not windows shut that down or whether or not it's uh, if it's done that of its own accord. If you do know that, leave it in the comments. But there you go. Um, yeah.

I want to see the gouge. That's little on a little compliant mount. Maybe you can take that out. Oh hello, do we have a little desiccant bag in there? That's got to be a desiccant bag, right? So yeah, to keep the moisture out of this sucker.

Of course that assembly there. is just the interface from that flat flex. It's just to hold the flat flex in place. It does absolutely nothing else.

And then it. Yeah. and then it just folds over, um, and goes over to the, uh, the head. So that's all the head and motor drive.

You can see the uh, the thicker traces in there versus the thin. Of course, the I assume that the head amplifiers. you know they're all going to be in there. It's not going to get, um, all those teeny weeny little signals all the way back over here.

I don't think. now. I'm totally unsure how these platters come out. and I'm sure there's a lot of people who've disassembled these and they're probably screaming at me.

Do this step. Dave. Do this step or whatever. I'm just going to wing it.

Haven't looked at any guides if we got some screws on top there, so maybe we've got to take them out one by one. Suck it and see once again, this is like I don't care. I'm not trying to save data here. Woohoo.

that's fun. Um, yeah, I know you probably shouldn't do that, but well. the heads are parked. Why not? As you'd probably expect, those are really locked.

I did. oh, lock tied it in there. Wow. Tight as a nun's nasty.

Actually, I don't see any evidence of loctite on those. That's um. it's rather surprising. although I guess you don't want to be applying liquids around.

uh, hard drives like this in this sort of process. Geez, Oh, this is ridiculous. Yeah, Imagine being the design engineer that actually proposes. Oh, let's put some loctite on those and the production engineers are just going.

What? Give me a break? You want us to put liquids around these platters? Well, this is totally not fun, I can assure you. Come on bastard, it's got to be an easy way to do this. There's no like locking point that I can find. Anyway, I just took out that head parking thing and I did, sort of, uh, scrape the heads as I took them out.

So yeah, it's probably not the correct assembly step. There you go. There's the teeny tiny heads. double-sided of course.

And yeah, gonna get Medieval on its arse. You can they actually spring apart like that? Look at that springy, springy science that goes into the engineering that goes into the aerodynamics of these heads and how they, uh, rest on the surface and stuff is, um, yeah. really something. I do actually have another seal on the bottom of the case under the Pcb here.

let's take that off. Oh, there you go. That's the bottom of the platter, so that's rather interesting. that access is like it's obviously something to do with, uh, some sort of production testing, production alignment.

Uh, you know, inspection. You know, Phys optically inspect the heads as they scan the surface Or something like that. I don't know. Anyone knows the center of the platters here and then the head.

just? uh. here's the head motor here and it just sweeps the head across like that. It's now got darts. I got a fingerprint fingerprint.

Oh no, it's ruined. Care Factor Zero at this point. So yeah, anyone know why that's there? Ah, let us know. Good news is it looks like I can unscrew the head assembly by taking this puppy off and then so the head assembly should now come out now.

Unfortunately, the final screw in there seems to be, uh, stripping. Okay, what I've done is looked at this, uh, screw under the microscope and I like a T7 like it fits and it feels fantastic. There is actually a tiny bit of play in it. So and and the T8 doesn't fit so it's almost as if there's a T7.5 or one of that.

Is there an Imperial? Rubbish? I don't know, I've never encountered that. Um, but yeah, I cannot get that bloody last screw out. and it's just stripping. Now with the T7 that got all the others out and of course, I just noticed the two notches in there.

Clearly there's a custom tool designed to go into the center and then hold in those two points to stop this sucker spinning around. And I do believe we can actually get that out of there. Watch it snap back now those neodymiums. Whoa.

there. we go. There we go. Got it.

Got it? Beautiful. Now I can access the screws and actually get the head out. Yeah, that's one powerful magnet. So yeah, that's a keeper.

So you can now see the coil, which is an interesting, uh, what uh, trapezoidal kind of like. But it's bowed at the bottom and I don't know what shape that is. Does that officially have a name that shape? But uh, yeah, that would be once again, highly engineered. Um, it's probably not that shape by accident.

So now we can actually lift that out of there. And of course, we're going to have the magnet on the bottom. Tada. there's the entire head assembly.

