Development of head change tools

Changing the heads on a hard disk is a complex process that requires a clean air environment and specialist equipment.

We have developed various head change tools that allow precise head assembly removal from drives with platters of varying thicknesses with different interval spacings between the platters. Typically, a unique tool is developed for each family of hard disk, although some tools are interchangable between drive families.

These tools allow the safe repositioning of the heads away from the platter surface, and removal of the whole head assembly whilst also preserving the spacing between the heads. Once the faulty head assembly has been removed the head change tools are used for fitting the new head assembly.

Multiple tools can also be combined, their spacing adjusted and then locked in place - this allows head change tool application on drives with more than one platter.

We have fabricated head change tools for use with Western Digital, Maxtor, Fujitsu, IBM / Hitachi, Toshiba and Seagate hard drives.

Head realignment

Failure of the heads from a drive where those heads are misaligned often results in unrecoverable data as the donor heads also need to have the original degree of head misalignment in order to recover the data successfully.

We have developed a clean room tool that accurately measures head misalignment and re-creates this on donor heads.

Under development we have a tool set able to measure and reproduce platter alignments on the horizontal plane with a sub-micron accuracy level.

In the photograph to the right the head misalignment is 0.37mm, which on this drive is approximately an offset of 200 tracks.

GCubic Training Course - Hard disk head changes

A practical course in which faulty head assemblies from various hard disks are removed and replaced with working assemblies. The data on the disk is then recovered.