# Hard disks



## carnivore1975 (May 21, 2008)

Hello all,

I'm a newbie to this refining stuff so please bear with me. I have worked on computers for over 14 years as a hobby, but, during the last two or three months I have been getting more and more interested in recycling all the old e-crap I have lying around the house. I have alot of old parts that contain gold, aluminum, and copper. The hard drive is where my questions begin. I have taken apart several hard disks (for the aluminum housings mostly) and have gained alot of dark silver disks from this. I do believe that there is platinum on these disks (as well as cobalt and other things) I would like to use aqua regia on these disks to extract the platinum.

Q 1 How well does AR work on these disks?
Q 2 Has anyone else tried AR on HDD disks? If so what are your success rates?

I know I can use AR for the Gold but I think (heard) the proccess for Pt is a little different.

Q 3 What is different in using AR for Platinum?

Many years ago I worked in a copper plating factory (before taking on my current profession) which will lend some basic chemistry knowledge to my recycling... 

I kindly thank you all in advanced for your wealth of information!

carnivore1975


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## Rag and Bone (May 21, 2008)

Story goes...platinum is only present in platters from newer hard drives and in very small amounts. 

You also might consider acid-peroxide for recovery of gold rather than AR. I use AP for pins, cpus and fingers with good results. 

Good Luck!


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## junkelly (May 21, 2008)

Welcome to the forum.

I have not attempted to refine platters, but have read the attempts of others on the forum. It appears that some of these contain no platinum at all, and others contain very little. If anyone is refining an appreciable amount of platinum from the platters, they aren't posting about it here. 

Sorry I can't help with your questions. Spend a good amount of time reading the forum. Lazersteve has a few illustrated posts on platters. The 'book' that is often mentioned is "Refining of Precious Metal Wastes" by cm hoke. There is a link to a free .pdf of it around here somewhere...

As anticlimactic as it is, you are better off selling on eBay for an inflated amount, paying eBay and PayPal fees, and buying platinum (or whatever else you desire) with your profits.

-junkelly


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## carnivore1975 (May 22, 2008)

I was wondering how to setup AP?


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## Oz (May 22, 2008)

Go to any post by Lazersteve and go to the link at the bottom. There is a link to his site there. He has done much work improving AP.


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