Modern Hard Disk Drives – Seagate Barracuda 7200.9

Moving on to desktop Hard Disk Drives, as we discussed even relatively new disk drives do fail, and this why manufacturers warranties have increased, to ‘protect’ the consumer. This following drive has a 5 year warranty and was still under warranty before data recovery was attempted.

Here we have a 160 Gigabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 from 2006, a very popular and common disk drive with D-I-Y computer enthusiasts, white box system builders and Original Equipment Manufacturers.

This drive, model ST3160212A failed because the read/write head dug into the disk platters and scratched the surface, in other words a head crash. The effect of the damage is worsened when we consider that the platter rotate at 7200 RPM.

Keen readers might wonder why the platter seems so low in the hard disk chassis compared to our other photos. Modern hard drives have much larger areal densities, packing more gigabytes into a single disk.

The 7200.9 model line uses a 160GB platter meaning only one disk platter is required whereas for the 80GB drive only one head and side of the double sided platter is used.This feature is why this particular drive has an ‘empty’ look