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The Lego Brick Hard Drive
Billosaur writes "With Lego being in the news after completion of their lawsuit against Mega Bloks, I found this interesting little tidbit on Boing Boing, about a company that makes stackable Lego Brick-shaped Hard Drives. With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder. Available desktop models are: 160GB (white), 250GB (red), 300GB (blue) and 500GB (red). But can you build a Star Destroyer out of them?"
Different Lego-like knoblets on top and bottom of each brick would correspond to different interconnect functions (one or more knoblets each for +5 VDC, +3.3 VDC, Optical-PCI, Optical-ATA, etc.). Aligned vent holes throughout the stack would allow the base PSU brick to pull cooling air from the other bricks. Adding a new video card or HD would be as simple as snapping the card to the top of the PC.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Sometimes it's the drive itself. Sometimes it's the fan, a friend of mine had two of a specific model where the fan went bad, then I checked one of mine and its fan was dead too. Sometimes it's the power supply; I think that's the real reason they're all using external power bricks these days, more so than the safety issue of having semi-exposed AC wiring with a built-in power supply. And sometimes it could be the controller card; I have one with a dead Firewire port, good thing they come in pairs.
All that being said, I wouldn't want one of these without a Firewire port. It's kind of sad that a long-time seller of external drives for the Macintosh now sells a model of external case with only USB support.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted but I've been a fan of LACIE hard drives for a while. My currebt 80Gb drive is supposed to be Porshe designed. That's as maybe, I just know that I get a very good bytes/bucks ratio and pretty fair performance.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
But modern hard drives have non-operating shock ratings in the hundreds of G's. If hard drives were so fragile that they couldn't be toted around in a backpack, then laptops would be useless.
Ventilation and cooling is what bothers me with these drives. I had a 500GB Lacie drive in which BOTH drives failed within days of each other. I never carried the drive arround except packed in its original cushioned box. I suspect that heat killed those drives. When I replaced the unit with a 1TB model, I was sure never to operate it any longer than necessary - which means just long enough to make a backup. The newer disk also has a fan in it, small but enough to move some cool air through the enclosure. So far the new disk has held up well.
It reminds me of some early google hardware.. Some of their equipment was housed in lego cases at Stanford.
/ 03/1354222&tid=137
Here's the link to the slashdot story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04
which links to the internet archive.. Though the pictures don't seem to work any more.
This guy built his whole machine from lego: http://home.hawaii.rr.com/chowfamily/lego/
UNIX: 'cuz you can tattoo it on your knuckles!
I think you are taking about the orginal storage tower?
s /display/0-4-Google.htm
http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/picture