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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.
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.
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?
Evidently this guy had some static electricity issues while modding his HDD from his huge brass balls rubbing against his pants.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
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 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!"
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!
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!"
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)
.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!
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.
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Or you could just buy a 75GXP and have it turn into a brick all by itself.
Personally, I just want a full tower, in the dimensions 1 x 4 x 9 (x 16 x 25..), painted black, that makes no sound.
Yeah, but what will you do when it starts eating Jupiter?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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!
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