Slashdot Mirror
PyraMac Pyramid G4 Case Mod
Factomatic writes "Kent Salas has unveiled his latest creation, the Pyramac G4 pyramid, which took six months to design and build. Salas says the toughest part was figuring out how to get all of those rectangular parts to fit into a pyramid, but he finally managed to cram in the motherboard from a 466 MHz Graphite Power Mac he bought on eBay for $600, a $400 1.4 GHz overclocked G4 upgrade card, 768 MB RAM, a 100 GB hard drive, an ATI 8500 video card and a CD-RW/DVD optical drive. You may remember Salas as the creator of the BlueIce modified Power Mac G4 tower with a front-mounted 5-inch LCD screen (also here). Wired News has an article and eight images of the Pyramac mod, but Salas has included the full set of 51 images on the building page of Pyramac site. I'm sure it won't be long before pyramid PCs show up at mini-itx.com... add a Webcam to the top and John Poindexter's vision of Total Information Awareness can be a reality in your home or office!"
As the site seemed to be slow w/ just subscribers...
Mirror of the images hereNot all of them are there yet, but the skeleton is there. Refresh often.
--sig fault--
It's quite scary: I could immediatly tell the minute the story went live for everyone... the download rate dropped from >50KBps to below 3...
Its is dangerous, but entirely possible. I'e modded a couple hard drives myself, putting a plexiglass cover on them. I havnt had a problem yet, but I expect is not too far in the future.
The main issue is that dust does not get between the writing pin and the platters. Most of the time, dust particles are larger than the writing pin. In that case, the push just pushes it out of the way.
But the main reason why hard drives are created in a closed "clean room" enviroment is the sheer quantity that they are made in. If you tried to mod 100,000 hard drives at home, your failure rate would be much more than 50% atleast. These companies need to maintain something around a 10% rate to not lose money (kinda like the recent fiasco of failing hard drives).
So, yep, you right, it is dangerous, which is why you void your warranty if you do so, but not impossible.
Is this thing on?
Site's down.
Get it here
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
Okay, If you want to store data on the drive, it's a REALLY bad idea. Incredibly bad, in fact. On current HDDs the fly height of the head is incredibly small. Check out an excellent primer on the subject from Storage Review at http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/op/ heads/opHeight.html. The graphic's at the bottom's the important bit. I work with the guys that used to design these things. Unless you have access to a clean room (and even then it's iffy) this is a Bad Idea.
Michael C. Hollinger