So I just spent about 45 minutes ripping apart some old hard drives. I think they were formatted but I was going to throw them out and decided to remove the platters and use them as coasters in my office. 5 platters were recovered out of 4 hard drives... 2 remain in a stupid drive I'll get to later. The following is my review of HD design in order from worst to best:
3) Seagate - AWFUL. Pain in the ass to get into. Required 3 different hex bits to open and disassemble, the last of which is very small (to remove the platters) and in fact, so small that I don't have a hex key small enough. There are 2 platters in that drive that will remain in the drive in the trash that I scratched the hell out of (1 from the top, one from the bottom of the drive). The design was also shitty and I don't think the parts were all that high quality. The bearings were probably the best part of it.
2) IBM - Not bad. Only took 2 different bits to get into. Half decent design, pretty decent quality parts. The bearings seemed ok but not great.
1) Maxtor - I had 2 of these drives. All the bits were the same hex and they didn't try to hide any of the screws from you. The other drives hid screws under stickers and shit. Pretty easy to get into and I didn't have to remove anything from the under side to get the top off. The other two required removing the electronics board and a few screws to open the drive. The design inside of both were very clean and simple. The arm reader swung out of the way very easily and everything was easy to disassemble and I probably could have even put one of those back together. All the parts were heavy duty and seemed to be very well made. The bearings were decent but nothing to write home about.
I know I'm probably a huge dork, but whatever. Also note that all of these drives are PATA and none were more than 15Gb. I think they were all made since 2000 but I'm not sure. I'm sure the guts of more recent drives is different so the reviews may not be worth a damn. But oh well.
