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Clear Hard Drive Mods
Baloo Ursidae writes "In the spirit of the case window kit and the clear PC case, there are people who have made hard drive windows, and apparently they're not alone."
That ladies and gentlemen, takes balls.
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Opening a hard drive lets in dust that will cause a catastrophic failure after a while.
The owls are not what they seem
Because when you start using transparent mods to your PC, you're blowing away any kind of FCC rating it has. When the radio starts getting static and the cell phone drops connections and the portable phone/802.11b/x10 camera quits working, put the metal back around the case.
See them metal prongs all over the place around the case and seams? That's to prevent signals from the motherboard/CPU/hard drive from interfering with everything around it.
good lord! i might try this with an old bargin bin used 40 meg hard drive first. a quote from the page:
"Cover the platter part with plastic wrap and put it in a safe spot"
plastic wrap??? if i recall correctly, what keeps the plastic wrap stuck to the hard drive is STATIC ELECTRICITY. exactly the wrong thing to be dealing with when using an open hard drive.
moox. for a new generation.
you redundant bastards..
But what's the point of having a window on your hard drive when it's tucked away inside your computer where you generally never see it? You need to create windows on your drive bays, too.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Who wants to see inside their PC? It just turns into one big dust ball over time.
Sounds like it would take a bit of stupidity too.
Yeah, I'm gonna open my hard drive, sacrifice the warranty, get foreign matter in amongst the platters and heads.. I'm guessing these modified hard drives don't last too long.
I'm not even gonna mention the RF that'd leak out your plastic window on the side of your case. If half your monitor goes dim, don't say I didn't warn ya.
This is about as sane as using bubblegum to fix a rocket pack.
...clear power supplies? This is getting ridiculous.
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
there's just something about people saying "Cover the platter part with plastic wrap and put it in a safe spot" and telling me to Dremel my hard drive that tells me they have not thought this out very well. considering that a speck of dust can be disastrous to a drive, i don't think i really want to make a pile of metal shavings inside and put it all back together.
To publish this and let your site get slash-dotted.
Sent from your iPad.
if I'm not mistaken, it was the good ole RLL harddrives (before IDE, heh)
I think it was runnin Windows 3.1 :)
Anyone cache it? Post the link!
Is at the end he says that his drive have been working just fine.
See boys and girls? When the head moves between here and here, that's my porn collection.
:)
When everything stops moving and starts to smoke thats Windows 98.
When everything stops moving and nothing happens that's a Redhat user trying to install FreeBSD
Am I the only one who thinks this is an incredibly stupid thing to do? Considering that these drives are put together under strict clean-room conditions, wouldn't it be rather foolish to open one up in your basement or garage? Also, note the use of a DREMEL tool on the case cover... just what I want to be doing to a cover for a hard drive that contains multiple high speed platters: spewing little bits of metal dust all about the place.
No matter how well you vacuum this off, undoubtedly there will be debris remaining somewhere. Now imagine what those platters will look like after a few days at 7200RPM with the little bits of metal dust. This is the dumbest idea for a case mod I've seen yet. A joke perhaps?
they're not alone....
;-)
because anyone who is anyone has a clean room in their basement
I recall reading an article about hard drives and their sensitivity to contamination. Companies that make drives, and companies that take them apart for data recovery usually do so in ultra clean environments.
An average particle of dust is several times the gap between the drive's heads and it's platters. Having a head run into such a particle causes the head to bounce up and crash onto the platter. That can't be good.
IMHO his drive still works out of pure luck, but he's probably increased his bad sector count somewhat significantly.
Evidently this guy had some static electricity issues while modding his HDD from his huge brass balls rubbing against his pants.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
They're getting slashdotted AND memepooled at the same time...
At the very least there could have been a picture of the final product showing the cover with plexiglass. I know I wouldn't do this unless I had an old harddrive lieing around I wanted to tinker with from time to time.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I remember seeing lots of clear hard drive covers at a drive manufacturer booth at Comdex well over a decade ago. The rythmically moving drive heads seemed to draw almost as much attention as a cute booth babe would have.
This is a transparent (sorry) plot by IBM or Maxtor to get us to ruin our hard drives so we have to buy new ones!
This is a suicide mod!
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
And the fellow that did the mod knows that. Yeah, it's not the smartest thing to do, but you guys are idiots if you think you are the only ones who don't know the dangers. Please don't post any more comments about dust and RF.
It's not real smart, IMHO, to lower a pickup and mod it to hell, but the guys that do that like the way it looks. They aren't doing it so their vehicle will be faster. Just so it will look better.
That is what these guys are doing. Let them have their fun. I wouldn't do it, but I like the way it looks.
Ooooo.... look at it spin... it spins so fast it's like it's standing still! Aaahhhh... I could watch this all... of 5 seconds.
Back to work.
Sounds like an incredible waste of time - even for a seemingly nifty hack.
There is no off postion on the genius switch. - David Letterman
You're creating a Farraday Cage, where any energy that goes out hits a piece of metal, gets absorbed, then goes to ground and out. The metal tabs along the edges prevent any waves that are in the same phase as the opening from leaving. So by putting metal tabs along a non-conductive material will help, but not much. The waves will still pass right through the material and out.
I used to do FCC and UL testing of PCs, so ran into this often.
You many think I mean the guy who says "My HD works just fine after I opened the case", but I'm not.
Manufacturers SCARE you with "You MUST open this in a Clean Room, or you will have an unworking drive." Companies do that crap all the time.
Personally, I think that's bullshit. If people knew they could take a platter with data they needed, and move it to a working drive for $200 (the cost of a new drive), they wouldn't spend THOUSANDS to have a company do it for them. Just check out the ads in the back of Computer Shopper.
How many of you who claim a clean room is needed, have ever TRIED taking apart a HD, and putting it back togerther? I have, and it worked fine.
You people open TV's and VCR's and PC Power Supplies (I know you do, because I do), why havn't you opened a HD?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I modded my monitor. Replaced the existing screen with clear plastic so you can see the inner workings. Looks sa-weet!
All of the images from the above site are mirrored here: http://mattcasey.dyndns.org/hd If only the could make spinning lights when the disk spins...
Ladies and gentlemen, putting a window on a hard drive does not take balls. Putting a window on your skull, now that takes balls.
He writes at the begining of the page about how hard drives are specially sealed with ventilation etc. Well, I'm pretty sure his high school shop class job on cutting the plexiglass, hd case, and putting it all together might let a little bit more than air in.
I'm calling bullshit!
And I just got Windows OFF my hard drive...
An old college instructor of mine did the same thing with some high-weight window wrap. Similar idea. The hard drive has been working for about 5 years since he did the project, he more or less did it just to show students what the inside of a drive looks like while it's functioning.
Pretty impressive.
