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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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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.
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.
Agreed. Hard drives are manufactured in a cleanroom environment for a reason. My guess is that these guys either got extremely lucky, or more likely they have hundreds of bad sectors that got re-mapped to the outside of the platters by the drive's circuitry. That drive is going to fail before long--mark my words.
If someone really wants to do this, the drive should be taken apart in a cleanroom and the platters kept there. The dremel work must be done outside for obvious reasons.
I suppose if anyone is in the Columbus, OH area and has a harddrive to waste--I'll help you out since I have access to a class 100 cleanroom. I won't do anything except take the thing apart and protect the platters. Someone else can be responsible for modding the case. Send me an e-mail.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
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'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.
I'll back that up, and I'll report success on actually swapping platters between identical 2.5" HDD's, with exactly zero hygiene precautions. In fact, I was eating lunch at the time. A turkey and salad ciabatta, if I recall, onions but no coleslaw. Both drives were effectively unusable, I really had nothing to lose, and it was just a fun piece of lunchtime surgery.
To my immense surprise, six months down the line, I have one working hard drive, no bad sectors.
Perhaps we were both immensely lucky. I certainly wouldn't advise opening a drive that you couldn't afford to lose. But if it's a old drive, or a dead drive and you can't afford the retrieval fees, give it a go. My personal experience is that it's not as hopeless an operation as the speck-of-dust brigade would have you believe.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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One of my good friends has a closet-sized studio apartment in SF. His Linux "box" is a motherboard attached to the wall, with all the drives also attached, in a little pattern around it.
Sort of cool looking, actually.
No monitor, he accesses it via shell from the laptop he keeps on his bedside.
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)
Hmmm ... well, the short answer is, unless it is a controlled condition, it is not advisable to summon lightning bolt nearby.
... a matter of some annoyance to New Yorkers) has probably attached lighting rods and special cabling to ground to protect against such things.
A lightning bolt forms a conductive path from the clouds to the ground. It essentially a capacitor discharging through a short circuit. Given the rapidity of a bolt, the EM radiation covers the whole frequency spectrum. In terms of danger, the lower frequency stuff (this is what transports the charge) is what I would worry about. (When we talk about the low frequency parts, we can use the language of currents and grounds and potentials.)
Ideally, your EE friend would be correct. Being inside a giant metal statue would protect you from the bolt. And assuming the Statue of Liberty is still a good conductor (minimal rust and what not), the Statue will still reflect the high frequency radiation.
However, low frequency concerns make using the Statue of Liberty as a lightbolt protection inadvisable. How well grounded is the Statue? Are all the metal components at the same potential?
For example, suppose you are standing near where two metal panels are abutting. Rust has formed between common edge of the panels. From an electrical standpoint, the two panels are equipotentials electrically connected by a resistance.
When the lightning strikes, current will flow through the panels to ground. You better hope that the current flow doesn't find it easier to jump through you than through the rust to get to ground!
On the other hand, I imagine the New Jersey Parks Department (oddly, the Statue of Libery is in New Jersey
I can think of other concerns, but this should give enough fodder for your friends to come to a resolution in their dispute.
Kevin
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
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.
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
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.
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