HDDs with an easily replaceable motor

[burnttoastnice]

Just an idea. With the motor being the main cause for hard drive failure I'm surprised no manufacturer has invented this yet.

[Enderman]

thats because it needs to be perfectly balanced and positioned

not something you can just unscrew and replace

[SPG]

then they lose profit. Make more money by buying an entirely new drive instead of buying parts to fix it

[dom1310df]

The cost of developing and implementing the replaceable motor, plus the cost of the new motor, *may* be more expensive than buying two new hard drives - one for a backup and one as a replacement.

[W-L]

It requires highly specialized equipment to get to properly center and balanced so it causes no vibrations as Enderman has mentioned. Some are also press fit into place making removal very difficult from the aluminum housing.

[GlassBomb]

As others have said, harddrives just have too tight tolerances in order for them to have swappable parts.

 

And it's not even the motor dying first on harddrives. It's the heads reading the platters that gets misaligned/shaken and starts to scratch the platters. That's how most harddrives die.

[burnttoastnice]

As others have said, harddrives just have too tight tolerances in order for them to have swappable parts.

 

And it's not even the motor dying first on harddrives. It's the heads reading the platters that gets misaligned/shaken and starts to scratch the platters. That's how most harddrives die.

 

It could be possible, though at the expense of space. My reason for thinking this is because some really old-school hard drives are belt-driven.

However, relating back to what you said about tight tolerances, I guess if someone replaced the motor on a belt-driven HDD and didn't align the belt properly the drive wouldn't spin at the correct speed, causing data to maybe not be read properly

[.spider.]

With the motor being the main cause for hard drive failure...

Proof? Source? 

[GlassBomb]

My reason for thinking this is because some really old-school hard drives are belt-driven.

 

I haven't seen, or heard of any belt driven hard drives. Using a belt is horribly inefficient and have very loose tolerances.

 

Moderns hard drives has their heads floating nano meters over the platters.

 

Here's an old hard drive from a bank or something, 30+ years old. And you can see the motor 15 minutes into the video (it's a pretty good watch).

 

[burnttoastnice]

Proof? Source? 

 

I'm speaking from the point of view of a hard drive that isn't being read and written to constantly.

For hard drives that are used constantly there's others like head crashes, r/w head failure etc.

[burnttoastnice]

I haven't seen, or heard of any belt driven hard drives. Using a belt is horribly inefficient and have very loose tolerances.

 

Moderns hard drives has their heads floating nano meters over the platters.

 

Here's an old hard drive from a bank or something, 30+ years old. And you can see the motor 15 minutes into the video (it's a pretty good watch).

 

 

EDIT: it is belt driven. Here's a better video:

 

[GlassBomb]

EDIT: it is belt driven. Here's a better video:

 

~snip~

 

That's interesting... An even older drive than what EEVblog took apart (his was from -89, this one's from -83). My head's just has lots of "Why? Why?! WHY?!?!" when it comes to belt-driven hard drives. As regular maintenance is a must, since you have to check the tension of the belt every so often (I imagine every other month?). Where as with drives which are directly driven are basically maintenance free.

 

I imagine that they had to use belt driven ones in order to make the whole hard drive fit within a certain space. And direct driven motors probably didn't have enough torque to properly spin the heavy platters. Frankly, I don't know.