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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.
...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 :)
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?
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.
I still don't see the point in having windows on your hard drive ;) oh uh.. wait...
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
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.
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.
And I just got Windows OFF my hard drive...
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.
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?
I I work in a chip fab in research. Not everybody has dirty jobs....;-)
The truth shall set you free!
How would it die from dust exactly? The motors are still sealed. Even if dust gets on the platters it shouldn't matter unless the dust is bonded well enough to the platter and there's a large enough pile of it that the head gets damaged by hitting it.
Of course ANY hard drive will suffer from catastrophic failure "after awhile" from just normal use.
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!
Well I guarantee you this much:
I don't have a clean room...
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........
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.
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!"
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?
A microscopic dust particle could stick to the head, especially since it usually has more grooves then the platter itself. Now the head is .01" lower to the platter, and only had 0.005" to start. The particle will slowly grind away at the surface of the platter, never mind the fact that now that head can't read anything with the metal in its way.
Or the particle could be whipped up into the air inside the drive (what with it spinning at 1000s of RPMs), and get stuck between the head and platter at some point. Griding platter again.
Normally (AFAIK) the head doesn't get badly damaged until the platter is ground up coarse enough to break it off.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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."
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.
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 $10,000 to do it. I'm real tired though, and the incision is still dripping quite a bit. I'm sure it'll get better in a few d
(dull thud of body hitting floor)
I agree that it is possible to open a hard drive and put it back together and have it work. I too have done this several times. I have have several antique servers that were shut down for the first time in years and their drives froze. The bearings go out, the motor dies, what have you. I would give the spindle a litlle nudge to get it spinning again or replace the motor and boot the server right back up. But, I also regarded those drives as contaminated or failed and immediately mirrored the data to a new drive, discarding the old one.
Sure I might have been able to use those drives for years more but, I could have just as likely had a microscopic piece of dust hose a 30GB database two weeks later. Drives aren't so expensive that I would take that sort of risk.
So by putting metal tabs along a non-conductive material will help, but not much. The waves will still pass right through the material and out.
It might be possible to put a mesh or something on the clear material, so it is somewhat see-through, but still blocks the waves.
Like the door of a microwave, which blocks the lower frequency microwaves but allows the higher frequencies (light) through.
Of course with microwave ovens the energy is confined to a narrow band and the interference from GHz computers is all over the place, but I'm sure some clever engineer is working on it. I can see in my newer iMac a type of mesh surrounds a lot of the circuits.
There are commercially-sold cases with transparent windows in the side; presumably these meet the appropriate FCC regulations...any ideas how?
10 PRINT CHR$(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.
But I made sure to use the plastic wrap! What happened?
.01" ? ROFL
I am a firmware engineer for Maxtor...
The heads on our drives, and everyone else's in IDE land are currently flying at some fraction of a micron, if they aren't burnished already (sliding through the layer of lubrication on the surface of the platter).
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.
A single particle of dust inside the drive is HUGE, and can easily cause catastrophic data failure. If the head touches the media at all, you can basically forget the adjacent 10-20 tracks on each side, which on a modern drive is roughly 15 megabytes at least. If the strike happened while the drive was seeking, you get a radial scratch which can be destructive to a much larger area of the drive.
Bottom line: don't do it, no matter how cool you think you might be. They're fragile enough as it is.
More data, damnit!
>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
That's right.. And cars are manufactured in factories by robots, so you shouldn't be doing any work on them because you're not a robot. :)
Bad example, but I know where you're headed.
Seriously. I'm not saying that dust isn't an issue, but it's blown WAY out of proportion.
Some people forget that there are POLAR opinions to issues. I think it's not a HUGE issue to take apart your HD. Others here think RF emissions from an 'unprotected' HD will interfere with air-traffic control...
YMMV
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
What we need is that transparent aluminum! Why's it taking so long?
All I can say to that is:
Have you ever had a WD 1.6 GB? As soon as they were taken out of the box, I found out those things had MBTF's of two weeks.
They must have had a 50% failure rate. So much for the exalted "clean room".
Again, YMMV
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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.
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
Yeah, it's only the first step in the article. Turn on the shower really hot in the bathroom so the humidity and fog clears the dust out of the air. Still a gamble, but better than nothing. You have to wait for the fog the settle after turning off the shower or else a water droplet with some dust particles could get in the drive and dry up later leaving the dust.
Or you could just buy a 75GXP and have it turn into a brick all by itself.
