Polish that hard drive!

A

Ashbringer

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jan 25, 2010
Messages
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I'm very serious, and no it's not to make your computer look pretty. Anyone who's had a failed hard drive and hates it should really consider doing this. A while ago I accidentally forgot to tighten a hose for my water cooling setup on my HTPC, and had to dry a lot of components off. Luckily it was non conductive coolant, but I decided to remove the circuit board on my drives to dry them off. To my shock I saw what looks like corroded connectors.

I took this old Maxtor 200GB drive apart to show exactly how often you'll find this corrosion, which damn near all the drives in my HTPC had. The pins on the right are for data, while the pins on the left are for the actuator. This drive is probably about 8-10 years old, but I have a 2 year old Samsung that was far worse then this. The 1TB Samsung had even the actuator pins corroded.


The results after I used metal polish to clean it up, and some paper towel to rub it to a shine. I used Eagle One Never-Dull I got from Walmart to do this. My main PC has a Samsung, Hitachi, and a Western Digital. Only the Samsung had badly corroded connectors, and would correlate with the SMART status of 62 Ultra DMA CRC Error Count, and 2 Calibration Retry count. None of the Sata connectors were corroded, but I polished them anyway.
 
If you use any kind of polish you are taking a big chance,unless you plan to use the drives as wall hangings.Some is conductive. Some will cause worse corrosion,unless its remnants are removed with a solvent.Alcohol is generally recommended to clean contacts.Most card edge contacts, which are gold colored, are plated with fifty millionths of an inch of gold thickness.That is easily abraded off,to reveal an easily corroded surface.You must have a lot of humidity in the place you have the hard drives.
 
Not only will you probably abrade any finish on the contacts away, unless you use the right type of cloth and solvent you are likely to generate enough static to kill some small unassuming SMT component.
 
I'll mirror the comments of the two above, using any old polish is a bad idea and so is using a regular paper towel because those two items can cause a fair amount of static charge which can possibly damage the electronics. The toughest part of an ESD shock is that it isn't always immediately apparent that there's been damage; the part might fail soon or maybe a year later...
 
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npublici said:
If you use any kind of polish you are taking a big chance,unless you plan to use the drives as wall hangings.Some is conductive. Some will cause worse corrosion,unless its remnants are removed with a solvent.Alcohol is generally recommended to clean contacts.Most card edge contacts, which are gold colored, are plated with fifty millionths of an inch of gold thickness.That is easily abraded off,to reveal an easily corroded surface.
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I've also used electric grease in some drives to keep it from corroding again. I've been doing this for over a year with no problems. Besides the Never Dull, I've also used Flitz with no issue. Sometimes I've used Alcohol after polish to remove the wax like layer they leave behind.

Flitz though is known as conductive and improving electrical joints, so I just stopped cleaning it with alcohol and using dielectric grease. Never Dull seems to also work just fine, but I don't know that for sure. I tested Never Dull out on metal contacts with no problems, but nothing concrete.

You must have a lot of humidity in the place you have the hard drives.
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New Jersey is very humid. Though I don't think it has much to do with humidity. In my HTPC I have two Samsung drives which had badly corroded contacts. My main PC has three drives, the Hitachi, Samsung, and Western Digital. The Hitachi is only a few months old. The Samsung is 2 years old, and the Western Digital is at least 4 years old. Only the Samsung was corroded.

Could be the quality of materials used.
 
gold is non corrosive, using a circuit board cleaner would have resolved the issue easily.....
 
Just use a electronics contact cleaner metal polish is meant for polishing metal not cleaning sensitive contacts.
 
A good electrical cleaner like De Oxit would have worked wonders on that corrosion.
I cannot say enough enough good things about that stuff when it comes to fixing electrical contacts.
 
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