Wow, isn't that fantastic? Yeah, you can see the thickness of the coil there. You can see all the turns on that. Yep, there's our other magnet assembly. So does that just lift out? comes out somehow? All right, let's have a quick look at the head under the Tagano microscope.

That's all. Yeah, that's just the flat flex interface. Like that. There's nothing else on there at all.

and that's just a holder for all the flat flex. There's our head amplifier silicon. There you go because there wasn't the number of connections required to actually do that. And there we go.

There's our head driver chip. So that's a chip on Flex. Uh, technology. They've got the gunk around there just to keep the moisture out and whatnot.

And yeah, you can see all the traces coming in here from the head. And then there's only a few going out here, which goes across the flat flex to the main at Pcb. So of course you can't have the, uh, you know, the tiny output from the heads. I mean the the signal levels.

Oh oh careful. Yeah, I'm gonna break these anyway. Anyway, the signal levels from the head are incredibly small. So yeah, you need a custom head amplifier basic there.

There's nothing else on there. Oh, there's one one bypass cap and that's all she wrote. And there's our head drive coil there. and that's it.

There's no other feedback on the head drive coil by the looks of it. So yeah, we've got all our test points here and check this out Though this is interesting. These large traces here seem to have like large little chunks taken out of them around the bend there, and I haven't seen that before. I I can't see how that's sort of any controlled impedance type thing, so I'm left to imagine that's a mechanical stress kind of thing on the flat Flex.

I, I don't know if anyone knows for sure. Please leave it in the comments. Anyway, isn't that beautifully machined? I mean absolutely fantastic. That's all machined in one block.

Look at that that is not joined or anything, right? Wow, How do they do that? That is remarkable. Oh geez, that's a bit how you doing. Check out the wires just going down to the coil. All right there you go.

Oh no. I thought that was soldered down there. but it's not. They just go into some um.

insulated sleeve in there. anyway. You can see the thickness of the coil there. There's lots of turns in that those playing along at home want to count that knock yourself out itself.

The head plate that's actually attached on the underside of because this is all part of the big machined part, right? So that's actually heads actually attached to the underside of that. So are these these big test pads on the top? You can see this is going off to, uh, some test pads here, and you can see that the trace is actually split around this gap in the Um in the head in the part of the metal there. I'm not sure why that's the case. Is that aerodynamic reasons or something? Yeah, I can only assume that's aerodynamics.

Anyway, there's our head. I might have to sacrifice. One of them. might have to.

Well, yep, that one's gone. Oh no. Oh no. Come and guts.

are there. Believe it or not, that's actually maximum zoom. Now you can see that. The ferrite head.

I mean, there's amazing material science technology going on inside these ferrite heads in here. so there's another close-up of the head. You can see how tiny that is compared to my fingerprint. Wow, Yeah, that's amazing.

And yeah, it's all flat flex. Of course, there's lots of. Once again, there's lots of aerodynamics in this. There would be a lot of engineering that goes into the aerodynamics to make sure these heads actually, uh, just float above the surface.

So that's ah. yeah, that's really something. Wow. If you think you understand the every aspect of the engineering that goes into this, you're probably wrong.

Like 40 years, 50 years of advancement in technology, I've still got somewhere. The Magnetic Recording Handbook. It's this thick. almost.

Well, a lot of it's not obsolete, but in terms of like manufacturing technology, it would be so so. Yeah, these heads are just amazing technology. Absolutely amazing. So yeah, there you go.

But yeah, there's no feedback on that coil at all. Yeah, that is one machined piece, isn't it? Wow, that's great. How much does it cost to churn out one of those Any any machining experts out there? Is it? No, it didn't have to be cast, wouldn't it? It'd have to be cast. You wouldn't machine that properly, right? In fact, it doesn't look like this machine in.

Oh no. There's machining marks on the top for all the world. Look like machining marks that they just like polished it off. I don't know if anyone knows.

Is it a combination of cast and machine or something? I don't know, but that's yeah. that's I Guess that's the only way you can get the rigidity on on that head. and the arms and everything. It's absolutely remarkable.

So yeah, there's not much in these things. It's uh. it's just the platters and the head assembly. and that's that's it.

