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I have an old laptop at my disposal that has a malfunctioning HDD in it. I would really enjoy taking the drive apart and looking at it.

However, I would like to ensure that I am not going to end up with lead poisoning or any thing like that.

So, my question is, are there any health hazards associated with the contents of an internal HDD (that was placed in a computer manufactured in 2004)?

P.S. I am not worried about doing damage to the hard drive or the computer, just me!

L.B.
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    There are plenty of ways you can pinch and cut your flesh, but as far as hazardous materials.... I haven't died from dissecting a HDD. – James Mertz May 08 '14 at 20:41
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    There shouldn't be any hazardous materials, but there are plenty of ways for you to hurt yourself if you use the wrong tools (or the right tools in the wrong way). Good luck! – KnightOfNi May 08 '14 at 20:45
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    No, because of legislations such as RoHS, WEEE and country-specific legislation you are highly unlikely to find any seriously hazardous materials in any electronics equipment sold to the consumer market in the last 20 years. – Mokubai May 08 '14 at 20:46
  • Taking it apart is fine, just don't burn it. :) Anyhow, check out this related page: https://sites.google.com/site/dukeewaste/home – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 May 08 '14 at 21:01
  • The biggest danger is probably that the magnets will demagnetize the strips on the credit cards in your wallet. – Daniel R Hicks May 09 '14 at 11:54
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    @Mokubai The contents of batteries are pretty unpleasant! (Took me ages to get used to the flavour, anyway) –  May 09 '14 at 15:53
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    @Mokubai Simple! Make your own hard drives! Then you don't have to deal with RoHS and all the other annoying legal requirements! ;) – Cole Tobin May 09 '14 at 16:30
  • @DanielRHicks Thanks for letting me know, I definitely want to keep that in mind! – L.B. May 09 '14 at 18:36
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    @ColeJohnson - Yeah, but to really do it right you need to get hold of some freon to clean the platters. (At one time IBM's Rochester MN disk platter manufacturing facility was the world's largest single point source user of freon -- tons of the stuff. Less than two years later, with the help of lemon juice, the plant used about 6 oz total.) – Daniel R Hicks May 16 '14 at 00:40
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    @KronoS Check :) Pinched the dickens out of my finger in the magnet ;) – L.B. May 13 '15 at 16:32

6 Answers6

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No problem.

There could be a small amount of lead in the solder (if the soldering dates from before ROHS compliancy), but it's locked up in the material. It won't escape unless you take a Dremel or drill to the printed circuit board, or heat it in any way.
And even then the amount is so tiny... You will catch far more lead from air-pollution by car-exhausts if you live near a highway or in a city.

Same goes for chemicals in the PCB and/or electrical components. As long as you don't cut or drill into them it's no problem at all.

People who assemble these things don't take any special precautions either. And they handle far more of them than you will ever do.

