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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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...clear power supplies? This is getting ridiculous.
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
To publish this and let your site get slash-dotted.
Sent from your iPad.
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
Yep, I have an old 16x cd rom in a small home samba server that is "possesed". I took off the covering to it one day to just poke around and never put it back on. One night a strange sound was emmenating from my closet and I thought a small animal was in there inside on of the computers so I sent in the cats. After a few minutes I looked in there and it was the cdrom. Opening and closing randomly. I did not have the covering it came in so I got a long scsi cable and put in on top of the box.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Evidently this guy had some static electricity issues while modding his HDD from his huge brass balls rubbing against his pants.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
I still don't see the point in having windows on your hard drive ;) oh uh.. wait...
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.
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
And I just got Windows OFF my hard drive...
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!"
I myself would be pretty interested in the results.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
I I work in a chip fab in research. Not everybody has dirty jobs....;-)
The truth shall set you free!
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........
telling me to Dremel my hard drive
For another Dremel-induced hardware modification, check out this guide to changing a video card.
I can't say I've tried it because I haven't. Heck, even if I had tried it, I might not admit the fact.InitZero
"Cut teeth into the edges of the platters, and stick a baseball card in there so your hard drive sounds like a motorcycle!"
my co-worker Joe opened up and mod'ed his hard drive too. didn't require a clean room, but the drive doesn't work too well.
-f
www.blackant.net
I hear that do-it-yourself home-surgery kits are also becoming popular for the cheap, yet technically adept tinkerer.
In fact, I removed my own appendix the other day, without even having to use a sterile field. If people knew how easy it is, they wouldn't pay those bastard hospitals $10,000 to do it. I'm real tired though, and the incision is still dripping quite a bit. I'm sure it'll get better in a few d
(dull thud of body hitting floor)
But I made sure to use the plastic wrap! What happened?
What we need is that transparent aluminum! Why's it taking so long?
Or you could just buy a 75GXP and have it turn into a brick all by itself.
He must have died while carving it.
Oh, come on!
Well, that's what it says.
Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aaaaaggh'. He'd just say it!
Well, that's what's carved in the rock!
Perhaps he was dictating.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
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)
I made a counter-mod. Since everybody is making their cases transparent, I replaced the screen of my monitor with sheet metal.
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.
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 want to put a window in my power supply so I can watch the electrons.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.
I've got ya one worse (but no picture :-( )
:-)
I once found a drive in a client's machine that was so hosed that the head had actually *severed* the platter. I picked up the drive and *rattle*rattle*. Fairly easy to troubleshoot that one.
Nono, you misunderstood, more little black things means more pictures at once I think, and if they're big and cube shaped it's one of them there new 3d cards. My gfx card even has a propeller to push the pictures down that pipe to my screen faster!
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
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.