this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Did you know the contacts to the head, preamp and the motor on regular spinning disks are not soldered nowadays? That's right, after some clever PLM engineering, companies decided NOT to do this. Why? It shortens the life span of the disk, thus, your disks die and you go and buy new ones.
Mitigation of this problem: Remove the controller board from the drive and solder (add solder) to all of the contacts that connect to something to the aluminium chassis of the disk.
This is nonesense
Try it, then comment.
Try what? Add some pointless solder to a disk and then what? Wait years to see how long it takes to die? How many do I need for a sample size? Do I need to test the same model? What about workloads the drives should be under?
This is pure untestable unverifiable snake oil.
You can take my word for it and try it. Cuz I've done it numerous times and have extended the lives of many many disks. Sure, they all eventually fail, no doubt there. But, at least it will fail later, rather than sooner.
Test any model you like, doesn't make a difference, they all perform better after the surgery. And they will be more stable under workload as well, that can be guaranteed.
How do you know you extended the life?
Because some of these disks were proclaimed worn out and not to be used. I still use all of them in 3 custom NAS builds. I sold 2 of them, the owners still haven't reported a disk failiure, that was 2 years ago. I use one of the NASes as my personal storage, mdadm in RAID5, I still haven't had a single disk fail on me. They were all full of "bad sectors" (logical, because of the bad contact between the head/preamp and the control board, bad data was being written to them, passed them with DRevitalize, all of the bad sectors were "reparied"), and yet, somehow, they still work.
Not to mention the numerous primary (OS) drives I've done this operation through the years and most of them still work fine, even though they have fulfilled their purpose (with the advent of SSD and all that). I've also compared the life cycle of identical drives that didn't get this treatment and ones that did. Most of the ones that didn't get this treatment are dead now (head crash in most cases).
Do this surgery to all of your drives as soon as you buy them (or at least after they're out of warranty), disable AAM/APM (wdidle3 in case of WD) (you can do this even if in warranty, it's a software/firmware tweak) and the disk will practically last forever.
What part should i try
What do you mean what part... all if it, lol 😂. Solder all the pins.
DON'T DO THIS, at best it'll do nothing and at worst (muuch more likely) you'll short and kill your HDD.
The whole point of contacts is that they aren't soldered, the transmit current by physical contact. There's a matching pair on the HDD chassis:
They're not soldered, as in soldered to pins on the aluminium chassis. Look at the image I posted, have I soldered anything from that board to the aluminium chassis? No. The're solder cushions to act as pillows for the metal head/preamp pins, which leads to having wider contact surface and no oxidation, which in turn leads to better conductivity, no head fly-bys and no head crashes when the head looses contact with the control board.
BTW, they used to make them with solder cushions, but stopped after a while, cuz those disks could go through hell and back. Remove the boards from some old early 2000's drives, you'll see what I'm talking about.
The contacts are gold, which definitely doesn't oxidize any more than solder considering it, y'know, doesn't oxidize in air at all ever. The solder doesn't really add any contact surface area, and even if it did, it makes no difference for digital signals. "Better conductivity" doesn't improve digital sigs either. And why would the contacts ever disconnect?
I can't confirm the last paragraph, but HDD manufacturers could just move the PCB closer to the chassis and/or make the contacts' springs a bit stiffer to achieve the exact same thing, which is slightly more pressure between the contacts. That's literally all you're getting here.
This looks like gold plated to you?
When will people learn, don't trust everything you're told, check for yourself.
Plase take a look at the two, and tell me the contact area is the same. Solder wire is 60% tin, 40% lead (Sn60Pb40). They are both soft metals at room temperature, thus, they displace when pressure is applied on them, like from a needle for example, and they make a nice bed for the needle to lay in, maximizing surface area.
Oh, now I just know you know nothing about electronics.
You do know that it's not just I/O data that goes through those pins, right? Look at some of the buses on the PCB, not all of them are the tiny, there are a few thay are quite thick. You know what they are? They're the magnetic coil control pins, the thing that makes the heads move accross the surface of the disk... you know, the thing that fails when there's a head crash. It takes power to move the head, thus, it's not just a signal now, is it.
Look at the doodle again, and you'll see I'm right.
I didn't come up with this idea on my own, as I said, I looked at how things were done in the past, when drives were really good. Everyone soldered the contacts for the pins back in the day, and then, they just stopped. WD were the first, others followed.
Look, I'm sorry but I have better things to do than arguing about why putting blobs of solder on your HDD's contacts isn't a good idea. I'm not gonna stop you, but I don't think you've convinced anyone.
I know, you ran out of arguments.
Gold does not oxidize in atmosphere. You are spouting nonsense you do not understand.
This looks like gold plated to you?
You've never actually removed a board after years of use to see what those look like, have you...
Interesting, but I'm confused how it can be applied to piracy.
Gotta be a bot post, right?
Nothing would surprise me these days after seeing a Skyrim mod with an AI companion you can talk to.
who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks
I'm not sure it's a bot, but it's very questionable advice, and completely off topic. But I'm inclined to wait and see just how many downvotes it can accumulate just for the lolz 🤣
Meeh, just thought I'd share 🤷.
Plus, you gotta save your pirated data somewhere, right 😁.