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2026-10-17: This is a teardown of a failed HDD from a mirrored drive setup in a file server. (Yes this was RAID1; no data lost - no horror stories of recovery or losses; this is a simple teardown!) The story is that someone managed to drop a metal rack on top of the unit. Afterwards, they came to me with a complaint that something is clicking loudly & file access seems slow. (No mention of the dent on the unit that was not there before.) A quick check showed a drive offline...and loud clicking. Order a new drive & rebuild the array. Now to see the insides of the drive:
I've already taken a peek. Label image of the drive - Manufacture date of 2012-05-16. This drive has had a fairly long life!
If you have seen the insides of a HDD before, you will probably notice a problem right away. If not, take a glance at the platters - they should be a mirror finish. I've never seen a failure like this before - the platters are actually quite rough and bumpy!
Closeup of the platter; you can see the inner surface of the platter that is not touched by the heads is still mirror-like.
This is one of the inner platters with the same problem. There is not a single platter without this pattern on it in the drive.
The marks on the platters reminds me of this video; its a bit too similar to be coincidence.
Closeup of the filter; I think this filter tried to do its job. (Those are not the platters below; those are the air control guides between platters.)
Closeup of the head stack.
I tried to get closeups of the heads. They're obviously destroyed, but I don't have a good before/after comparison to show.
Dirt patterns created by the platters throwing off debris.
There is absolutely no saving this drive. It is also the worst failure I have seen on any modern HDD. I'm still doing weekly checks on the remaining drives... 2 months later and the rest are still doing ok...