Stark07
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Tonny
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    lead has not been allowed in fuel for a long time – ratchet freak May 09 '14 at 08:56
  • @ratchetfreak True, but there are still a lot of pollutants from the old days in the environment. The lead (and other stuff) got into the road-surfaces and some of it is re-circulated (to some extend) into the atmosphere by the vehicles traveling over the road. When a road is re-paved or gets new tarmac the problem goes away of course, but in many places the original road-surface of the leaded fuel days is still there. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 09:39
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    Can you cite the air pollution comparision? – bot47 May 09 '14 at 11:15
  • @MaxRied I have seen some studies (my girlfriend works for an insurance company involved in a health-claim case due to road-pollution and she showed me some things), but I can't cite those. They might be public (I'm not sure), but I wouldn't know where to find them if they are. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 13:12
  • Lead was also deposited off the road (onto soil), sometimes for a considerable distance. It can be stirred up and get ingested or into the food chain, but I would be more worried about old lead paint in a home, or old paint being sandblasted off a bridge, or being near a lead smelter or battery plant. – Phil Perry May 09 '14 at 15:48
  • Aren't hard disks made in clean/white rooms? So people who assemble these things do in fact take precautions (or don't need to take further ones, both wordings may apply ^^) – FelipeAls May 09 '14 at 18:57
  • People who work with lead solder (and especially solder paste) do take basic precautions such as washing hands before handing food (especially acidic foods). I suggest doing the same. And if you're pregnant, be extra careful. – Spehro Pefhany May 09 '14 at 19:15
  • @PhilPerry You are right. Lead-paint or lead water-pipes are the biggest hazard, unless you work in a factory that deals with lead directly. Thankfully lead-paint and lead-pipes have been banned for even longer than leaded-fuel. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 20:13
  • @FelipeAls The final assembly yes, because they need to prevent dust getting on the platters, but the PCBs come from a regular production line. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 20:15
  • @SpehroPefhany Don't forget an air-pump to suck away the fumes when soldering lead. Even with ROHS legislation the use of lead in soldering isn't entirely gone. (Sometimes there is no alternative.) And don't forget stained glass making/restoring. That takes serious amounts of lead too. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 20:19
  • Clean rooms, as @Tonny said, are not so much concerned with minimizing chemical exposure as they are with keeping dust/skin flakes/etc. off of product. There have been a number of lawsuits and controversies around the world about clean room workers' exposure to nasty carcinogenic and mutagenic process chemicals. – Phil Perry May 12 '14 at 13:31
  • I think lead paint and leaded gas were both banned in the mid '70s. I can't tell you when lead pipes were banned (presumably they were), or if lead solder is still allowed in water piping. Reminds me of a "helpful hint" in a 1960-something Popular Mechanics (or Popular Electronics or similar). They said to use your mouth as a third hand to hold a roll of solder while soldering up a project! Nice picture of some guy sucking on a nice roll of lead-tin solder. I wonder if he's a babbling idiot today? – Phil Perry May 12 '14 at 13:36
  • @PhilPerry Mid 70's sounds right for paint. For special applications it was possible to at least mid 80's to still use it. Fuel I think was a bit later. Can't recall precisely (early 80's ?). For electronics ROHS only came into effect 10-15 years ago. – Tonny May 12 '14 at 14:28
  • I think lead paint (at least in homes) was banned around '77 or '78. Unleaded gas would have become widely available with the advent of catalytic converters (early '70s), with smaller nozzles that would fit into cars requiring unleaded. I think the ban on sales of leaded gas came a bit later, but was still in the '70s. There would have been a declining market for the stuff anyway, as almost every new car took unleaded, but enough old cars around needing it, as well as enough bozos putting it in newer cars because it was cheaper. – Phil Perry May 12 '14 at 14:34
  • @PhilPerry I just looked it up. In Europe unleaded petrol was available until the early 90's in many countries. As for lead-paint: In the Netherlands (where I live) it was banned in 1925 for use in homes, but it was in reality still used until the beginning of WWII. For industrial/profesional paint is was never completely banned (e.g. "red lead", which is a special anti-rust primer for iron is still available, but can only be sold to professional painters). – Tonny May 12 '14 at 21:35
  • @Tonny, I presume you meant leaded petrol (gasoline) was available. I was talking specifically about the US; sorry about not being clear about locale. Leaded gas was long gone in the US by the early '90s -- I don't recall it being available past the late '70s. – Phil Perry May 13 '14 at 13:25
  • @PhilPerry You could be right about the petrol. I vaguely remember Europe didn't ban leaded petrol earlier because the most common replacement for the lead-additive was possibly carcinogenic. Only in the late 80's a less dangerous additive (butylether based), became widely available. Also: Catalytic converters in the exhaust became the norm for petrol cars mid-90's in Europe (less road-tax if your car had one in many countries) and those converters are damaged by lead. That really accelerated the wide-spread adoption of lead-free petrol here. – Tonny May 13 '14 at 20:00
  • There is still a lot of lead in the soil (in the US), especially in urban residential neighborhoods. In some cities this still creates a hazard for children. – Daniel R Hicks May 16 '14 at 00:36
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The only "danger" I've ever encountered is the voice-coil permanent magnets. If you were to pinch some flesh between them you could end up with a minor but painful hematoma or laceration. When separated by a small distance (3-4mm) they can exert several kilograms of force, which increases quadratically as they get closer together. If you let them stick together it will require significant force and a wedge of some kind to separate them.

