My E-Waste research artifact is a 2.5″ Laptop HDD. Removing the lid was easy as it was only held in place with a few Torx screws. I thankfully had a Torx bit for my screwdriver that was a perfect fit. One screw was a pain though as it was under the label.
This is what the drive looks like under the hood:

I noticed attached to the lid of the drive was a pouch containing beads of some kind, I found out this is some form of desiccant (most likely Silica Xerogel). This is part of the filter system to keep the internals of the drive clean. The other part is a filter that uses the spinning disk to circulate air through the filter. The filter can be seen in the top right corner of the drive, a white filter paper on a diagonal (United States Patent No. 5307222, 1994).

Neodymium (Rare Earth) magnets are used in many things from electric motors to fridge magnets. Under the read/write arm (Top Left) is two Neodymium Magnets. These magnets are made from rare materials only available from mining, making them very expensive and scarce. However, due to how HDD’s are constructed, recycling the Neodymium magnets is not ideal as the amount of time is greater than the cost of mining more (Sprecher, Kleijn, & Kramer, 2014).

The base material of the Platters is made of aluminum alloy or a mix of glass and ceramic. That is then coated with some sort of magnetic material to store the data on. This was made from a magnetic oxide, however, now it is made from something called a thin-film medium (Hard disk (hard drive) construction, n.d.). Three magnetic mediums are currently in use for HDDs: Oxide, Thin-Film, AFC (antiferromagnetically coupled). AFC is the latest advancement and IBM is coining it ‘Pixie Dust’. AFC allows a much smaller amount of space per GB (Gigabyte), this allows for much larger drives, going beyond the previously thought ‘superparemegnetic limit’. (Hard Drive Films, n.d.)

In conclusion, There are lots of components in HDDs and the most efficient way to recycle them other than to reuse is the ‘WEEE’ method that I explained in my last post; Dismantling and sorting the individual components just takes too long and does not provide much better results.

References:
Dion, F. E. (1994). United States Patent No. 5307222.
Hard disk (hard drive) construction. (n.d.). Retrieved from pctechguide.com: https://www.pctechguide.com/hard-disks/hard-disk-hard-drive-construction
Hard Drive Films. (n.d.). Retrieved from Affordable Computer Security Service, LLC: http://www.clintonpchelp.com/Recording_Media.html
Sprecher, B., Kleijn, R., & Kramer, G. J. (2014). Recycling Potential of Neodymium: The Case of Computer Hard Disk. Environmental Science & Technology, 48, 9506-9513.