Mayday! Ants in a sealed disk drive!
 

Elder son has Seagate 1Tb Free Agent External USB drive. Have just discovered that it is full of small black ants! And it's a sealed unit ... Just has some 1mm vents for air (and ant) circulation ...
Does anyone have any suggestions of how to get rid of the little b*ggers? Giving it a dose of Doom might not do the driver electronics a lot of good ...

You need to de-bug your system.

Sorry, no help but couldn't resist it.

Vapona?

If you're determined, then seal it with strong tape. They'll suffocate before long. If otoh you're more compassionate, then open the thing up, let the buggers out.

Are you sure they're not I.T. ants, defragging & cleaning the thing up?

Place it between two high powered magnets, give them headache, they'll run away.....or plunge it into a bucket of icy cold salt water - they don't like that, either.

lack of Humour
 

Where was the drive made / assembled / sent from - its a bio hazard -

CAT III - ( I ate the other two - Bones very chicken like - credit crunch ).

It does depend on whether you want to kill them or not.

But if you dont mind killing them - switch off the drive and use a vacuum cleaner against the fan opening. This will not only get rid of the ants but will clean the drive of dust that could help prolong its life.

Incidently the term of a software fault being called a bug is from the days when a valve based computers occupied whole rooms - if an insect landed on the racks it would often cross contacts causing an error - hence the term debugging.

Ha Ha Ha:O

ROFL at Ant :p I am going to read up about ants...and that magnet thing :)

bung it in the freezer ??

Living in Texas, I can affirm that ants can get anywhere. Anywhere whatsoever. The inside of bird-feeders - via the sticky liquid - into electronics, and of course in your pants.

These guys here cause subsidence, so a mere disc-drive would be an easy target.

Take a lesson from Richard Feynman. Observe them, and tempt them onto a different path. Use sugar, or a proprietary...erm, little plastic thing with nasty stuff in it. Wait until the dead of night, and if you can't wait for their slow demise, have a mallet at hand.

I spend a huge amount of time trying to save creatures...even cockroaches get put out carefully, but ants have made me their enemy.

That'll sort the ants, but I think the hard drive might prematurely end an otherwise long and industrious career along with them.

D'ya think, TRC, really? "Lol"

I was being fas...fac....cheeky. :}

Turn it on and they may decide to leave for themselves if the unit gets hot!

Feline.
I have a Seagate and it gets incredibly HOT during use it even puts out a fair bit of heat on standby, they are sealed units no fan only a heat sink on base of unit. Put it under a heavy load and it'll heat up nicely, Ah! the aroma of roast ant;)

Feedback
 

Well, since aforementioned 1Tb drive holds elder son's collection of modern music (Boom! Boom! Boom!) I was sorely tempted to try the magnet and bucket of ice cold water approach ... But the vacuum cleaner idea did flush quite a few of the little b*ggers out. They don't actually seem to mind the heat of the unit when operational - maybe this is the same syndrome as frogs being quite happy in a bowl of water that is bought to the boil?
Quite a few of them did decamp (complete with eggs) to a sealed speaker unit - and others to an audio switch box.
But as far as I'm concerned, I've signed off on the original problem, and I'm not opening any new job tickets.
Thanks for all the suggestions!

I don't know that particular unit, but I think I can safely assume that it's a standard hard disk drive (HDD) in an external enclosure, and the ants have got in to the enclosure, but not in to the actual HDD, which should be sealed. Subject to the warranty, you might get away with opening up the enclosure, as long as you don't try to open up the internal hard drive.

no vents in a hard drive
 

Are you confusing the whole computer with a hard drive? A hard drive is only one small component that stores data. It's a completely sealed unit and should never be opened as it will make it unusable.

If you have bugs in your computer do not use any sort of chemical or fluid to kill them as it will damage your computer. Open it up and use a vacuum cleaner to get rid of them. If you keep getting them then try putting the whole unit on a plinth surrounded with anti-bug tape

if this is an external usb hard drive then simply unplug it, unscrew the case, and clean using a vacuum. Make sure you don't lose the screws!