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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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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just because they "have been" working, does not mean they "will keep" working. I don't know about any of you, but ill keep away from this mod. I enjoy my wireless network and RF gadgets way to much to mess with this - oh yeah and I like my drives working for longer then a a couple weeks.
Maybe Apple will see this and make see through drives in there next iMacs. Or at the very least some external drive manufacturer will make some.
That is your ass, and this over here is your elbow, and NO they ARE NOT the same 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.
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.
>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."
What about the guy who bent the platters and shone a laser pointer at the drive as it spun?
I'm thinking you could do the same thing with this mod - but instead of bending the platters and killing the drive, shine the laser pointer onto the point where the heads move back and forth, or onto the nuts that hold the platters in place.
You still get the laser light show, but you might also get to use the drive.
(No, I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than a swap partition either, but it sounds like a neat extension to what's already a pretty insane mod.)
The riskiest part of the mod looks like the stage where the plastic wrap lies on the disk. I'd have pulled the plastic wrap tight across the surface of the drive, just in case any oils on the plastic wrap find their way onto the platters.
One other thing I'd suggest for this mod is to leave a portion of the drive's housing intact, and mount that funny little air filter on it. Drives need to "breathe" through that filter. I suppose the risk of doing the mod in a non-cleanroom environment shortens the life of the drive to the point that the air filter is a moot point...
Finally, there may be additional risk from the outgassing of components in the silicone/epoxy/goop used to affix the plexi to the drive housing. God only knows what winds up being deposited on the drive platters over the next six months.
Still, a damn cool mod, and something to try some weekend when I've got nothing to do and an old 1.2G drive I don't need... and, of course, a modded case to show off the results.
Manufacturers don't say that. They put a seal across the lid that says "if you break this seal, you void your warranty." They don't say anything about damaging the drive. THEY KNOW that opening the drive, while possibly not causing immediate failure, most likely WILL increase its probability of failure dramatically, and they don't want to be liable for your stupidity. Why do you think hard drives are manufactured in clean rooms in the first place?
Why do you think the manufacturers put the warranty seal on the drive? Drive manufacturers don't give half a shit about the numerous companies that restore/move data and advertise in the back of Computer Shopper, as you mentioned. Do you really think IBM and Seagate are doing back-room deals with Bob's Hard Drive Repair Shop in Tuscaloosa, AL in order to conspire against the consumer and screw him over?
Apparently you're one of the lucky ones. Many others posting here have tried the same thing, with a quite different outcome.
Note the difference. Look on the back of a TV or VCR, and it says "Do not open - No user serviceable parts inside." It doesn't say your warranty will be voided. Now compare that to the hard drive seal, which doesn't say anything about "user-serviceability" but DOES specify that your warranty will be voided. Why is your warranty not voided when you open your TV or VCR? Because opening it will not increase its probable failure rate. Why is the warning there, then? Because it contains parts that can kill you, and manufacturers don't want to see you get hurt, because they know that if you get hurt, you'll sue them.
I find it very interesting that all the posts in this thread that agree with yours have all been modded up, while those that don't have been modded down. Watch this one get modded to 0 by all the elite Slashdot case modders with neon-lit IDE RAID-0 arrays.
Alex
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 :).
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.