Hard drive platter "X"?

November 4, 2005 7:56 AM

After dissassembling a hard drive, a coworker found a drive platter with an "X" engraved/stamped on it, anyone know what this means?
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo to Technology (5 answers total)

Was it on just one side of the platter? Did that platter have a actual head serving it?
posted by bshort at 8:11 AM on November 4, 2005

Sometimes when a manufacturer wants to sell, say, a 60GB drive, they'll take an 80GB drive and disable one of the platters. Normally it's done in the drive's firmware though, not physically.

It may also be a calibration platter. Older drives needed a whole side of one platter to track where they were.
posted by cillit bang at 8:13 AM on November 4, 2005

I think cillit bang is basically correct. Sometimes one side of a platter will be unused. But it is my understanding with these disks that the unused side doesn't go through the fine processing and coatings that the used sides do; the "X" is probably there to make sure the unused side doesn't get mounted incorrectly in assembly.
posted by adamrice at 8:57 AM on November 4, 2005

Response by poster: interesting. sadly i dont have it anymore so i cant post a picture.
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 9:57 AM on November 4, 2005

echoing cillit bang and adamrice, another possibility would be that it was a platter that failed QA on one side (post-processing, as opposed to the scenario that it was never processed.)
posted by printdevil at 1:00 AM on November 5, 2005