"Woohoo look at those platters fly!! -- Homer Simpson (Abriged)
The whole reason you have these metal cases over everything is to block out the *significant* amount of radio frequency interference your machine puts out. Previous poster mentioned 802.11, AM/FM/XM, etc. could stop working, but I'm more worried about other frequencies, like police/fire/ambulance services. I've read in the past about PCs without cases interfering with these signals, and these mods seem irresponsible to me. Sure the odds are pretty low that you'll happen to block out the paramedic who can't get the info on where the heart attack victim is in time and some gets killed, but I think it's a bad idea nonetheless.
:)
Altho it does look damn cool
As a former hard drive engineer for IBM, I can aboslutely tell you that if you do this mod your hard drive will not last long.
The case is nearly sealed-- the only opening is for pressure equalization and is protected by a pretty advanced catacomb filter. Drives are assembled in clean rooms to minimze the internal particle count after manufacture. Remember that the distance between the (moving) head and the (spinning) media is measured in nanometers!
Why does a hard drive stop working when it takes a shock, sometimes not when the shock happens but a few hours/days/weeks later? It's becuase the heads slapped into the media, chipping off some of the magnetic material. That doesn't immediately kill it-- the disk automatically notices that it can't write those bits anymore, and reassigns them to one of the spare areas. It's the little bits of magnetic material floating around the drive that kill it. Eventually, they find their way to one of the heads and block it from reading/writing. Or, more spectacularly (and more rare) if the debris is big enough, it will wedge in between the head and the media and score the substrate (aluminum or glass), which sounds a little bit like a turbine exploding.
Hard drives are incredibly complex and sensitive devices. Unless you also think it would be cool to crack open your processor case and put a little window on it-- don't do your hard drive. Now, if you have a hard drive you don't need, you can add the window to make it look cool, but don't expect it to work. Also, it's unlikely the arms will move much, so just expect to see the platters spinning.
He didn't do it in the basement/garage, he tried to simulate a clean room environment, read the page. And it seems to have worked.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
RF is easy to block. 1/4" Hardware cloth will block most things, specifically any RF signal with a wavelength > .5 inches.
Just calculate the wavelength and use a wire mesh with a grid of half that size. Anything larger is a window that RF can use to escape.
The metal fingers mentioned in another post just reduce the "window" size of the gap between two metal edges. Uh, it is important that the mesh be conductive of course!
Think of a microwave window...notice the little black mesh that keeps those nasty signals from cooking your eyeballs as you peek in to watch your tomato sauce explode all over. Same thing.
-Bollux
"Code monkeys aren't engineers!"
Hard drive windows? Bleah! How about CHIP Windows! Then you can see the insides of all the little chips in the computer... and Blinken-lights too!
... and another and this guy jumps into a barrel and a bunch of other stuff happens until finally a mouse is caught in a net or something like that?
And anyone remember that game "Mouse Trap"? You know the one... it starts with one movement which triggers another
How about we mount the game inside one of these PCs and then people will REALLY have something cool to look at.
Oh! Better! How about a gerbil running on an exercise wheel? Yeah!! All that inside a PC case!
...and here I was thinking that speed and output mattered... what was I Thinking?
I myself would be pretty interested in the results.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
And if I recall correctly, static electricity doesnt affect a magnetic medium, so it should be fine if you kepp it away from the electronics.
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
Geez, if I had my HD open, at least put in neon lights too, those really thin kind? Now that, would be cool.
And to all the people worried about destrying the HD, don't you have a bunch of old HD's laying around? I have 2 gigs, 1 gigs and a 540. Why not mod one of those, the worse thing that could happen is it ends up in the garbage instead of in a pile of junk on your computer desk.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
Yes, modding your hard drive will introduce impurities into it. Yes, you will void the warranty, yes, you will offend the Gods and generate additional RF.
But, it's a mod that you do because you want to, damn the consequences. It's done....for fun, for the hell of it, because you can, because it's there.
Chill out, lay off the "Yeah buts" and applaud the chutzpah that it takes to actually do this....but do not try it with ANYTHING mission critical!
Ooh Ahh. I'm not impressed.
First of all, this is definitely an opportunity to WASTE a good hard drive. But, beyond that, it is way too much effort for such a simple and stupid task.
The fact is that WD and others already make clear molded plastic covers for their drives. Sure you can't just go out and buy one but, surely you have seem display drives on countertops in your local computer store? You know the nice "dummy" drive with the clear plastic cover? If you are hell bent on seeing the inside of your drive, you simply need to scrounge up one of these display units, I have one on my desk, take the plastic cover and put it on your working drive. The contamination risk is only slightly less but, the work involved is far greater. 3 minutes with a screwdriver and your done.
All this assumes that you care to see your heads thrashing in the first place.
I did that 10 years ago with a Seagate 10 meg 5 1/2 MFM Hard drive, on my 386 ?
:)
,each set of heads had its own independent channel, and acted like its own drive. but RO in the case of th second set of heads, I MOLDED a clear top case half (they werent flat, on this drive, ou of plexi in the oven, overtop of a reverse mold I made of the orignial in plaster.
Admittedly and ALL clear hard drive would be cooler
I also split heads on the same drives (10 meg Seagate MFM, and set it up so 2 INDEPENDENT sets could be running on the same set of platters, 1 set was READ only , the other could read and write, the concept was 4 sets in the end (I never got there) for network transfers and reduced seek times
I spent a total of 2 month making all the mods, the clear was to show the seperate control on the seperate head arms, I choose the drive I did because it, and all the components were friggng HUE and tolerances were less than what they were even in other drives of the era. I still have it in storage somewhere.
Anyone wanna BUY it ???
I wanted to apply this to a CDROM at the time in parraled, several sets of heads, for speeding up archive retrieval on a cd juke. I thought several people could access different data simeltanous, OR run in parralel for GREATER than 2x spees, kind of a read ahead with another 3 heads doing the read ahead....
Yes, I drink WAAYYYY too much coffee
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Let me see if I understand this correctly :
... Nuttin' to see here ... Keep it movin' ... Jeesh !
Individuals who refer to that element of the hard drive that carries the heads back and forth, as the "spindle" are illustrating for the benefit of Slashdotters, how to put perspex windows on their hard drives ?
Just carry on movin', people
During my senior year of high school, I covertly colocated an old 486 in one of the labs. I graduated and managed to leave the server there. It worked great for two weeks, after which it stopped responding. Two months later, one of my friends managed to gain access and recover the server. he reported that one of the hard drives was making horrible noises. I drug it home and opened up the drive and saw this. Apparently the head crashed and the platter spun, grinding away for two months. It's hard to see in this picture, but there's actually a hole part of the way through the drive.
This is what I would consider a catastrophic head crash.
I'd love to see the inside of my hard drive spin, but I'd rather not have that happen to it. A little dirt can be a very bad thing.
I used to write servo firmware, and I'd get to go on recruiting tours to local colleges sometimes... we had clear-case drives at our display. We also used them to debug problems with the spinup and headload algorithms sometimes. Even when they were changed in cleanrooms, the drives usually wouldn't last very long before they'd stop working.
"Look Ma! No brains!"
jeesh! Cool? yes! Expensive? Yes!
all I can say is yowza.