Coming from someone who has done this in a professional environment (opened drives), I would say you are lucky, or did this to a relatively old drive. I have seen the effects that small amounts of dust can have on a drive.
Older drives have had fly heights higher than a particle size, meaning little effect from the presence of trace amounts of dust.
Current drives (last 4 years or so) have VERY low fly heights. They are designed to maintain an altitude over the drive platter that is generally smaller than a visible dust particle. A dust particle that becomes lodged like this on the disk head will draw cyclical patterns of dead/error sectors on the disk (yes, I have seen this, many times). In many cases, you will not have catastrophic drive failure, but you *will* have damaged sectors.
Even if the platter is "tough" enough to take this, the contamination is likely to accelerate corrosion (something that a disk head has no tolerance for), you risk damaging the head from particle impacts (at 7200+ RPM, that particle sticking to the drive surface can do some considerable damage).
Dust contamination may take weeks or months to develop problems (there is a small whirlwind going on in your HD, it is just a matter of time if there is any free dust in there). Taking a drive apart, then putting it back together, and watching it spin up would be an extremely naive method of calling it functional. If you are lucky, you didn't drop too much dust in there, and the filters in the HD would pick up most of the particles.
Also, some of the damage is not permanent. Reformatting the drive, or rewriting the sectors will clear the damage (really partial corruption). The heat from the particle being dragged across the surface of the disk may flip a few bits here and there.
Now, TVs, VCRs and power supplies are ALL DESIGNED TO BE OPEN to the air. You wouldn't crack open the TV tube, connect your Hoover to it and plug the hole with Fix-a-Flat, would you? The only part in a VCR that is really a problem to have dirty is the head (which is already exposed daily). That can be remedied with a solvent. You'd be an idiot to use any solvent on a modern HD surface, you'd be sure to crash the head then (film residue, most platters are coated).
As for the conspiracy theory regarding data recovery: it is your risk to take. If you can't afford the recovery fee, find as clean of a place as you can find to open the drive, and DO NOT TOUCH THE PLATTERS WITH YOUR FINGERS. Only touch them at the edges with clean plastic. Read the data off the drive, and consider the "new" drive dead. It will not live forever.
Also, this is only useful if the head dies in your drive. If the platter is scratched, it will destroy the head of the new drive as well (if it works at all).
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!
Ah for the good old days, running DEC RP04's, with those nice see through sliding tops and removable (oof) disk packs. Even at ~10 microns we forbid anyone to smoke in the computer room, because an airborn tar ball landing and attaching itself to the platters would gum up the heads even on those low tech beasties.
I wouldn't even attempt such a feat unless I had at my disposal a clean box with the propper atmosphere for the job. Open air is just nuts, after what a tiny bit of humidity did to fog the crystal of my swiss watch over time. (Now I send the watch to someone who changes the cell in a clean, nitrogen atmosphere box, like it's supposed to be done.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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)
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.
It's not that I don't agree with what you're saying in general, that hard drives are very fragile, but you could really use a better similie. The engineering structure of a hard drive would be more like an F16 flying over Oklahoma. To say the rocky mountains would imply that your platters had bumps and ridges in them, which i would hope they don't (I have 2 maxtor HDD's), and to say a 747 would imply that the read head is bulky and has little practical precision. An F-16 would be more accurate, being smaller and much more manuverable.
~z
sig?
I made a counter-mod. Since everybody is making their cases transparent, I replaced the screen of my monitor with sheet metal.
Aren't these sold to the same sort of people who used to ridicule Apple for building iMacs with translucent cases?
Idiots.
I'll second that. These are probably the same people that ride around in lowered Honda Civics with huge wings, air dams, blacked out headlights, clear taillight lenses, 4" diameter chromed exhaust tips, and bone-stock engines.
I know that everyone has different taste, but if you think windows and neon lights belong on PCs, you have poor taste.
Since I already have no respect for the opinion of people who do this kind of lame mode, flame away. You won't hurt my feelings.
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.
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
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.
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 used to open 5.25 floppy disks to clean them. Slice the cover on the dirty disk (orange juice had dried onto one so badly that it wouldn't spin by hand) and a clean disk (preferably blank). Remove the dirty disk and gently wash under warm water. Dry carefully (with something lint free) or let air dry. Put the disk into the clean sleeve and tape the sleeve shut.
As people who have taken HDs apart say, I didn't expect it to last. I got in, took the data, and then junked the disk. It might have worked, 5.25s were fairly forgiving and the Apple// drive was pretty robust, but I didn't risk it.
