What exactly is inside a hard drive? Well, I let myself be talked into manually destroying some hard drives, rather than using the simple Derek's Book and Nuke.

So, we pop all the cases off, then do some terrible things to the platters which hopefully prevent most people from being interested in the Word documents we send around here at work.

The one thing I found interesting was that... in addition to the head, platters, and some other gizmos and gadgets, there's not one, but two rather powerful magnets inside. And they're attached to the base of the head, a few millimeters away from the platters.

I had never really known how careful one had to be with magnets around hard drives. Well, I don't think I own a single magnet anywhere near as strong as the ones I pulled out from inside of the drives.

They make great toys though, I have a chain of them now to dangle off various metal objects :-)