I'm sure there will be many people screaming "But a speck of dust can wreck your hard drive!", and a few personal experiences of horror stories of drive damage. Here's my personal experience:
I have seen a new hard drive, untampered and sealed, run for 18 months, then start to lose sectors gradually. After about 3 full months, it had lost about 25% of its capacity and the owner gave up on it. At that point, we opened it up for a post mortem, and a tiny pile of grit fell out. The top platter was visible scored and marked... and it was still 75% usable.
I have personally swapped the platters on two 2.5" HDD's (from one with a broken arm to one with a hard ass password lock stored on the platter). Both drives were effectively write-offs, so I didn't even bother with the bathroom trick and had them open for about an hour at work, during lunch, with greasy fingers and food crumbs everywhere. To my great surprise, the result was one working HDD, no bad sectors, six months and counting. I trust it exactly as much as I trust new sealed drives, which is to say: not at all.
I'm sure that there are plenty of counter-stories, but it's my (limited) experience that even the most extreme manufacturing defect won't necessarily kill your drive immediately, and that if you've got an old drive you don't mind losing and fancy playing with, go on and have a poke around. At the very least, you'll get the pleasure of having friends and co-workers do a double take and begin the shrieking mantra of "Speck of dust! Speck of dust! Speck of dust!" ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"Cut teeth into the edges of the platters, and stick a baseball card in there so your hard drive sounds like a motorcycle!"
Transparent Aluminum is the answer.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Why can't people just stick to making crazy modifications for cars(paint rollers, ground effects, hydraulics) instead of shortening the life of a hard drive to impress your friends?
That's what a lot of geek computers already look like, never having the case closed because they are constantly in some state of modification or alteration!
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
HDD reader heads hover above the platters at about 1/50 the width of a human hair. If one spectral of dust lands on the platter and gets in-between the head and the platter, that could be bad. As Taco said, "That ladies and gentlemen, takes balls."
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
...would be lining the inside of the casing with fine wire mesh. This is enough to form a Faraday cage if the size of the mesh is equal to or less than the relevant wavelength.
For those of you familiar with the [H]ard|OCP forums, I'm sure this will seem familiar to you,
:-\
WELCOME TO LAST WEEK
hell, not even a week. This is old news.
I suppose it still fits the bill, News for nerds. But geez, can't we hear about new stuff? Like those spiffy Spir@l water blocks, uNF!
Computational Madness in a round package.
on an Altos 8005. It's a 5 meg drive with 8" platters. It's about 16" x 10" x 10" and has a transparent yellow lexan cover. You can watch everything move when it's accessed. But alas the media is bad, so I can no longer use it.
Does anyone out there know where I could get this fixed cheep?
I agree that it is possible to open a hard drive and put it back together and have it work. I too have done this several times. I have have several antique servers that were shut down for the first time in years and their drives froze. The bearings go out, the motor dies, what have you. I would give the spindle a litlle nudge to get it spinning again or replace the motor and boot the server right back up. But, I also regarded those drives as contaminated or failed and immediately mirrored the data to a new drive, discarding the old one.
Sure I might have been able to use those drives for years more but, I could have just as likely had a microscopic piece of dust hose a 30GB database two weeks later. Drives aren't so expensive that I would take that sort of risk.
So by putting metal tabs along a non-conductive material will help, but not much. The waves will still pass right through the material and out.
It might be possible to put a mesh or something on the clear material, so it is somewhat see-through, but still blocks the waves.
Like the door of a microwave, which blocks the lower frequency microwaves but allows the higher frequencies (light) through.
Of course with microwave ovens the energy is confined to a narrow band and the interference from GHz computers is all over the place, but I'm sure some clever engineer is working on it. I can see in my newer iMac a type of mesh surrounds a lot of the circuits.
There are commercially-sold cases with transparent windows in the side; presumably these meet the appropriate FCC regulations...any ideas how?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This mod was so successful that they're able to host their websites on those modded hard drives, and you can SEE how well they're doing!
Next mod: the plexiglass CPU.
Are there any transparent materials that have metal properties? How about those static shielding bags? Not completely see-through but they do have metal in them, I believe. IMO it would look hella cooler to have a coal-transparent cover, with a blue LED *inside* the drive to accentuate the parts...
I did this back in 'nam with a piece of bamboo and spent AK47 catridge...
Would all the 'so what' people shut the f#@k up and admire a cool hack when you see it. Remember:
Q: Why?
A: Because I can.
It's the hacking spirit.
/b
[Please type your sig here.]
>kepp it away from the electronics.
Like the horribly sensitive GMR heads on any newer HD... or the (less sensitive but still damagable) controller card on the back of the drive.
Use a good static bag (silver, not black web, pink, blue, or bubble wrap). Fold the end over... Also, doing this in winter means you should artificially raise the humidity in the room (low RelHumidity leads to a lot of ESD and far more dust problems).
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Place the HD in a humid bathroom to keep the dust particles down. *snicker*
Wonder what happens when the mositure condenses on the inner workings of the drive. Make a dust particle look like a cake walk.
Oh, and as a photographer, most of us don't use high mosture areas for development work, we have an HEPPA air fliter in our darkroom.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
The server seems to be somewhat /.ed already, so here's a direct link to just the final image of the transparent drive.
If you want to see the other ~35 images, use the original link to the full page.
What we need is that transparent aluminum! Why's it taking so long?
Well given what you said I don't think you did EMC testing for the FCC and UL. Your description of how a _Faraday_ cage works is stunningly wrong.
A good conductor reflects incident waves very very efficiently. Very little power is absorbed by the metal itself. If you surround a region with metal, all incident radiation from outside the box is scattered and does not enter the box.
If you want add a transparent window to the box, all you have to do is integrate a metal wire mesh fine enough so that the gaps are much smaller than the wavelengths of the frequencies you want to filter out. So, to filter out all frequencies below 2.4 GHz (lambda = 12.5 cm), you want a mesh much finer spacing on the order of 1.25mm - 1.25cm. (How do you think your microwave oven window works?)
Only if you are talking very low frequencies, would even talking about "goes to ground and out" have any meaningful content (like 60Hz which is essentially the same as DC from any electromagnetics theory standpoing unless your devices are the size of the continential U.S.)
Kevin
P.S. By the way, my Ph.D. background is electromagnetics and I had an office inside a Faraday cage at a former employer.
I modified my flatbed scanner so that it has a window. You can see the scanning head move as it scans the document. It's pretty cool. ;-)
So what is there left that we can put a window on? Keyboard, mouse?
Back in '83 I was standing outside a computer room when there was a head crash in a 12", IIRC, drive. Everybody hit the deck. Sounded like a bomb going off.
Best Slashdot Co
Am I honestly the only one who thinks all these "PC Mods" are just unbelievably ugly and a total waste of time and money? I equate doing things like this to my PC case on the same level as putting a 6" tailpipe or a ridiculous spoiler wing on the back of my car.