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)
(Now that I've stopped laughing... ;-)
OK, what if you took a very thin sheet of aluminized mylar and stretched it over the front of your monitor?
By day, it'd look like mirrorshades. But who uses their computer during the day? By night, just turn up the brightness a notch and voila!
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.
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.
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
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 :).
It is 747 in size, not in mass.
A GMR head is visible to the naked eye (tiny tiny black speck on the end of the actuator) The actual read element is not visible to the eye.
It is basically shaped like a huge surfboard, where there is a tiny element on the back end of the surfboard that does the actual reading / writing.
There are 20-60 data tracks at present in modern drives within the thickness of a piece of paper. That is the required lateral accuracy.
Vertical accuracy is assisted by the use of an "air bearing". This is common to all drives to my knowledge. Basically, our head flies along similar to the way a low altitude helicopter flies upon a cushion of its own prop wash. The heads are designed like wings, and they channel a tiny bit of air underneath the head. If the head drops lower due to a bump in the media, the air pressure increases, forcing the head to resist the change to a lower altitude. Similarly, no cushion of air is created at high altitude, so this causes the head to settle down on the platter.
When you compare the size of the head to its distance from the ground, a 747 at 1/4" was accurate as of 18 months ago. Now it is even lower.
As to the rocky mountains, ok, sure, the bumps might not be quite that big, but they're at least the Appalachians. On the fractional micron scale that everything works at, there's no practical way to flatten the media that perfectly. Besides, if the media were perfectly smooth it would create too much surface tension and the head would stick to it (called "stiction"), so actually parts of the media are intentionally textured to reduce the amount of surface that might actually touch the head at any given time.
As to your F16 comment, just how maneuverable do you think the head of a drive is? We can't steer our heads onto a track, we can only recognize that we missed the track and need to adjust.
Perhaps I should have said we were an oil tanker flying mach 4 at 1/2" of altitude down an olympic slalom course.
Hell I am amazed the things even work, knowing what I know about them.
More data, damnit!
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.
(Now I send the watch to someone who changes the cell in a clean, nitrogen atmosphere box, like it's supposed to be done.)
Where? I have a sealed watch that needs a battery replaced and I haven't done it because I don't trust the Mall Watch Shop Morons.
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
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
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.
I am a test engineer for Maxtor in advanced recording technology. It's actually quite amazing how robust these things are given the dimensions we're working at, it can actually be quite difficult to get a head to crash. Now I am in no way condoning this mod but this issue of "dust" needs a little clarification. It is virtually impossible for dust to get between the head and the disk. Imagine the 747 flying 1/4" above the ground analogy. On that scale a dust particle is about the size of house. The head will simply knock any dust particles out of its way. Even smoke particles are huge compared to the sub-micro inch spacing between the head and disk. Having said that however there is a contamination issue but from materials much smaller than dust. Molecular out-gassing is a big problem in drives and every material inside the drive is tested and appropriate filters are built into the drive to trap these gasses. Putting a big slab of plexiglass in the drive enviroment simply was not accounted for when designing those scrubbers. There is also the issue of humidity and the resulting corrosion. What REALLY scares me about this procedure is that Saran Wrap casually draped over the drive while the cover is being hacked up. What kills heads these days is static charge. That Saran Wrap is one of the most easily charged materials in the known universe, and it only takes a few volts to kill a head. And then, the window itself is plexiglas, another material that charges up just by looking at it. So, while I might take exception to the issue of dust, I'm in total agreement that this mod is simply a BAD IDEA. If you do it, do it for show only, do not put any data on it that you can't afford to lose at any moment and without warning. Failure may not be immediate but will almost certainly be instantaneous and catastrophic when it does occur. Steve
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?
I hope you aren't paying much more than $15 to have your battery changed. What caused your crystal to fog was most likely a leak in the gasket (either behind the back or the crystal) or around the crown. This happens most often when people wear non-water resistant watches in the shower or wear a "water-resistant" watch too deep or in hot water like a bath or hottub. In any case the battery can be changed in room air. As long as you replace the gaskets and pressure test the case when your done you shouldn't have any leakage or fogging.
Anyone who tells you your watch battery needs to be changed in a nitrigen environment is only selling to suckers.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
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.
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
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 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.
You see here, folks; this is why you shouldn't do this modification because as you can see, he didn't get to finish his message due to a hard drive failure.
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?
In fact, I removed my own appendix the other day
Did you tape a note to yourself telling you to call 911 when you woke up?
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.
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.
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..