It’s been a while since I disassembled a failed hard disk. I take them apart (and destroy the platters) to prevent anyone from recovering my data, and also to harvest the two super-strong magnets held inside (upper left in this photo). This particular 2TB drive had a “spinning time” of 7+ years and was still working, but the OS noted a quickly-increasing amount of read errors. Not much has changed since the last time I did this: you still get the pretty shiny platters and a couple precision aluminum rings to separate them, the lightweight head-arm assembly, the aforementioned magnets, and a metric assload of stainless steel screws. I’d never seen the blade-like things at bottom left (slotted between the platters, presumably for airflow management or heat extraction).
