Photos: Dissecting a hard drive

Do not try this at home. To remove the yellow ramp, the mechanical heads had to be pushed onto the platter, which will render the disk unusable. The white strip on the lower left is another air filter, included because, as Western Digital's Lo put it, "It's improbable (despite tons of precautions) you'll have a drive with zero particles inside it."

On the lower right is the dual magnet voice coil motor, which, along with being an extremely strong magnet, controls how the mechanical heads move over the platter to write and retrieve information for the computer.