You will be destroying any hard drive you open. If you still intend to store or access data on a drive, it's a bad idea for this instructable.



Not all hard drives are alike, but they are remarkably similar. From brand to brand, they often have mechanically interchangeable parts such as platters, spacers, retaining collars and screws. In order to build my version, I had to take apart five hard drives to achieve the right configuration of parts and hard drive chassis.



The motor that spins the platter is known as the spindle. Most hard drive spindles are three terminal brushless motors. Driving this kind of motor is beyond the scope of this tutorial. To our advantage, most logic boards for hard drives will spin their spindle indefinitely.



Select a hard drive, and open the top case. Opening a hard drive requires a set of Torx screwdrivers. If you don't have any, you can pick up a set at any well stocked hardware store. Once you remove the top case, remove the entire read/write assembly. Be careful not to damage the underlying logic board, as it is required to drive the spindle.



Remove the platter retaining collar, and remove the platter stack. Make sure you save the collar, its screws, any spacers and any platters.



Here are a few important issues to be aware of as you proceed to select your candidate drive:



- The clearing of the platter over the LEDs is critical, and there is a very small space to fit them in. Once the LEDs are glued to the wall of the platter chamber, the platter must be able to freely spin. This means no part of the LEDs or its ribbon backing can touch the platter. It's important to test this before gluing anything to anything.



- The LEDs are too tall to hide below the first platter. The solution is to use a combination of spacers from various hard drive manufacturers to shim a single platter above the LEDs. This can be very tricky to achieve, and may have you tearing apart working computers in sacrifice to the cause.



- Once you have all of the above figured out, make sure you test the spindle driver! Screw it together (without the LEDs) and plug it in. Make sure the drive spins continuously! I had the perfect drive that would only spin for about a minute before quitting. I suspect it found the lack of a read/write head unsettling, and decided rest was best. The point is you don't want to carry out the remainder of this instructable with a drive that won't continuously spin for you.

