Of interest (or not), the May-June 2002 issue of American Scientist included an article by Brian Hayes titled Terabyte Territory with some interesting (to me and who gives a s... about the rest of you) bits on Hard Drives. The magazine is online, but is accessible only to Sigma Xi members and/or paid subscribers. (Note there's another mag with the same name not assoc with Sigma Xi.)

[quote:]

The first disk drive was built in 1956 by IBM, as part of a business machine called RAMAC (for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). The RAMAC drive was housed in a cabinet the size of a refrigerator and powered by a motor that could have run a small cement mixer. The core of the device was a stack of 50 aluminum platters coated on both sides with a brown film of iron oxide. The disks were two feet in diameter and turned at 1,200 rpm. A pair of pneumatically controlled read-write heads would ratchet up and down to reach a specific disk, as in a juke box; then the heads moved radially to access information at a designated position on the selected disk. Each side of each disk had 100 circular data tracks, each of which could hold 500 characters. Thus the entire drive unit had a capacity of five megabytes—barely enough nowadays for a couple of MP3 tunes.
RAMAC was designed in a small laboratory in San Jose, California, headed by Reynold B. Johnson, who has told some stories about the early days of the project. The magnetic coating on the disks was made by mixing powdered iron oxide into paint, Johnson says; it was essentially the same paint used on the Golden Gate Bridge. To produce a smooth layer, the paint was filtered through a silk stocking and then poured onto the spinning disk from a Dixie cup.

[end quote]

So DIYers - now you know how.

John