Using hard disk motor as generator

I have disassembled 20 broken hard disks and taken out the motors, thinking they might be useful. However, they didn't work using DC current, because they required some kind of control circuit. Now I have a project (electrolysis) that might require to use those motors as generators. I want to know what kind of current these generate (DC or AC)? They were able to power an LED but as LEDs are diodes, I couldn't tell whether that motor generated AC.

Answer

A HDD motor usually is brushless, i.e. it has no commutator. Basically, it consists of three coils arranged around a magnetic rotor. There are three terminals to power the three coils and one common current return terminal:

You can drive the motor by a 3-phase AC voltage, and when you turn it by hand, it will generate a 3-phase AC voltage.

Here is a youtube video of someone who measured the voltage on all three terminals while spinning the motor by hand. This screenshot from the video shows a wonderful 3 phase voltage:

As you need DC, you could use three rectifiers:

^{simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab}

or six diodes, as @jms pointed out:

^{simulate this circuit}

However, I'm not sure how powerful those motors are, or how much power you get out when using them as generator. @JRE's experience (see comment) is that the power is very low. This may not be enough for your experiments, but if you want to try, choose diodes/rectifiers with low voltage drop (schottky diodes) to reduce the losses in them.