- May 19, 2011
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Nothing terribly technical was involved, and admittedly I didn't set out with this idea in mind. A customer's portable HDD had failed, and I thought I'd get the disk out to find out for certain whether it was the disk that failed or the enclosure. In hindsight I made the mistake of brute-forcing the enclosure open, breaking some of the clips in the process (I'll probably sellotape half the enclosure shut). But it's handy to have another portable HDD now, as I had a spare Samsung 500GB 2.5" HDD that has been sitting around for about a year.
It's an older product I dismantled, here's an image:
I worked from the front of the drive, where the shiny plastic meets the matte, wedged a screwdriver in between and starting working along. Plastic clips hold the lid of the enclosure all the way around. The way that the inner structure has been designed was reasonably sensible, so there's not a great risk of injuring hardware on your way in (the PCB for the enclosure is covered and the cover only comes off once you undo the screws for the HDD).
It's only USB 2.0 but so are both of the other portable HDDs I have for carting customer data around, and I'm happy to throw less tech away (plus I wanted to be certain that I wasn't chucking a working HDD out that had customer data on).
It's an older product I dismantled, here's an image:
I worked from the front of the drive, where the shiny plastic meets the matte, wedged a screwdriver in between and starting working along. Plastic clips hold the lid of the enclosure all the way around. The way that the inner structure has been designed was reasonably sensible, so there's not a great risk of injuring hardware on your way in (the PCB for the enclosure is covered and the cover only comes off once you undo the screws for the HDD).
It's only USB 2.0 but so are both of the other portable HDDs I have for carting customer data around, and I'm happy to throw less tech away (plus I wanted to be certain that I wasn't chucking a working HDD out that had customer data on).
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