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Ants colonized my hard drive, would the platter still be ok?

lucagrabacr
By lucagrabacr
in Storage Devices
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Posted

I'm not sure how this happened, I totally never ate ontop of my PC but there are ants inside my hard drive for some reason.

 

https://gyazo.com/18abd4732d408d7b6a8c8021f8d7bde4

 

So earlier today 2 of my drives broke, I thought it was caused by a cleaner guy who was cleaning my room yesterday, and that he tried to tilt the PC to clean the floor underneath and put it back too hard or something. I'm not ruling that possibility out, but now that I see the ants I'm hoping it's the ants and not the cleaner guy (I'm assuming the ants just ate out the cabling and caused mechanical failure, and that the platter is still ok, compared to impact damage by the cleaner guy which might damage the platter)

 

What do you guys think?

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The moment any contaminant enter the internals, which looks like happened there, those contaminants scratch and damage the platters destroying everything.

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3 minutes ago, Zagna said:

The moment any contaminant enter the internals, which looks like happened there, those contaminants scratch and damage the platters destroying everything.

Damn :/ is it possible that they didn't get to the platter and just the outer casing which contains the other things?

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How's that even possible? lol

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1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

How's that even possible? lol

I was surprised myself lol, it's a hard drive that's been running in my PC for a few months now, but the ants weren't there when I moved it to a new case about a month ago.

 

The ants are leaving the hard drive in drove now that I disconnected it, probably because the temperature dropped after I disconnected it 

IMG_20190119_1853362.jpg.fe02a99736baaf38074ae513e1ff7baa.jpg

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... what the hell? well if you want any data back its got to go off to someone like drivesavers but thats going to cost you. hopefully nothing critical was on there

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Yoooo how even ?

 

 

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Yeah - there's no way that it'll be alright. Hell, even a bit of dust getting in can destroy it... much less ants.

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2 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

Damn :/ is it possible that they didn't get to the platter and just the outer casing which contains the other things?

Behind that hole is a tiny high grade air filter so that the internals can normalize air pressure. Ants could easily just chew through it since it's very small.

As soon as that filter is punctured, all the internals are contaminated, platters, read/write heads, everything.

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Update: there's almost no ant left in / on the hard drive from what I can see, it seems like they have sent / hatched male / female winged ants to breed and find a new nest (from what I watched in an ant documentary, that's what they do)

 

The winged ants can be seen hanging around on my 2nd monitor here

 

IMG_20190120_171925.jpg.25d853f90c4f4f03fbf8d86009015b01.jpg

 

I still can't go to a hard drive repair center / service because it's sunday, but I've prepared my hard drives to be brought there

 

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