Well I got the seagate pulled apart, it had 8 thick, large platters, about 1 and a half times as big still as a normal hard drive platter (5'' radius), with about three times the thickness as a regular drive platter.
(I hope the image shows the differences ok lol...)
obviously, the larger platter came from the Seagate
The platters were of the golden brown variety, not too sure what the maxtor has yet.
These hard drives had a date of 1985 on them, with the Maxtor drive printing roughly 12 patents for that drive on it's face, stating it was a D.o.D. variant drive.
It stated too that it was a 350 mb. drive, but the interesting thing about it wasn't it's capacity so much as it's capabilities... The Maxtor board possessed 32 single gold plated pins in various places on the main board, which tells me that one could link two or more separate pins with a special cable and allocate specific drive addresses unaccessable without the pin connections. There might have been some juicy info on those drives heh....
Here's what the Seagate drive yielded, minus the platters. the Maxtor main board is on the left, which had gold fingers I'd already snipped. The pins on both drive boards are all fully plated. There are also three female pin locations on thick gold circuit ribbon, where some of the pins were inserted that also were on thick gold circuit ribbon.
The drive chamber lid has a clear plastic box attached to it that appears to house a type of clear to clear reddish salt material (?? moisture control??), I'll need to investigate what that is... The magnets are huge!!! and very, very dangerous lmao.... I need to watch my fingers when holding them, they are super, super attracted to irons and other magnets.
There are rows and rows and rows of monolithic caps and resistors as well, on top of the multitude of flatpacks and IC's integrated on the board. My $5 may have been spent well after all... we'll see. :lol:
