Way back in 2002, I ran an experiment with a hard drive to see how durable the inside actually is, mostly curious to see how easy it is to ruin a drive.
In the 2nd above photo you can see the drive arm moving, all of these photos were taken while the drive was being used in a live system.
We removed the cover of a old IDE hard drive and proceeded to format and install windows. We didn’t make any attempt to protect the drive, and the office we worked in at the time was pretty dusty. The format and install did work with some errors, and eventually we got the computer to boot in safe mode. The computer worked but just barely, it was plain to see it wouldn’t last for long.
After that crude test, we decided to take it to the next level and pour water into the running drive, mostly just to see what would happen. We covered the live pc with plastic, and took some other electrical safety precautions.
We started with just a few drops on far side of the arm, the water more or less sprayed right off of the moving platter. Later I made a quick calculation and found that the edge of the platter at 5400rpm moves at an estimated 56 miles per hour (90kph).
After the water the drive arm moved wildly, and eventually went back to the edge. A few quick tests showed the hard drive had more or less failed at that point, but continued to spin and try to seek. Since most of the drive electronics are on the circuit board underneath, that’s not too surprising. Although if a drive fails catastrophically, usually they stop the spin. I’m sure it would be possible to retrieve the data if the drive heads were not damaged.
After the light dousing, we decided to pour the whole glass on the drive, and like before it more or less just splashed off the drive, but was exponentially cooler.
In the end it was just for fun, and it produced some interesting photos.