Repurposing old hard drives

[LitterBug]

I have a nice stack of old Hard Disk Drives dating back to the days when they were sized in MegaBytes rather than TeraBytes. Turns out there are a TON of potentially useful parts in them from the three phase brushless spindle motors, super strong coil magnets, fasteners galore, the disk platters, etc... Might be fun to build some hobby stuff out of them. Maybe landing gear from disk platters, see how fast I can get the disks to spin by hooking them up to an ESC instead of the HDD controller. See what kind of thrust can be had from the spindle motors. Maybe try to make something actually fly....

Anyone else played with old computer guts??

Cheers!
LitterBug

 

[Timmy]

Anyone else played with old computer guts??

yes, and I collect all of it even the tiny screws.

 

[Tench745]

I've got a couple old hard drive platters in my junk drawer. I haven't found a good use for them except maybe as a wind chime.
As I understand it, in the old days of electrics when everything was brushed motors, people would convert brushless CD drives to spin a prop. I have no idea of the specifics of that kind of conversion, but I'll bet a hard drive would work too.

 

[LitterBug]

The spindle motors are all multiphase brushless motors. I have a really old drive that only has the three wires. The newer motors have a center tap in addition to the normal three wires. You can hook an esc up and spin them just like any other motor. I've seen some persistence of view projects done with them. Need to see how much torque they have and how much prop they can spin. They will probably be fairly heavy compared to a normal Plane/Drone motor.

 

[PsyBorg]

Im rebuilding my computer now as we speak. New parts arrived today. I just spent the last two hours lapping the cpu water block to be perfectly flat and polished. Im not sure I will do the actual CPU like I did in this machine as that processor is mighty expensive if I esd zap it and kill part or all of it.

Anyways long story longer I went thru all my old hard drives and have 4 in working order but two that wont light up. If I cant swap control boards and wake them up I may strip them down and see what I can do with the parts.

Sadly when I moved here I had to dump all my stored computer parts of which there were 15 working win 95 / win xp computers I had networked at one point in the basement of my old house up in the city as well as bags.. yes multiple bags of ram ranging from 32 pin 1 meg sticks to a whopping 128 pin 4 gig sticks from all the repairs and upgrades I used to do for people back in the day. My payment was a good meal and all the old parts I was upgrading. I would then take those parts and make working computers for the lan set up or to donate to kids in need of one for school as the internet grew more important to education.

All that stuff went to an old friend who was heading off to school for IT and was also working on his CNA for microsoft. what better more easy way to learn networking then on your own network right?

With the low voltage and probably low torque of those motors I would think a geared drive system and some solar panels would be a good place to start re purposing hard drive stuffs. Both cars and multi engine foamies. Maybe even a solar powered extended duration quad?

 

[LitterBug]

Did a quick proof of concept with a 10 amp ESC hooked up to a drive to spin the platters. The "stock" timing is really off for starting the motor with the platters attached. Have to hand start it. A 5000 rpm drive is now spinning MUCH faster at full PWM LOL. Need to set up a tachometer. I also need to reverse the motor direction from CW because the designed airflow is for CCW rotation and impeding the speed of the drive. Even when hand spun, it spins down pretty fast when spun CW vs CCW. Actually kicks out a surprising amount of air. (think tesla turbine)

Cheers!
LittererBug

EDIT: Swapped rotation direction. Spinning faster, less airflow, and the motor started up on it's own.

 

[mrjdstewart]

my students and i used to do "recycling" time at the end of the day as a wind down. we had ton's of electronics donated and we would just tear them apart, salvage what we could, then build crazy things out it. i still have boxes of brushed motors taken out of old CD and DVD drives. you can also salvage the power supply unit and use it to power your DC battery chargers. much more efficient than running an AC to DC conversion charger.

me