I don't mean this to come across as a troll or anything, but seriously, the inside of my computer is just NOT all that interesting. Aside from being a conversation piece for a few minutes, its just money down the drain. If people really want to see the inside, just take the cover off! I'd rather spend the money on parts to make my computer faster.
If you're going to repair/modify a hard drive, you must do it in a clean room. Even a speck of dust can ruin a hard drive platter. Not to mention that the metal case also acts as a Faraday cage, sheilding EMI from the rest of the computer.
But hey this is the world of Slashdolts right? The group of people with too much money and too little intelligence. Why don't you try soldering mod chips into your Playstation? That sounds like something you might be capable of doing.
...would be the ideal domain name for a site featuring more dumb shit like this.
Another suggestion would be to turn the top of your PC case into a hot plate by using a toothpick to disable the power supply's exhaust fan, and putting duct tape over all the vent holes.
Idiots.
Or you could just buy a 75GXP and have it turn into a brick all by itself.
You just do it with an old 6 gig drive or something small. But no way in hell I'll opening up a new big harddrive to see the platters spin and heads move. I'll kindly wait till Maxtor makes one with a window for me.
Clear hard drives? Next you'll be telling me that they're making Clear Pepsi or perhaps even Clear Gravy.
You'll take a dremel to modify your HD and yet you'll change the channel when this guy is on.
I don't get it.
WTF? Over?
Following all the trends in case mods, the next step will be to drill holes in the hard drive's platters and glue multicolored LEDs inside the holes. It'll mean having to reopen the drive periodically to change batteries, but it'll sure look cool!
before you bitch. He doesn't suggest you open your drive in your basement or garage. He suggests you steam up your bathroom (with the shower) and let it sit for a while to help get the dust out of the air. Then he suggests you take off the cover of the drive and immediately wrap the drive in something like saran-wrap to keep dust out. The dremel tool is used only on the lid. Once the lid has a plastic window it is carefully cleaned. To replace the lid, he does the whole shower steam thing again.
Is it very safe? I don't know. But you could at least read the article before assuming he is stupid...
One of the 1970s-1980s OEM suppliers of disk drives with removable disk packs had a blue translucent cover. After inserting tbe pack and closing the cover, you could see the heads move in and out, a little bit, from the edge (the top platter's upper surface wasn't used so there was no head for it). Cool.
IIRC there was an early Winchester-format (5") hard disk with a smoked (translucent brown) plastic case.
Both probably spewed RF but were not made for home use, and there were fewer radio users anyway.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
> And if I recall correctly, static electricity doesnt affect a magnetic medium
Static electricity is only "static" until it discharges. The discharge current, while small, is highly localized and might create enough of a field to flip some bits. Also, the discharges might burn tiny spots on the platter, resulting in bad sectors.
This is the coolest Mod I've seen. Quite frankly I'm amazed that this mod is getting trashed by the majority of posters thus far. This is COOL! This is stepping outside the lines of where people tell you you're supposed to be, and thinking outside the box! This is the type of stuff slashdot readers are supposed to embrace and love! It comes down to risk management - obviously, you don't do this to a drive with data you care about. The only risk in this operation should be the money you're out if the device fails after the mod. I was very impressed by the picture of the dual drives visible through the plexi-glass case.
:-)
:) But that's part of what makes it sweet.
There's something about watching machines in motion, like harddrives, and steam engines, that has a mesmorizing effect on me. I'd love to see a raid array of drives like this, where one user was commenting on how you could see the drives seeking synchronously. COOL!
And couldn't this be another way to verify your machine has crashed hard? Machine locks up - look at the hard drive. Is the head just sitting in one spot? Definitely the system is wedged.... You could also possibly visually verify the sync commands flush out buffers before a reboot.
Okay.. Not necessary, but still cool.
Anyway, Bravo! This is a great MOD. DANGEROUS - yes.
Good, then you can settle an argument some of my friends are having. :-)
They're both engineers; one electrical, one mechanical. The dispute is about a scene in the X-Men movie, where a bunch of people are inside the Statue of Liberty. One of the heros is about to magically create a thunderstorm or some such, and Bad Guy says, "oh, real brilliant, summon up a boatload of lightning while you're standing inside a GIANT COPPER STATUE," and so the hero changes his/her mind, does nothing, and they all get tied up (or whatever).
One engineer says that this is moronic, and that standing inside a GIANT COPPER STATUE would in fact be the safest place from which to call down a lightning bolt, because you're inside a Faraday cage.
The other engineer says this is purest bullshit. Hilarity ensues.
(As a computer scientist lacking the ability to summon lightning storms, I fall into the "could not give a flying fat rat's ass" camp, but that's never helped settle a dispute.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
This kinda stuff was cool back when I had my bulletin board running on my 486 (I was fifteen at the time). Now, the only time I see the inside of my PC is when I add hardware to it. If you can be amused for anymore than 5 seconds by watching the internals of a hard drive, then you have some serious issues (probably need to date more or something). :-)
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
As for the cutting disks on the rotary tool... skip the "Heavy Duty" disks... they aren't much better than the standard stone cutting disks (which is why they come in packs of 20-40).
Get the fiberglass reinforced disks (~$1/disk). They cut through stainless steel without wearing much, and they *don't crack*.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Didn't you ever see Disclosure? Michael Douglas would never have beaten Demi Moore if she hadn't gone cheap on the filters and screwed up their CD-ROM fab.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Don't know what you guys are talking about. I've had this mod of my system for a day and it works perfectly fi
Aren't these sold to the same sort of people who used to ridicule Apple for building iMacs with translucent cases?
I "Windows modded" my two old quantum IDE hard drives (150MB and 50MB) over an year ago, and they are still working fine... What I did, was just took off the top cover and replaced it with a transparent plastic (A cd cover actually) with screw holes in it.
I also made a two videoclips of the 50MB drive doing its stuff... Check out http://koti.mbnet.fi/kegetys/hdtach.avi and http://koti.mbnet.fi/kegetys/visputus2.avi (Divx required)
Number one, we need to start categorise hacks into luxury hacks, conducted mainly by those with too much time on their hands, and mother-of-invention hacks which were the original and more exalted variety. Seems a little blasphemous to cut off my right arm and get off doing the exam when I'm really left-handed.
Secondly, this article feels a little dicey. If I pull out the engine from my Fiat and drop a truck engine in, then put up a page saying "This is how I did it; by being careful, kids" do I get posted?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
As a professional computer consultant, I am warning you all to NOT do this if you care about the security of your data. All this does is gives a clear, physical view of your data to hackers on the interweb and the linux users we all hear about. You've been warned!
my sig is so witty and fun - it tickles almost everyone who reads it.
Look at the next to last picture from the first link (the bp6.com one). That platter is chipped all to hell around the edge!!!!!!!
I'm a 2000 man.
True, the magnetics are safe but the magnetoresistive heads are exquisitly sensitive to ESD. So the magnetics stay intact but the heads are blown so they one can't read or write. ESD is evil, too, it doesn't always kill a device right off the bat, just weakens so it fails earlier than it should.
