>> Also... I thought the platters were glass? Last time I checked, glass 
>> doesn't bend.
> 
> Of course glass bends, and if you have a thin bit (eg 0.3mm) it bends 
> quite significantly without breaking.

I'm aware that glass can undergo a very small amount of elastic 
deformation. However, I've never seen glass deform plastically before. I 
didn't think it could do that.

>> And finally, how many thousand tonnes of force does it take to bend 
>> inch-thick steel?
> 
> For a start the steel is probably only 1mm thick, if that, and that sort 
> of thickness you can usually bend over your knee with your bare hands.

Have you handled a harddrive lately? It's basically a solid brick of 
steel with spaces inside it hollowed out for the platters and the motor. 
Those things are, like, 80% solid metal! (Indeed, in a world where 
seemingly everything is cheap and slimsy, there's something satisfyingly 
rugged about a HD...)

>> And how do you generate those kinds of forces with such a tiny machine?
> 
> Mechanical advantage.
> 
> You could get a 100W motor (the sort in those hand-held food mixers), 
> gear it down a huge amount and you could get pretty much whatever force 
> you wanted (of course the higher the force, the slower it will move down).

That's just it. If you take any feasible size motor and gear it down 
sufficiently to generate the collossal forces required, the thing would 
move so slowly it would make continental drift look fast. Yet this 
machine doesn't appear to do that...

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