Hard Drive Preamplifier

[Bob-O-Rama]

The head assembly of most modern hard drives ( rotational, that is ) includes a flexible mylar circuit with a surface mounted pre-amplifier chip, these are glued to the mylar so are easy to peel off. This is a quick 3 image stitch.



Here are some single images ( not stacked ) at 20x, these are actually pretty "deep" chips, about 10 um, and the NA 0.75 gives a pretty shallow slice of that. These were done with a rigged coaxial lighting setup which really designed to cover 2/3", it will cover APS-C fairly well.



On FF it vignettes. But for $35 off e-bay and some gaff tape? Thats OK.





This is a little loop of the live view at ~100% crop, 1 um steps, using the $75 gene editor the 20x / 0.75 :



So I am thinking that getting even smaller steps might help if stacking?

[klevin]

Fascinating images. HDD have lots of interesting parts. Have you done a close up of the head, for example? Also, the magnets are pretty strong and fun...

[Bob-O-Rama]

We decomissioned a storage array a couple years ago and I salvaged maybe 100 sets of identical magnets, and kept a dozen boards and head assemblies - so the heads are in the cue.

[iconoclastica]

Boy, we are surrounded by stuff like this and I don't even have a beginning of understanding how it might work. It could just as well be by magic.