I've got news for you. If companies did not need a clean room and a dust-free environment to produce working drives, they would not pay for one.
I work for a research company with a fairly small clean room. We have a class-10K zone, a class 1000 zone and a class 100 zone. Cost on the clean room was about US$750,000, and that is going the cheap route.
A real clean room costs a lot more. A whole clean production line with things like chases for the cryopumps and massive amounts of floorspace taken by production sputtering machines takes even more room, and clean rooms are rated in $$$ per square foot. Trust me, they don't have them just "too fool you".
Fixed discs NEED to be clean to work properly. You might be able to swap platters in your basement, but then again you might fry the lot. There is a lot of technology in that $200 crappy IDE drive that Joe CaseMod Dude does not understand.
I would never open a hard drive outside of a clean room that I expected to work again, except in a last-ditch scenario.
Iomega and Syquest (among others) developed removable rigid platters that are fairly dust-tolerant. But even those drives--devices that are DESIGNED to be exposed to dust--have problems. Iomega has had real problems with failure from dirt on their Jaz drive. Take a look at an internal Jaz versus a Jaz-II and look at all the seals they added! That's because dust was killing their products.
You could rig up a home-brew laminer flow unit with some HEPA filters to do your own fixed disk servicing and it would probably even work out okay most of the time...the first fixed disk drives I used actually had filters in them that needed to be changed. But then again, the dust tolerance was much higher.
The kiddies who are sticking plexiglas windows in their hard drives are at least cutting their lifetimes in half. The plexiglas itself will offgas and spew particles into their drive. God knows what the glue will do; I don't even let things like that into the cleanroom without some research.
But who cares...all these guys will lose will be their script kiddie kits, quake screen grabs and MP3 collections. Good riddance.
Can I install Linux on it?
Slashdot- The home of half-informed idiots.
Why don't drive manufactures just make them like this in the first place. If i had to choose between buying to identical drives, but one had a window, i'd go for the window every time. (Except ofcourse if it was an IBM drive, then i would laugh at it and pitty any poor sod who paid good money for it.
Here are some other good HD mods:
*If you have an IBM deskstar 60 or 75 GXP, hook a mini microphone up inside the case, near the drive. Connect it to an amp/speakers, and voila: A handy drive monitor that will let you hear the "buzz click" sound that means your drive has a week before it fails and turns into a brick
*If you have an IBM deskstar 60 or 75 GXP, drill a small hole in your case, run the ide/power cable through. Next get a cardboard box with some air vents. Put your drive in an antistatic bag, bubble rap and some foam, place it in the box, plug it in. Now, when your drive fails next month, you don't even have to open the case, just write the returns number on the box and ship it back to IBM.
*If you have an IBM deskstar 60 or 75 GXP, use it to practice dangerous window modding, and then when it goes wrong, claim that the insane clicking noises made you do it...
*If you have an IBM deskstar 60 or 75 GXP, congratulations - you will soon be the proud owner of a paper-weight.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I've create my own PC mod yesterday.
It's a screen mod. Looks really cool!
Here's the end result
http://www.uchsc.edu/atp/images/imac.jpg
How To :
Go on eBay, buy a old iMac.
It's even cuter then regular mod...you got color!
Yes the subject is correct. I once had a seagate drive that had some data that needed to be restored and didn't have a backup. The drive was an older model somewhere around 500MB. I removed the 2 platters and placed them in an identical drive I had on the shelf. When I fired it up I was able to get all the data I needed. I don't know how long it would have worked since I got my data and threw it in the trash, but it did work. I remember having to make sure I kept the two platters lined up together. I don't know if it would still work today with the higher data densities, but I thought it was cool at the time.
I like mods as much as the next person, but this is just plain Cracked!
I used to use a 1/4" drill bit to make my 3-1/2" floppys "High Density" floppies.
The only REAL difference between double density and high density is a hole the the corner (opposite of the write protect tab).
Flame on!
People who think my post is flamebait obviously havn't 'Hacked' in the true sense of the word. That just pisses me off.
Self-rightous bastards.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
You also know that the only difference between 360k "Single Sided" 5-1/4" floppies, and 1.2MB "Double Sided" floppies is a notch in the side, opposite of the write protect notch.
Yet another example of the industry pushing 'crap' data to the pubic to sell more product.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I used to work for a disk drive company that used to design/build enterprise drives (SCSI) and we used to put clear covers on demo models for show. This worked fine until we started using MR heads (GMR used now) as MR heads are extremely sensitive to ESD (electrostatic discharge) and most plastics are insulators and thus they don't dissipate a charge (the best material for ESD is static dissipative materials which fall between an insulator and a conductor).
What happens it that the air rushing inside the case will create a difference in electrostatic potential and when it gets large enough zap, and there goes the head. Please be advised that you won't see this happen as the amount of ESD to fry a MR stripe is extremely (worlds most sensitive fuse) tiny and a human would not even feel it.
If these drives work very long at all I would be very surprised!
That only worked sometimes. Many manufactures found that it was actually cheaper to make only one type of disk, and sell it at two different prices depending on demand. Those are the types that the hole punch worked for. Some companies, though, really did make two types of disks and the hole punch trick wouldn't work on them.
It seems the article in USA Today features this computing "brick" but is furthering the tradition of confusing the layman by publishing information that is inaccurate. On the web version of the paper the MetaPad has "10 gigabytes of storage" instead of 10 gigaBITS. The published version is even more fun claiming that the MetaPad has an astonishing 10 MEGABYTES! OOPS!
When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey. --Arab Proverb
As others point out, this is not new. Void the warranty? I'd mod an old 512Meg drive so far out of warranty it's forgotten what the factory looked like. Then use that drive for swap. If it crashes, so what? Plus, a separate swap drive will speed your system. If the heads don't move enough to look cool put a tiny parition on it (in addition to swap), mount that as /junk, and write a cron job to cp a small file to and from /junk every X seconds. You can even do this if you run Windows (although if you're such a serious modder you shouldn't need my help figuring out how to do this in Windows :-)
You folks who are thinking this is something you do to your 20/40/100Gig drive are nuts! Geeze, you could probably get a 512Meg drive free if you ask around.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Fuji M2388, Kennedy Data units, etc. Of course, when your drive platters are 14" and the head arms are nearly a foot long it's a lot more impressive - not much purpose for doing this on a dinky 5.25" drive!
This is insane - and most likely wouldn't work in the long term.
Look at the BP6 mod - toward the end there is tons of specs of dirt on the disk surface everywhere - hell, I think I even saw a fingerprint or two. At least the other article seemed "cleaner" - but still, the idea of doing this in a bathroom - wha? - are you on crack?
I don't understand why no one (or at least it seems that way) has built a "clean-tank". In theory, it would be pretty simple - maybe not clean enough for major work, but enough for some mod like this, or anything else that requires a relatively clean environment (not that I would still trust anything afterward).
