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I would like to see a hard disk with all open source software. This sounds extremely challenging, even just the physical construction. My thought is to take an EXISTING hard disk and replace the software. I think one problem is may some of the chips , it is hard / challenging to obtain programming information.

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> I would like to see a hard disk with all open source software.

You’ve got me curious of the use case, is it fascination or some other reason? From a security perspective, it seems straightforward to just encrypt the bytes before sending to the drive. That would ensure you can detect data being maliciously changed and/or protect against the drive somehow misusing the data.

You can replace the controller board all together, the electrical interface should not be that hard. You have to spin the spindle, jiggle the heads and send/receive the data. The main problem I see here is that modern hard drives have enormous, unimaginable information density. There must be so many tricks how they achieve that (and do that reliably!). You have to re-trace the steps the hard drive industry has made in the last 50 years.

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