Now that I’m back in Wellington, I’ve spent some time going through my boxes of parts relating to my server, and collected all 6 wrecked Seagate hard disks that gave me so much grief last year.

My friend @macropiper took them apart – most of them didn’t show anything interesting, but one particular disk had suffered an impressive head crash – a collision of the hard drive head with the disk platters.

You can see the groove that the disk heads have carved into the platters. And all that dust? That’s metal fragments that got torn off the disk platter surface.

The disk head and platter have essentially sanded each other down.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen an actual disk head crash before. It’s an odd occurrence, being a server drive, this disk would never have been subjected to any motion at all when powered up and spinning.

Presumably the disk controller must have suffered a critical failure and mis-guided the drive heads all the way into the platters. Pity I wasn’t in the room when it happened, I bet that would have sounded pretty impressive. And sadly expensive.