Seagate Cheetah LVD - platter removal

[iam2sam]

Hello. I have about 30 SCSI drives from corporate servers that must have the platters physically destroyed for one reason or another. I have removed the platters from nearly all of these, using Torx and Phillips drivers. However, I have a few remaining Seagate Cheetah LVD drives that appear to have the platters secured at the hub with some odd retaining ring fastener. One side has 6 long, rectangular slots near the hub perimeter, the other has 3 roughly semi-circular slots in the same relative position. The rectangular slots rotate with the hub & motor, the semi-circular slots are fixed. I do have pics showing this if needed (I don't think there is any way to upload same to this forum) My guess is that the washer/fastener with the semi-circular slots (fixed side) gets rotated counter-clockwise to loosen the hub and remove the platters, but my recent experience is that guessing about disassembling these items can lead to minor but painful hand injuries Does anyone here actually know of a specific tool or techniques that can be used to remove the platters from these drives? Thanks in advance.

Sam

 

[rolli59]

I have successfully destroyed drives in the past with a cutting torch!

 

[Charlieb000]

i can only describe the IBM (PN) 59H7013. it has a circlip at the top within the aluminium, and one at the bottom under the aluminium. dont remove these. these are supposed to keep the motor in but it didnt come out (as i wanted - may be i needed to press it out). the disks are on an aluminium tube with a flange at the bottom. what holds the disks in place is a aluminium ring on the top, it goes over the aluminium tube that is around the motor. after you remove this it all slides apart. if you choose to grind, and want to keep the rest intact, dont touch the part that the circlip is in. to get the motor out there is a scew on the underside, and feed the cable through.

there are no slots on top though. the only thing that is fixed is the screw hole (sleeve) that pokes up through what rotates. i hope that noone wants to attempt data recovery with this cause there is nothing keeping the disks centred! you would have to press the motor out (if it was faulty).
Charlie.

 

[tokencode]

An industrial grade woodchipper does the trick.... drilling several large holes directly through the drive/patters also works well, but my personal favorite is .223 NATO rounds from an AR15 (armor piercing works the best)

 

[stjudas]

The ring at the top can be removed by using a smaller flat head screwdriver and prying off the ring. The tip of the screwdriver will be facing away from the axis. You'll want to work your way around it to get it loose though.