# is there a market for these



## radical351 (Mar 22, 2013)

these came out of hard drives.


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## pgms4me (Mar 22, 2013)

hi; i have thousands of those. they are the hard drive read armature with heads that read and write to the platters. value depends on age and model. i have some that have gold wires running up the arms to the read head. sometimes there are chips that have gold (usually part of the ribbon wire assembly). these are from the 1990's. The interesting things are the read heads,the tiny little black squares at the end that nearly touch the platter. hitachi made some with iridium. different pgms in the ferrite alloy increase the hardness of the head and the ability to reduce hysterisis in the magnetic filelds at high data rates. they are very tiny so i dont even hazard a guess as to value. that is why mine are sitting in boxes


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## BShan (Oct 15, 2021)

Any thoughts about what to do with these? I too have collected these with intention of gold recovery, but didn't sort by year, and did not take into account the exotic composition of these write heads. Most have steel foil to bolster the thin plastic ribbon. The connection from ribbon to write heads looks like solder, but it's colored like gold, not sure why they'd plate gold on top of solder, so hopeful that is more akin to bonding wire gold. 

Some of mine also have gold color wires running up the arms, though I'm not holding my breath on mine, could just be a trick of the light going through that yellow color plastic, mine are all from the past two decades, probably too new for that exorbitant use of gold.

I was thinking of similar process as IC, pyrolize, incinerate to decompose plastic, remove steel foils with strainer (gold is not attached to steel foils), and digest remains with HCl and air.


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