Quantsuff sent me a picture of someone using a hard disk drive platter to grind down what looks like a circuit board (from this website). That disk is spinning around at 120 times a second, so it should be able to do some serious damage to anything that touches it.
I spent several hours at work this week between jobs doing something similar. We had a box full of old hard drives, 10GB and smaller, some as small as 3GB. They’re from the previous century, when windows and programs weren’t so much of a hog with memory and hard disk space. They were in administrative PCs, which had records of students, etc. Back then, more than a decade ago, they made a really stupid decision to change the student identification number from a student number to social security number. Then several years later, identity theft became rampant and the social security number had to be changed back to a student number. We had hard disks that had personal records of both students and staff, so I began disassembling them so the data could not be accessed.
I got dozens of high power neodymium magnets and motors, platters, etc., and a big handful of torx screws. And I still have more than a dozen more I have to do.
I never thought about leaving the motor and platters, and applying power to get the platters to turn. Like, if the heads are gone, what can you do with some spinning aluminum disks? Polish your pinkies? I have several Joule Thiefs that I have connected to a hard disk motor, and when I spin the spindle, it lights up the LEDwith a real bright flash. Trouble is my fingers quickly get chafed from spinning the hard metal spindle, so that doesn’t last very long.
Back to experimenting…