I have a couple of dozen pairs in a desk drawer :-)

Ex Umbris
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    Those magnets are perfect to keep cupboard doors closed. Much more powerful than the regular cupboard magnets. Especially useful on a boat or in a caravan that is subject to a fair bit of vibration. The hard-drive platters make nice coasters to put drinks on. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 06:56
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    @Tonny I can't believe you use the platters as coasters! Such a waste of a great signal mirror! – Canadian Luke May 09 '14 at 17:38
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    @allquixotic I know, but I live pretty close to a military airstrip. Not a good idea to mess around with signaling mirrors here :-) Last year a farmer, about half a mile from here, got into trouble because he used strips of aluminum foil to enhance a scare-crow. The fine was bigger than the bird-damage to his crops. – Tonny May 09 '14 at 20:10
  • You're kidding?! They fined someone for having excessively reflective scarecrows? What if they happened to park their car so that the Sun reflected off a window and dazzled a pilot -- would they be arrested for that? Neither action was deliberately intended to harm or interfere with a pilot (as opposed to, say shining a laser at a plane). This is the Netherlands? If that happened in the US, there would be armed rebellion. – Phil Perry May 13 '14 at 14:07
  • @PhilPerry It was a lot of foil and ideally positioned to reflect the rays of the sun at noon directly into face of landing pilots on the must-used runway. He was cautioned 3 times. Then he got a relatively small fine. (About $200 if I recall correctly.) He still didn't stop. 2nd fine: about $1000. 3rd time: $25000. It's not as if he hadn't been warned... – Tonny May 13 '14 at 19:50
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    I would also point out that the neodymium magnets are extremely brittle. I once had two of them snap together hard enough that they cracked into shards that went flying. Missed my eye by inches. I've also read, but never experienced firsthand, that some platters are made of a ceramic material that is also prone to shattering. – smitelli Aug 14 '16 at 14:51
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I recently opened a deceased Seagate laptop drive. ( I have had trouble with this brand in the past but that is another story) The platters in it were indeed glass but looked and felt like metal. I took it to work to show my coworkers and flexed one thinking it was maybe aluminium or magnesium. It shattered into many small pieces all of which were very sharp. This drive was manufactured in 2011 so yours may be different. Just be careful!

Greg
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As others have stated, there isn't likely to be anything immediately hazardous inside a hard drive of that vintage. I've taken a number of them apart and never seen or heard of anything in any form that could be easily ingested or absorbed that would be toxic.

Lead in solder, and other metals are present, of course, but not in forms that would be hazardous.

Some of the funnest parts inside a hard drive are the small but quite powerful magnets that work with the voice coil to move/position the read/write heads. Those are worth retrieving.

Sigmo
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I don't think this applies to laptop hard drives, but the platters in some older desktop drives used to be made of glass. If you drop or bend them, they can shatter to to quite small, painful shards. If you look after them, they're fine.

Stu
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    I managed to "shatter" a metal hard drive platter once. It didn't go to small pieces, but it did have a very dangerously sharp edge. – Heptite May 15 '14 at 22:18
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    Glass has been used as hard drive substrates as far back as the 1990's, originally for laptops. An easy way to check if a platter uses a glass substrate is with a laser pointer. You should be able to get a dim light to pass through the platter with a glass substrate. An aluminum substrate would be totally opaque. – CitizenRon Dec 10 '18 at 22:12
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No issues! The disk body is often from solid aluminium, the platters are made of aluminium alloy, glass or ceramic, coated with thin layer (10-20 nm) of magnetizable/demagnetizable material such as ferrite compound...

All in all, nothing more dangerous than opening a toaster

For info, you can find a detail of all components at https://youtu.be/h2z8TcYPy5M

Armando
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