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Clear Hard Drive Mods

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the please-don't-test-on-my-drives dept.

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.

3 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. Speck of dust, speck of dust, like a broken record by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!" ;-)

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  2. Head Crash by wiredog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:Head Crash by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.
      Back around that time, the company where I worked installed some new nifty IBM Winchester drives in the dinosaur pen. Those drives had their platters spinning around an horizontal axis that was parallel to the front of the drive housing.

      Well, one of the IBM servoids said that his boss, when he was being trained at some remote IBM campus, was shown a video of a drive whose axis was deliberately seized, in order to demonstrate the power of the spinning disk platters, so the people who work them respect the, er, "mechanical handling constraints" they require...

      The whole disk drive cabinet (as large as a clothes washing machine) simply went cartwheeling accross the room.

      No wonder it took several minutes for the drive to spin up to speed...