You would need a plexiglass tank, completely sealed on the edges. The tank would have rubber gloves or something (new and clean, non-talc coated - maybe washed down, too) to work inside the tank, and a mounted HEPA filter on one tank wall, a hose leading to a blower unit, and a HEPA filter just after the blower, and a HEPA filter on the intake of the blower (after all those filters, the unit won't blow much, but you want clean air). Then, you would have to clean your tools as good as possible, put them in the tank (always handling them with rubber gloves), along with the device you are working on (cleaned and handled with gloves again), then start up the blower and let it run for a few hours to clean any residual particles out (maybe there should be another HEPA filter on another wall, open to the room, to let the excess pressure out, along with particles).
Even in such a homebrew tank, I doubt after working on the drive, etc that it would be very stable. While doing such a mod or surgery on a drive seems like something worthwhile and cool, it really isn't worth it unless it is a "last ditch" effort to get data back from the dead.
That said - either the BP6 mod was faked (because of all the dust), or he actually did it for real, and did another in a dirty fashion - but I would think that if he wanted to show the technique, he would have tried to keep the whole thing clean as possible - and he didn't, which makes me suspect the whole thing (as in, "hey, lets see what other fools will try this!")...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If it works, then install. don't do it to a drive with 5 gigs of porn on it
- clear cables to allow you to SEE your bits coursing to and fro
- finger ports so you can FEEL your bits coursing to and fro
This is silly. I've taken apart dead hard drives and said "Cool!" and then tossed it in the trash - end of story. Let's not waste any more time on this.
- Bill
Well, just had to add my $0.02.
Back in school dayz, in comp. sci, we ran drives on scuzzy cables with the *tops off*. I personally ran a drive that way for weeks. We're talkin' dust in the room, the works. No problems whatsoever. Now sure, those were 20Mbyte drives back then, but still. So if you take the precautions described in the articles, you should have no problems whatsoever.
Sorry, just had to respond. Remember, this is reality and it actually happened that way.
I love this part of the steps:
> Finally, you need to pull out that Scotch® tape
> and tape up the sides of the HDD like in the
> picture. This is very important to keep the HDD
> clear of foreign objects.
After the atrocitizes performed upon the poor HD, I hardly think that the lack of Scotch tape around the sides of the HD is going to make much of the difference!
Tom
Um, yeah. I'm sure (sarcasm) that a bathroom approximates a clean-room. Though HDs aren't hermetically sealed, they are an should remain really clean, opening it up is an invitation to disaster.
Next thing they'll do is mod their bodies w/ windows.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
What don't you design a clear top drive case and maybe maxtor will start to sell hard drives in this factor. As volitile as the drive market obviously is, its good to have an edge. Plus on a 80G+ drive I would pay $15-20 more per drive...and your extra effort would be minimal for the extra change. Use glass though, cause plexiglass scratches too easy. I will be looking for these in the office depot before long...get to it, or maxtor could direct sell these to reap all the profits :).
I suggest that if you really want to mod a HD, then do it to a drive with no critical data on it, and one where the warranty is no longer valid.
The comments saying this is a dangerous thing to do are missing the point. Nobody in their right mind will do this to the hard drive containing their life's work. This is a *toy*, to play around with. Maybe one would use it as a /scratch drive, if you feel like living dangerously.
Sad but true: for many Slashdot readers, a $200 hard drive falls in the category of disposable income, the kind of thing they'd pick up along with a six-pack of batteries and a roll of toilet paper.
For a hard drive manufacturer, if one out of five drives they build go bad, they might go bankrupt. For many Slashdot readers, this is an acceptable risk in the name of having fun.
And please don't bother comparing this to home appendix removal, unless you want to claim that a hard drive crash is as bad as dying of gangrene.
Heck, I've got a ton of useless drives that still spin. I think I'll just cut a hole, paint some swirls on the platter, and stick it in the window. Any ideas on how I can get it to rev down to 30 rpms so I can put dancing hula figures on it? Next up: CD Rom as an actual drink coaster for my home theater PC. Boy, have to be careful not to put my drink in the functioning DVD ROM.
What are the chances that this is a joke?
I didn't see any smileys on those pages anywhere like they we use on AOL to communicate our mirth and sarcasm, but I still think this might not be real.
i found the cd/dvd rom window was easier to install, and cooler, due to the interchangeable colors of the discs
I'll clean my machine as soon as I get home. Just bought a couple of 160G drives, I want to make sure they start as fresh and clean as possible.
Thank you!
Infuriate left and right
but its still a totally kewl mod.
I did this on the hard drive in my Cavalier Type-R, but instead of clear, i covered the drive with carbon fiber to save weight. it was totally kewl. i got it for free cause they had to custom make my carbon fiber hood scoop and they had extra fiber left over from the hole they cut out of it. i needed more air flow under the hood cause my engine gets real hot from all the NOS i use.
I live my life one quarter pounder at a time -Vinh Diesel
good point. I'd wrap it in aluminum foil. It's much cleaner than some arbitrary plastic bag.
It seem like a hoax to me, the last picture has the arm for the heads outside the plastic "window".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here's a cool use. Ever find the feds knocking at your door with a search warrant? Don't want them to get at your hard drive? No problem! In Case of FBI Raid: BREAK GLASS. Then trash the platters! Simple as that! Hope you didn't have hard copy lying around. ;)
Why bother.
wouldn't it be rather foolish to open one up in your basement or garage?
Of course. That's why the article says to do it in the bathroom, after showering.
--saint
sorta related, but not nearly as sophisticated, I rescued some old apple scsi drives and built a 4-drive clear raid. Gets great throughput for the few hours it stays working. I just wanted to see how a raid behaved.
Check it out at:
http://www.mistmountain.com/crap_raid.jpg
Isn't there an aerodynamic property of moving materials that there is a thin zone near the surface in which air does not flow? What would that result in?
Hmm.. This sounds like something Apple would make. Design a completely clear computer, with a clear hard drive, a clear power supply, and maybe clear circuit boards if you could get PCBs made of clear material. Sure, it would cost a heck of a lot of money, since Apple would have to get the components custom made (to clean room specs, mind you), but it would also be cool as hell.
Should I be smoking a cigarette while I am doing all of this?
I have personally swapped the platters on two 2.5" HDD's (from one with a broken arm to one with a hard ass password lock stored on the platter). Both drives were effectively write-offs, so I didn't even bother with the bathroom trick and had them open for about an hour at work, during lunch, with greasy fingers and food crumbs everywhere. To my great surprise, the result was one working HDD, no bad sectors, six months and counting. I trust it exactly as much as I trust new sealed drives, which is to say: not at all.
Your experience interests me. I have a drive which failed (IBM 75GXP!) but has data on it which I would like to recover. However, I can't afford those ridiculously overpriced data recovery services. I assume you swapped platters of identical models. After you did, did you run into any trouble? Did you have to low-level format the drive before it would work or was the existing data immediately accessible?
This is an interesting mod, but keep in mind that the people doing it are using OLD hard disks of little value. Sure, it would be interesting for a lan-party box. If it fails after a few months, who cares.
