Pulled an old hard drive to pieces to check it out.Marvellous bits of engineering they are.I can't work out what the highly polished internal disks are made of.My guess would be aluminium(AU).Can anyone help me out here.

That part is where the data is stored, referred to as a platter... they are normally made from glass or an aluminum substrate which is covered with magnetic stuff [not sure technical name for the magnetic stuff!], they are then polished.

they are normally made from glass.

 

Has anyone actually seen a glass platter? What drives are they in? I know I've taken apart more than my fair share of hardrives; new, old, or otherwise, and never come across a glass platter. They're all aluminum. I think it's just a manufacturing-legend.

 

I like the 5.25" old apple hardrives. They have some of the largest rare-earth-cobalt magnets I've come across.

i love those neodymium magnets. Ive been severely pinched by one though. I got mine when i took apart a seagate 2.11 GB hard drive that came out of a packard bell running windows 95. Now i wish i hadnt destroyed it, i could of put it in my dell to store music or other crap. I wonder if this would even be possible becuase its so old. Oh well, not like i need it, i still have like 101GB with four movies on it and a few gigs of music. Its a 144GB hard drive.

 

 

How about this, a hard disk floppy. Kinda like a zip, but with a hard dist instead. Do you think it is possible to do something like this? It would need a whole new drive though.

They already exist; they're called caddy drives, you can pull them out and put other ones in.

I think there was a glass harddrive developed but it never caught on because the glass either had to be made special to withstand the forces or it was too slow or too unreliable compared to its metal counter parts. maybe with new advances in material sciences they might make a comeback.