Video of Your Hard Drive In Action

Here is a really cool video that shows a hard drive running with its top cover removed.  (Of course, that particular drive is now worthless, since the tiniest bit of dust can cause the heads to damage themselves or the platters.  But it was surely worth sacrificing one hard drive for the purposes of making a cool demo video.)

One note of clarification: people sometimes use the term "hard drive" to refer to their entire computer (sans peripherals like monitor, keyboard, and mouse).  That usage is incorrect, though.  The big ol’ tower that you plug all the cables into is not the hard drive, it’s the computer.  The hard drive is an individual device -- the size of a small book -- that is found inside the computer.  And it’s the device shown in the video above.

Update: the first time I watched this video, I missed the first ~5 seconds of audio (I had my volume muted previously).  During that time the guy mentions that the hard drive has a transparent cover.  So they didn’t remove the cover from a disk, killing it in the process, as I originally stated.

But don’t let that dissuade you -- there are other benefits to killing your hard drive by removing its cover.  For example, the magnets that control the servo for the read/write heads are extremely strong and fun to play with.