Now lets look at a more practical scenario: you have a drive which failed and want to recover data by swapping platters with another drive. No, you won't want to rely on the drive after the surgery, but it might just work long enough for you to recover you data. Additionally, there is a small chance that you'd be able to fix the original drive if there was an obvious mechanical problem. Some of the techniques mentioned in these articles have valid tips for performing this crude recovery work.
Here's another thought: has anyone tried constructing a miniature cleanroom? Like those plexiglass boxes biologists use where they put their hands into the rubber gloves to isolate themselves from the contents.. I wonder what sort of clean-room equivalency one could obtain from such a device. If it was well sealed, you could vacuum some of the air, use an ion generator to collect dust, etc.
Like this?
A window in the side of your PS won't show the electrons unless you get clear wires and you peel the wrapping off of all of the capacitors and wrap them back up with Scotch tape.
Sheez.
Virg
Way back when, a co-worker claimed he he got an IBM disk drive attached to a System/360 mainframe to crash by driving the head back and forth at the resonant frequency.
Not as dramatic as the story of the drum drive that broke loose and crashed though a concrete block wall, though.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Mose drive mfgs will cast a clear cover that they will use for NON-WORKING sales demo units.
What's the point with cutting the cover and putting clear plastic in when I can already see the drive through the Saran wrap?
There would be even a better effect if the wrap moves in the air of the spinning drive!
Yes, two identical IMB Travelstars. Same size, same model number. One ticked and burped on startup, the other had a password lock on the platter (which the controller knew about, and so wouldn't play ball). They were bought as seen on eBay for next to nothing, so I didn't expect them to work, and really had very little to lose.
Isn't the 75GXP the model that a lot of people had problems with? And the problem was with the physical platters breaking down? I'm not sure what you'd gain by moving the platters to a new drive, unless you know that it's the head, arm or motor that's screwed. In the first instance, you could try the controller from an identical drive. Swapping platters really is the last resort of the desparate, I think. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I did this, then to get all the dust & metal shavings out, I put the sucker in the dishwasher and used lots of extra soap.
I had a laptop hard drive that you hade to open the case and spin the platter to get it running. then put the case back on and let it go.... it ran for 2 years before the bearings finnally gave out and I couldn't "spin it up" anymore.
Newer insane capacity drives are fragile... drives from 1980's? Bah, if you didint sneeze on it it's fine.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But if you start whining that "The dust will kill this drive," well, you're not the target audience. Look at the pictures from both sites, they're ancient drives. Do not try these with drives you care about, do this with your old 6GB drive in your LAN party box.
Help us build a better map!
An interesting trick that photographers use to get a dust free environment is to go do the thing in the restroom. let Shower run for a few minuets and the room Will have reduced dust partial Count.
Kinda... except they tended to break after a few months... I have a heap of those old 720K disks that I drilled holes in that are now failed pieces of tech art... whereas the actual 1.44M disks are still working fine today.
:)
And the previous point about cleaning a 5 1/4 inch disk is nothing like the HDD cases in hand, the disk was ALWAYS exposed to air, therefore it had a MUCH higher tolerance to dirt, dust and grime... of course you could always give it a go cleaning it by hand... and you were also very correct in getting the data off and throwing it away, it would have barfed...
I've had a drive fail about a day after I bought it, with a lot of important data on it (it was making an odd clanking noise, and the controller was unable to talk to it.) I swapped platters with a defunct drive of the same size and it worked for about a week (which was long enough to get my data off,) then broke. When I opened it up, I saw that the arm was broken and the top platter was bent. Anybody have any idea what happened to either of the drives?
*sigh* I've never modded anything up because of humor, but this would have warranted it. It basically sums up just how stupid the arguments between engineers can get. Having gone to an engineering university, it really hit home.
:)
Thanks for the laugh.
Use the Head & Shoulders, and probably a hairnet as well.
As an experiment I added a clear plastic cover to an old 40MB hard drive. I took off the old cover, cut up the clear plastic from some old CD cases and stuck them with silicone where the metal cover used to be. No bad sectors were found when I tested the drive with scandisk, after the silicone had dried. It also ran windows 3.1 normally.
Another fun experiment I have tried is dragging some old 30pin RAM across the screen of a television to collect the static. The RAM modules passed all tests when put back in the 386 motherboard.
I have just taken a picture of the drive using my capture card and CCD camera, it's available here
Now if only I had a data chisel...
This is for all the "You can't do that" people.
:)
I worked in a computer store for years. Thank god I got out of there and into SysAdmin positions.
One of the guys in the store, from before I started there, had an IDE hard drive, which he had unscrewed the top. He'd pull the lid off occasionally and point out parts to explain to customers why their hard drives would go "thunk".. For some reason, it was easier for him to sell them new drives after he pointed out the mutilation he did to his.
I freaked the first time I saw it. "You can't do that! It won't work." He had Windows (3.1, I believe) installed, and it actually worked. That drive ran almost constantly until he left the company about a year later. It was opened almost daily. He took it with him, so I don't know its true fate.
Now back to the window project. He wasn't cutting on the part of the drive with the platter, he was cutting on the lid. The part with the platters was wrapped in plastic and probably left in another room, so it wouldn't get dirty. I'm strongly suspecting that he did the drive surgery in one room, and hacked the lid in another. So, after he cleaned the lid, he brought it back into his relatively clean room, and reassembled it. Sure, there's potential for bad things to happen, but I'm strongly suspecting his drive has a good chance of living for a long time. Putting the "window" in took less than an hour, I'm sure.
Would you consider a hard drive opened for less than an hour, and covered by plastic most of the time it was open, to be in any worse shape than the drive that was opened every day to have stupid customers look at it?
One of my hobbies is automotive mechanics. People who don't know any better look and say "You can't do that!" about automobile mechanics too. Sure, I can rip half of your engine apart with hand tools, and put it back together in an afternoon. I've known people to run engines without air cleaners for 200,000 miles in dusty environments, or not change their oil for 20k miles at a time. Would I recommend it? No. Is it very possible that it won't destroy anything or drastically shorten the lifespan of the equipment? Yes.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I had removed the cover off a western digital 420 meg hard drive and watched a base install of Linux install, kinda cool watching thoes heads thrash around. =)
rm -r windows
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
That's a cool idea. I wish I were mod'ing messages right now; I would have given you one of my precious points.
Hard drive companies are fighting for advantages right now. Most of them are plainly making jargon up (like they do for basketball shoes), to differentiate themselves in the market.
Why not create a different looking drive for case mod'ers and people who simply (like me) leave their cases open all the time.
I think that glass would be a good idea, other then it could break quite easily. I'm sure that there is some kind of plexi out there that wouldn't react to the sealing compound, or carry a static charge.
I'd like both the bottom and the top of my drive to be clear, the sides should be metal so I could still screw it in tightly. Having a translucent metal mesh (like in my microwave) could keep the RF interference down. It would be cool to have a few blue laser LED's pointing at the drive while it spun to light it up and bounce off the heads as they looked for data.
