motor from ancient hard drive

This AC motor comes from a really ancient hard drive. I don't know the details of this hard drive as there were several parts missing. What I do know is that the platters were somewhere around 5-7 inches in diameter and the entire drive must have weighed in at about 30 pounds!

In this video I've mounted a fan impeller to the motor to demonstrate how much power it has. That's a lot of power for a hard drive!

In case you're wondering where I got this, I got it amongst the boxes of "junk" in one of the labs at NAIT. It's amazing how much old stuff you can find there.

Motor nameplate reads:

NIDEC FDR-0405ARS
1Ø 115V 50/60HZ 2MFD. LOT M 3284
4P 1.4W 0.22/0.18A 1500/1800R.P.M.
NIDEC AMERICA CORP. ST. PAUL MINNESOTA
P/N4240677 EC862796E
THERMALLY PROTECTED
CL. "B" AMBIENT 40°C
MADE IN JAPAN

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• AC
• motor
• hard
• drive
• old
• vintage
• ancient
• powerful
• fan
• computer

[mturgeon2]

Well, that won't do very much. However, I have hooked it up to an amplifier through a step-up transformer.

By feeding a varying frequency sine wave into the amplifier I can change the speed of the motor and easily rev it up to double the speed or more.

Maybe I'll put up a video of that later.

[waqasgroups]

how can take out hard drive motor

[TehMG]

@TheAluminiumklorid Actually none of my stuff is from junk/scrap yards. I get a lot of it from where I work. Random parts of very old equipment show up every now and then. As well when we decommission old equipment I can usually take whatever I want from it or the whole thing.

[Nivicoman]

@RidingSausage At 60 Hz this old motor runs at 1 revolution per second so 3600 rpm. That is 1 turn for every AC cycle. Newer hard drive motors are brushless DC or servo type (correct me if I'm wrong) and can spin any RPM the manufacturer wants to design it for.

[XxKenManxX]

Yo omg that Old hdd uses as much power as two xbox 360z haha that motor iz 1,400 rpm new hdd can get up to 10,000 rpm

[TehMG]

@taylorbrandon86 Yup, it's a PSC (permanent split capacitor) type AC motor.

[taylorbrandon86]

is that a capacitor hooked to it?

[kbhasikevin]

OMG! High velocity!

[3BricksHigher]

Would have been cool if it hovered a bit :)

[pyromohanzed]

That's probably from a Macintosh plus 20sc harddrive, not the small ones which came with the system ps/2 and things.