I've taken apart countless numbers of 3.5" desktop hard drives like a Western Digital WD800, but I haven't taken apart many (any?) 2.5" laptop drives. There used to be a significant price premium for laptop components, an extra cost that I didn't need to pay for my own needs. This started changing a few years ago: increasing power efficiency requirements and benefits of miniaturization meant small and power efficient components no longer demand a huge price increase, and nowadays laptops outsell desktops. Also, dropping prices of flash memory solid-state drives meant a lot of laptop-sized 2.5" hard drives got replaced. With terabyte SSDs available for well under a hundred bucks, I can't think of any reason why I'd ever want to use a 250GB laptop sized hard drive again, so I'm taking apart this Toshiba HDD2D90.

On the bottom I see four wires going into the spindle motor, which I now know to be a brushless motor with "Wye" style winding.

I don't see an easy way to tap into motor wires while running, so I'm going to skip the oscilloscope examination for this drive.

Closest to the motor control contacts is a chip with Texas Instruments logo and text 7CCN5NTA G4 TLS2502.

Chip with largest surface area was set at an angle relative to everything else. I don't recognize the logo offhand, but a brief search with PSC acronym found Taiwan-based Powerchip Semiconductor Corp and a matching logo. I didn't find an exact match for text A2V64S40CTP 747AFD1N but similar model numbers designated memory chips.

Spansion was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor which was itself acquired by Infineon Technologies. After multiple mergers, it was pretty hopeless trying to find details on a FL040A005 74699043. But Spansion's main product line were flash memory, so this is probably a chunk of flash holding configuration, calibration, and drive-specific information such as remapping of bad blocks.

In between the DRAM candidate and flash memory candidate is a large chip with an old Marvell logo and text 8816717-TFJ1 FT15241.2 0747 C0P TW

My failure to find much of any information on the above chips were disappointing, but at this point no longer surprising. I continued onward to mechanical disassembly.