Cool idea. Everyone's becoming geekier these days and catching up to us. I'm sure that a HD company could sell quite a few of these just on the cool factor alone.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Actually. Didn't they use to have races with those drives? You know how an off balance washing machine walks accross the floor?
Well by programming the seeks right, one could get the drive cabinit to walk accross the room.
I sure do... it's a hoax. There's no WAY anyone can tell me that inside your hard drive is a TINY magnetoresistive head flying at MINISCULE altitudes over a fiberglass platter! Preposterous! I'm sticking to my theory that there's very tiny men (wearing miner's hats and riding Segways, probably) shuffling my data into tiny, tiny little filing cabinets, many millions of times a second. That's why I feed snacks and soft drinks through the power supply periodically, I'd feel so badly if they starved! By the way, why does the tech support staff keep calling me a nutcase?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"Put to scale, the head of a disk drive is like a 747 jumbo jet flying at mach 4 at an altitude of 1/4" over the rocky mountains."
No quibble with the numbers, but the jet is stationary, and the Rockies are moving under the jet. Otherwise, the heads would be spinning madly around in circles above stationary discs, which is plainly nuts. I also think the surface of the disc is much flatter in proportion than the Rockies! That's just silly; sorry. Surface finish is probably better than a microinch RMS.
Enby in Waltham
nbodley[at}world[dot}std[dot}com
Enby in Waltham
If you're lucky enough to have retained some of your childhood curiosity, by all means go for it; do inform yourself about possible hazards, though.
Enby in Waltham
Yeah, I'm gonna open my hard drive, sacrifice the warranty, get foreign matter in amongst the platters and heads..
Then don't do it. No, I'm not being funny or sarcastic. I'm serious. Don't do it. No one said you had to. Everything will be fine.
I'm guessing these modified hard drives don't last too long.
According to the article that you didn't read, the guy said that the drives he has modded have been in operation for months. Also, only an idiot would assume that this doesn't void his warranty, so I don't think you need to issue a warning. (Considering the article took care of that quite well.)
I'm not even gonna mention the RF that'd leak out your plastic window on the side of your case. If half your monitor goes dim, don't say I didn't warn ya.
Of all the towers and mid-towers I've ever owned, I have operated them all with at least one side of the case removed at one point or another, sometimes right next to the monitor and I have yet to see any adverse side effects from this. I'm talking none. Not even so much as a dim monitor. One of my computers is a full tower case that has never had the left side panel on and I have had neither problems with the computer nor with any nearby electronics. (And there are a great many nearby electronics.)
If you ask me, all this hooey from slashdotters about RF radiation remind me a lot like those Radon commercials that proliferated the airwaves in the late 90's. Yeah, if you suspect RF radiation is causing problems do something about it. But please don't go making it sound like it's going to be the next Black Plague because you didn't properly cover your box.
dot dot dot
So far, nobody has mentioned that he seemed to casually pry off what is probably a magnetic shield. He may be lucky, but external magnetic fields, afaik, can very easily corrupt writing, and probably reading as well.
the case might as well be made of glass. anything you do to a glass-cased drive that would crack or otherwise injure the case would probably kill a signifigant portion of your drive
moox. for a new generation.
Hey let's introduce dust into our data device. What next, clear RAM? These people have too much time on their hands.
Many years ago (about 1989), I decided to demonstrate to some of the IT staff I was supervising (as PC-resource manager) just how delicate these hard drives were.
We proceded to pull the cover of a 20MB Seagate HD (an ST225 or something from memory).
The drive was then reconnected and spun up.
Naturally, having read about the risks of head crashes and the effects of even microscopic specs of cigarette smoke, I expected the damned thing to at least lose data -- and hopefully come to a screeching halt with a fine shower of iron oxide dust everywhere.
Well that damned drive kept on working for several days without missing a beat.
The machine with the open drive was on a LAN and users could access it to check whether it was still running -- so it got quite a thrashing.
Eventually we got so frustrated that we deliberately blew smoke onto it -- and still nothing happened.
Even blowing dust directly at the platters still didn't kill it.
After a week of operation without its lid, the novelty wore off and we simply took to dropping it from ever-increasing heights to try and get a head-crash.
Eventually we managed to ding it up pretty bad -- but my smart move kind of backfired. Instead of convincing the staff that hard drives were delicate and things to be treated with great care, it turns out that they were (at least in those days) a hell of a lot more robust (at least in the short term) than we gave them credit for.
Of course since those early days, I've lost numerous Seagate drives to mechanical failures. I have a couple of 2.5GB units that both dropped their heads within a few weeks of each other -- and they were sitting quietly in a tower case with a UPS and no exposure to vibration or excessive temperature fluctuations.
They don't build them like they used to eh?
You should talk to marketing and say "hey, I can get you a 10 dollar markup on these clear drives" (which probably cost less than ones with a metal case).
Then, they can expand the line--put a strobe disk access light so the head appears to freeze and jump around in a lighted room, chrome plate everything, hell, DIAMOND studded drives. They do it with cell phones now..
The possibilities are endless, as are the number of total idiots who are willing to spend $$ making their computer look cool (after they are done spending $$ to make their ricey econobox look like a remote controlled car).
Good day.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Impressive. That guy managed to destroy a perfectly good hard drive.
Just look where the head is in the last two photograps on the BP6 one. Don't all IDE hard drives since like the 90s park their heads on the spindle? The heads on that drive are sitting in the middle of the platter...obviously touching it since its not spinning to create lift. That drive may work, but he didn't do the mod to make a working drive.
--Should work--
I think you've just made me a rich man...
:)
Peace, Love, Games
It's in the jargon files: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Jargon-Lexi con-framed.html
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
While you have the drive open you should take the opportunity to defraggle your motherdisc....
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Many Hard Disk manufacturers will allow you to RMA a drive and ship immediately if you guarantee the transaction with a credit card. They don't charge your card, they "reserve" it. (You can't spend the $$ elsewhere, but you get it back if you return the drive within the time specified, otherwise they charge it).
On more than one occasion, I swapped the controller board off the bottom of the drive, transferred the data off to another disk, swapped the controller back, and sent in the defective drive with no complaints. The trick? It MUST be the exact same make and model of drive, or you can screw it all up.
Not as radical as swapping platters, but...
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
But completely enclosed - using such plans would be a great starting point for a "clean box" - basically you want to have a completely enclosed box, with gloves reaching inside (ie, the wall is sealed around the gloves) - an air inlet (through a HEPA filter) and an air outlet (through a HEPA filter as well). Finally, the entire inside of the box needs to be super clean, then the air filtered in and left running to remove any stray particles...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This is probably the coolest of the HD Window mod's I've seen..
http://linear1.org/gm/archives/00000071.php
They came after the bp6 one, but their's just looks so pimp..
industrial sapphire, like on movado watch faces. course it might just brign the price up a *bit*
When will these people grow up?