# just picked up some hard drives



## Never_Evil (Sep 22, 2007)

A friend of mine had 41 NEW scsi hard drives and was willing to give them to me. I had to open one up to see if the hard drive platters were platinum or not. I cannot tell. They are not a shiny reflective silver like other platinum drives Ive opened, but they are not the brownish drives either. It is more on the silver side, but is offtinted to the ever so slight brown side. On a scale of 1 being bright silver coloring and 10 being the brownish drive, these are about a 3. I had an Ipod 40gig hard drive that was bad and opened that and WOOO HOOOO platinum. 

Ok now with all the details out of the way, Ive tried to google these seagates and nothing is coming up with materials used. They are model st31051n 1.06 gig 50 pin scsi hd 5400 rpm spin. There is a lot of aluminum used to make up the body, a few gold pins, and copper for recovery, but what are the platters made of/coated with?

any help is appreciated

dennis


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## scavenger (Sep 22, 2007)

Aluminum coated with chromium/cobalt. U will get platinum on 20gig plus platters.


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## cheapmanuals (Jun 2, 2008)

What 20GB + platters have platinum on them? We have HUNDREDS of drives
at my work that are dead. Are one type of drive (i.e Seagate over Maxtor)
more likely to have the good stuff?


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## Rag and Bone (Jun 2, 2008)

I like hard drives for the stainless and aluminum. The small circuit board goes in with the mother boards and the platters... you guessed it, Ebay!


Don't get excited about the PT content.


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## Exibar (Jun 2, 2008)

I thought that it was shown here on the forum that harddrives contain pretty much zero Pt... That there is barely a dusting if even that on some platters.

That doesn't mean that ppl on ebay aren't buying them like they're solid Pt though....

Mike B


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## cheapmanuals (Jun 2, 2008)

I opened up some drives and have over 15 platters now that are very shiny like the ones I have seen shown as PT. I opened an IBM drive and got
5 of them out of it. We have hundreds of dead drives at work and if they
throw them out I will grab as many as I can to see what I can get from them. I did notice a very small amount of gold on some of the pins and on the read head mechanism on some of the drives.


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## banjags (Jun 3, 2008)

They best way I find to make money processing hard drives is take them all apart, keep platter, aluminium, circuit board separate. Sell the platters in 10+ pound lots on ebay for $2 per pound , sell aluminium to scrap metal dealer, and circuit boards from the bottom I throw in with de fingered cards and sell on ebay for $1 per pound. 

I make way more money on the scraps... aka copper, aluminium and steel then I do on gold. Gold is the gravy in the computer recycling business as far as I am concerned.


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## clwp (Aug 3, 2008)

check your hd covers, some are actually brass with a chrome covering.


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## jimwig (Aug 11, 2008)

hey guys if you run across any hard drive cases made with magnesium - like some older IBM stuff -- i will buy them from you. i need about 50 pounds of magnesium scrap for pyro use.

please don't ask for details as its in the experimental stage.

thanks


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## Never_Evil (Aug 12, 2008)

Here's the update guys.

HD's are sold and no platinum in the small hd.

Sorry


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