All the electronics is outside. Yeah, there we go. You can just pull that out. So we've got the matching uh assemblies.

I won't try and snap them together because uh, yeah, it could be quite dangerous. These are incredibly powerful. and of course, um, yeah. rare earth metals used in these.

and well, I think, uh, isn't China the dominant player in rare earth metals? Um, yeah. very precious resource trigger Warning: Look away. Now I think I got it. Winner Winner chicken dinner.

Wow, that was a real bastard. That one ta-da There we go. We're in. There's our separator for each one, So nothing on that one beautiful look at that.

I mean polished mirror. That's just incredible. Wow. Anyway, so that's one.

Now we. There we go. That is not a magnet. Uh, by the way, that's just like that's just a machined brushed aluminium.

Is it something like that? Yeah, that's just a machined bracket. How precisely that has to be machined? I don't know. Anyway, our next one down also doesn't have any evidence of a head crash. Maybe we're not actually going to see.

That'll be disappointing. After all this, I'm going to be incredibly disappointed not to see a big gouge taken out and a big head crash. These are going to get increasingly hard to, ah, take out, I suspect. now.

Third one looks okay too. Yep, no problems whatsoever. Oh, after all this effort, really, you gonna do that to me? None of them. I bet you none of them Now, Yep, none.

I reckon it's none of them that's absolutely perfect. There's nothing wrong with that. I suspect we're going to come a gutsy here, lucky last ta-da There we go. Absolutely nothing wrong with any of those platters.

So we haven't had a head crash. There's your five platters, don't They look absolutely fantastic. Oh, now they got fingerprints all over them. Ah, who cares.

Not, There's no evidence of a head crash whatsoever. And we've got another Uh pad under there. I don't know. Is there some aerodynamics to that? I don't know.

There's actually a significant amount of friction in that. I guess once again, that would be precisely engineered. There'd be a reason for that. And uh, yeah, these pads.

They would be for, you know, aerodynamic, uh, reasons to keep you know, the platter from, uh, flapping around in the breeze or whatnot. Um, I would guess Or that you know if it happens to wobble a little bit. Maybe it touches the pad and doesn't touch any metallic surface so it doesn't get damaged because they obviously don't need those in the middle. They don't need those, uh, around these at all.

Um, but yeah, these would be precisely engineered. I mean, look at. I yeah, you can see how they're just milled out. How do they finish that? I don't know the mechanical engineers out there like you can see the lip, so that's that's really very nicely machined.

That's just the thing of beauty. Joy Forever wouldn't be cheap to do that, would it? These platters here so precisely engineered, I can't damn well slide them apart. Um, I can't get them apart. I swear.

What the Oh, There we go. Got it? Got it? Wow. It's so precisely felt flat. The surface is so precisely engineered.

just can't do it. Unbelievable. Anyway, there you have it. That's a tear down of a Western digital red hard drive, six terabyte, Jobby, and uh, five platter.

and of course, uh, that would be a ten heads. A total. Oh yeah, I miscounted those before. So yes, that's interesting.

but I didn't see the money shot. We didn't get it. I didn't get to see like a big um, part of one of the platters gouged out there, so that's disappointing. So that earns a what? So yeah.

I can only assume that there was something in the head drive mechanism that sort of made it do the large crunching noises and stuff like that because it was just so much louder than like a normal drive. I could hear it like on the other side of the lab. It was incredible when it first happened. Um, so yeah, that's interesting.

but there you go. I hope you enjoyed that. That's a fascinating look inside a hard drive and I probably could have like got a new drive under warranty perhaps. Although, as I said, was one month technically one month out from when I bought it.

about 26 000 something hours. uh, continuous operation and eventually Kamagatsa. All the others are fine though. no bad sectors at all.

So anyway, I hope you enjoyed that fascinating look inside. Absolute marvel of modern uh. physics, electronics, uh, packaging, uh, construction, testing, science, all sorts. Everything amazing technology goes into these hard drives.

I couldn't even begin to scratch the surface of what all the aspects of a modern technology that go. There's probably not not a single aspect of modern technology that is not inside a modern hard drive and manufacturing technology, and Physics, material science, and the whole works is just absolutely incredible. So I hope you enjoyed that. I certainly did.

If you did, please give it a big thumbs up. As always, discuss down below. Catch you next time you.