I've been scrounging through my old stock piles of electronics "stuff" to see what might be reusable and repurposed. I disassembled this 180MB Seagate HD of mine, an oldie for sure, targeting the platter stepper. Here are some pics and wiring data. From my testing, this neat little motor ohms out like it is a 3-wire, 3-phase stepper even though it has 8 wires. But only two 5 ohm coils exist and have one end of each coil tied together, the other 5 wires are not interconnected (open circuits) when the 8 pin plug is disconnected from the PCB. (see wiring diagram)
All of my web research indicates this is a very early HD platter motor implementation by Seagate with no information available.
Connecting a 5V PSU between the common coil wires and either coil end does cause the spindle to move (bump or slightly rotate) and draw about 1 amp briefly. Manually rotating the spindle one can tell there are 24 magnetic "steps".
HD Model info
Stepper Motor Wiring-Side
Stepper Motor Platter-Side (platters removed)
Motor flexible PCB leads and dual 4-pin male plug
Pin-out Wiring determined by Ohm Metter
Does anyone have operational insights for driving this little guy. I'm just interested in seeing if it can be used as a variable speed motor.
Thanks in advance.