HARD DRIVE MOTOR FOR CONTINUOUS USE
 

DO ANY OF YOU KNOW HOW TO TAKE A HARD DRIVE MOTOR AND CONNECT TO DRIVE A ROTOR CONTINUOSLY I KNOW A LITTLE BUT I CANT FIGURE THE FEEDBACK SYSTEM OUT THANKS

GABE

Someone will probably prove me wrong but this might be tough to do. Anything modern will use embedded servodata to determine RPM. It's a closed-loop system. You'd have to know the servodata arrangement and respond as the controller. I don't know, there might be logic available for this purpose but it doesn't seem trivial given the variety of drives.

yeah its not trivial, try taking the controler off of the hard drive and using it as well. second, most hard drives are not ment for 24/7 use.

I'd look for steppers from whatever discard devices or new in catalogs, just as older hard drives used for spindle and heads. They're simple to control vs. supporting head positioning & feedback just to keep spindle rpm stable. As Dilbert said, given you need head function, you're probably best off with almost the entire drive. I suppose it'd work if that's an acceptable form factor.

But hey, let us know if you find some cool workaround!

I've messed around with dead drives before... the easiest way to make it run constantly that I've found

I did this with an old 10gig seagate drive... not sure what your working with... but I imagine it would be pretty similar with all drives.

remove the pcb from the bottom... but keep it intact, you'll need it later

strip everything from the inside, heads, magnets, chips, boards whatever... then reattach the bottom circuit board and plug it in to a PSU

then you should have constantly spinning platters

depending on what your trying to do you could leave it like that... or pull it all out of the hard drive enclosure and solder the motor leads directly to the board or whatever...


I did this with a seagate drive

JS, it'll depend on the drive and how it respond to faults. I don't believe any recent drives will be able to manage rpm without head and platter to provide feedback.

How about using a DC tach fan? They're cheap, and self cooling. Max RPMs vary by model from 1500-4000. Plenty of controller ICs available.

http://pdfserv.maxim-ic.com/en/ds/MAX6650-MAX6651.pdf

Hey, here's a cool little 3-hpase PWM controller that would work.

http://www.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/7209.pdf

There are probably tons of them. Any EE here is going to be more in-the-know than I.