CE Marking

Posted under Educational, Product Design, Technology on April 24th, 2022 by

I get this question a lot from startups on where and how you get CE “certified”. CE is short for Conformité Européenne(French for European Conformity). It’s a sticker/symbol placed in your hardware product to let the user know that you are conforming to all directives by European protection standards. So as a rule of thumb, if your product is marked “CE” you can freely sell your product in the European Union. This is NOT a certification mark. Please understand that.

CE is a self-declaration process, meaning you as a manufacturer can put the CE logo on your product. Once it’s placed on the product, it’s assumed that you as a manufacturer have taken the effort to test all the relevant directives and have passed all quality and safety standards mentioned by the EU. The onus is on the manufacturer, they can slap a logo on the product and not have done any of that. Therein lies the problem of CE, where people think that just because it’s marked as CE means that the product is of the highest quality. Again, CE is not a Quality or Certification Mark.

In a proper workflow, if you need to affix the CE symbol on your hardware product, you need to create something known as a Technical file, which details all the product specifications, test safety reports, standards compliance reports, instructions of use etc. This document is to be produced to EU authorities when asked for or when a dispute is raised. You can be penalised if your product doesn’t adhere to some standards which you may have missed. Then there is a document called Declaration of Conformity which is an undertaking mentioning that your product adheres to a list of EU directives.

When you do put the logo on your product, please make sure that you follow the CE Logo’s standard design guidelines. There is a myth floating about that the China Export logo is a similar logo found on products shipped from China and you should look at the spacing to ascertain that it’s an actual CE logo. Actually, a logo like that doesn’t exist. I don’t think it’s hard for any manufacturer to adjust the spacing on symbols to fool you if they want. Just because you see CE in a product it doesn’t mean anything.

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Mechanical Harddisk Teardown

Posted under DIY, Educational, Teardown, Technology on April 17th, 2022 by
SATA Harddisk Teardown
SATA Harddisk Teardown
SATA Harddisk Teardown

In a recent power surge at home, I had a few device casualties and one of them being a mechanical SATA HDD. It doesn’t power on when plugged into the power supply, so I am guessing there is a bad component in the controller board on the HDD. Will get to troubleshooting this unit later this month. Mechanical Harddisks are one of the most intricately designed electromechanical devices out there. Inside one of them, you will see a flat platter that is coated with a magnetic material a few nanometers thick. These platters are where the data gets stored. The platter is mounted on a spindle with a brushless DC motor which can turn at around 7200rpm for the higher-speed hard disks.

SATA Harddisk Teardown
SATA Harddisk Teardown

You have a read-write arm that extends over the platter which controls the data storage process. Contrary to the popular belief the read-write arm never touches the platter, it always floats over the platters a few microns above. The arm contains tiny electromagnets and sensors which will induce a magnetic flux to write on the platter and sense a written bit. The arm is moved up and down by a simple voice coil which is controlled by the onboard controller. When an address is received by this controller, it activates the coil to move to a particular position to read or write. In larger size HDDs there will be multiple platters and a stacked read/write arm to access each of the platters individually. Since reading and writing to these platters is usually only possible by mechanical motion, these HDDs are essentially slow compared to SSDs which are entirely IC-based storage(Meaning you can read/write things parallelly and pretty fast). That’s the reason your PC boots faster on an SSD compared with HDD.

But mechanical HDD still hold a place in this day and age as a backup storage device. These are cheap for large sizes and you usually don’t have to worry about the data being lost as compared with your SSDs which can lose data if you are not powering it over 2yrs or so. Protip: If you are throwing away your old HDD make sure you break the platter before you throw it out else you risk a data breach in future.

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