Hard Drive Platters
- Thread starter tyoon21
- Start date
Help Support Gold Refining Forum:
HAHA, great idea OZ.......
It is all my girlfriends fault, honest. She kept asking me to help her make wind chimes for months knowing I had pipe scraps, wood and the tools. One day I was talking to her on the phone and she mentioned it while I was sitting in front of a pile of platters and “click” the thought was born. They do ring nicely.
cut some of those platters up, took a little bit of used acid peroxide( finished using), put them in jar, careful aluminum can act violent after the oxidized layer eaten through reaction boils, dont add very much, when boiling ceases add lil more used acid peroxide, the aluminum drops copper from the acid, when all aluminum has been removed I ended up with copper and the hard drive platinum foils, now acid peroxide to remove the copper and heat and more peroxide untill I got down to almost clean foils, then used this to drop gold from a gold laden some copper HCL/Bleach solution good boil in this and left with dirty gold and platinum disk foils that strong HCL/Bleach even boiling has a hard time dissolving(will clean this up and get ready for aqua regia, this way am using mostly used acids and cemicals to remove the aluminum, even my very dilute solutions that copper has been dropped out with iron will work to remove the aluminum. , and I will then expireiment on even removing the aluminum from solution, with hydroxides, who knows maybe make up some aluminum oxide for sanding with. steve is right takes alot to get these to foils, but as I am using used solutions, and have time to mess with them, and a big box of them platters, and usually lots of used solutions,I will play with these and see if I can get some of that shinny metal.
had a few small platters my guess from laptop had glass platters foils from them stripped with HCL/Bleach and boiling, these foils must be PGM gold dissolves way easyier than these foils do.
Have not tested yet but the reddish platters are probably Iron oxide, you want the silvery ones.
I am not recommending others recover from these, but I want to do these platters , and already have a large stock pile of aluminum, and the expirience and getting some platimum is worth more to me even if I could make more money from the aluminum in them.
is adding to my education now I am getting familiar with the aluminum chemistry, Heck that is making all this work worth it the education . 8)
had a few small platters my guess from laptop had glass platters foils from them stripped with HCL/Bleach and boiling, these foils must be PGM gold dissolves way easyier than these foils do.
Have not tested yet but the reddish platters are probably Iron oxide, you want the silvery ones.
I am not recommending others recover from these, but I want to do these platters , and already have a large stock pile of aluminum, and the expirience and getting some platimum is worth more to me even if I could make more money from the aluminum in them.
is adding to my education now I am getting familiar with the aluminum chemistry, Heck that is making all this work worth it the education . 8)
Toss them in with your aluminum scrap as the platinum in them is in very minute quantities (rumored to be less than 20 grams per metric ton) if it is present at all.
Steve
Steve
glorycloud
Well-known member
I get paid 45 cents a pound for hard drives that still have the controller card intact.
That seems to be easier to me these days then all the labor involved to remove
the screws, etc. on these drives. 8)
Of course, I do have to wipe the drives first which does take some time and effort.
Maybe I should consider one of those hard drive grinders and REALLY destroy the data!!! :lol:
Anybody know what a cheap way to do that might be?? I bet someone has a good used
machine sitting in storage somewhere.
That seems to be easier to me these days then all the labor involved to remove
the screws, etc. on these drives. 8)
Of course, I do have to wipe the drives first which does take some time and effort.
Maybe I should consider one of those hard drive grinders and REALLY destroy the data!!! :lol:
Anybody know what a cheap way to do that might be?? I bet someone has a good used
machine sitting in storage somewhere.
Harvester3
Well-known member
Howdy,
Have you thought of using a degausser on the drives instead of overwriting or "wiping" them?
.45/lb isn't too bad these days.
Have you thought of using a degausser on the drives instead of overwriting or "wiping" them?
.45/lb isn't too bad these days.
glorycloud
Well-known member
I do have a 12"+ degaussing ring that we used to use on monitors. I think I still
have an old tape degausser that looked like an iron you would use for pressing clothes.
I wonder if anyone has any facts about the definitive wiping of data using magnetic fields?
That would be a time saver for me for sure as it takes 45 minutes to wipe a 20G drive and
it just goes up from there!
have an old tape degausser that looked like an iron you would use for pressing clothes.
I wonder if anyone has any facts about the definitive wiping of data using magnetic fields?
That would be a time saver for me for sure as it takes 45 minutes to wipe a 20G drive and
it just goes up from there!
Harvester3
Well-known member
Well, I can tell you that with a strong enough emp, you will render a hard drive completely worthless for data storage. won't format, wont even be recognized as a drive. lots quicker than wiping or drilling and gives the desired result.
Only thing I wonder is how energy efficient it would be compared to wiping/overwriting, etc.
Only thing I wonder is how energy efficient it would be compared to wiping/overwriting, etc.
glorycloud
Well-known member
The big degaussing ring that I have has a plug that runs off of 110V wall socket power.
Maybe I will give this a try and see if I can get any data off of the drives after I degauss them.
Maybe I will give this a try and see if I can get any data off of the drives after I degauss them.
Dragonstar
Member
I realize that necro posting to a three year old thread might not be the best way to introduce myself to the forum, but.... I share the OP's pain on how to get the platters off the "slotted hub" scsi drives. The answer is to use a flat bladed screwdriver to pry off the outer ring. I answered an instructable on it here:
http://www.instructables.com/answers/How-do-I-remove-the-platter-from-this-SCSI-harddri/
Getting the platters off was so maddening i even dremelled slots into an aluminum tube to make a custom torque tool ( which did not work, of course). Another thing that drove me nuts was how to tell glass from aluminum platters without marring them. The sun helps out with that:
http://www.instructables.com/answers/Distinguish-glass-hard-disk-platters-from-aluminum/
My interest in hard drive platters is not for PM recovery but to make sculptures. So getting the platters out really is the critical task. I've saved all the other pars just in case i ever get around to prospecting.
http://www.instructables.com/answers/How-do-I-remove-the-platter-from-this-SCSI-harddri/
Getting the platters off was so maddening i even dremelled slots into an aluminum tube to make a custom torque tool ( which did not work, of course). Another thing that drove me nuts was how to tell glass from aluminum platters without marring them. The sun helps out with that:
http://www.instructables.com/answers/Distinguish-glass-hard-disk-platters-from-aluminum/
My interest in hard drive platters is not for PM recovery but to make sculptures. So getting the platters out really is the critical task. I've saved all the other pars just in case i ever get around to prospecting.
