Dead hard drive

This 800MB drive ran for some time after it died (it was running a co-located webserver) and although the drive was producing a lot of errors, it continued to serve web pages for a couple of weeks after the initial failure.



When I opened the drive, the entire casing was filled with metal dust, and some of this had been distributed over the drive platter. Of interest is the dust seems to have deposited onto the platter in a manner that shows some of the underlying data structure on the disk - though whether what is visible is sectors, or some other servo reference, I have no idea.