When Blue Chip Technology’s IT manager, Rob Mortimer, was faced with the disposal of 25 hard disk drives, he felt it was a shame to simply consign the drives to the waste and came up with a novel alternative. He decided to take them into his daughter’s primary school, so that a class of 10 year olds could get an insider tour of the little “magic box” that can hold a lifetime’s worth of words, photographs and songs. Each hard disk drive represents a vast engineering achievement, operating with complete precision - the read write heads skim over the disk at about 7 millionths of an inch from the surface scanning magnetic dots molecules in width, whilst the platters revolve at 7200 rpm without a fraction of a wobble. The special ‘hands on’ lesson generated much excitement for class 4A as they literally lifted the lid on a common place electronic device to really appreciate this little feat of engineering.
Rob started proceedings with a quick overview of the computer, the hard drive and a little bit of history. It can be quite a revelation explaining to a 10 year old that the little 1GB USB stick they carry in their school bag, holds as much data as the first gigabyte hard drive introduced in 1980 – which was the size of a refrigerator, weighed about 550 pounds and cost over £25K.
Then it was screwdrivers at the ready. Once dismantled, a hard drive only has a few parts, so it’s a great example for the kids to work with and understand the basic mechanics. By the end of the morning the children were still enthused, having deconstructed all the drives with varying degrees of care and generally revelling in destruction. It was fun for the kids and a learning experience for our IT engineer who was relieved to discover it’s actually a myth that children have an irresistible urge to eat small packets of desiccant. All in all - a morning well spent. OK the mechanical hard drive may be obsolete before that class of children gets into the workforce, but that is the sort of bold statement that the solid state memory advocates have been making for the last 20 years.