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Hard Drive Window
Xx Shinwa xX writes "This guy has done what was thought to be impossible: he has opened his hard drive and installed a clear acrylic window. And it still works. I would love to try this, if I had the guts."
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This guy deserves a usefool entry.
One day I'll get around to making a window for my CDROM, so that I can see what's going on when there's no CD inside.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
... but still a fun mod. I'd like to see one that's clear on ALL sides.
I was impressed with this, until I read the following: I hate to be a buzzkill, but BFD. I regularly disassembled these drives for data recovery purposes back in the salad days, when I was a carefree computer repair technician. We had an excellent level of success with any drive smaller than 4 GB, and one 2 GB drive, on which I replaced the head assembly for data recovery purposes, happily ran for over two years after the surgery.
I thought this mod was going to be performed on a contemporary drive, which would have been duly impressive. Heck...perform this mod successfully on a drive as big as 30 GB, and I'll tip my hat. But 3 GB? Sorry, but no.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This is news??
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Hmm, I seem to remember someone doing that a couple of years ago.
And it still works
For now...
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
i thought this had been done before...and indeed it has
http://www.overclockers.com/tips821/
from 2002
and that was just the first result on google for "hard drive window"
A long time ago, a friend of mine and I took the lid off the top of a 10g full-height MFM hard disk. We used some disk-testing software to get the heads to flip back and forth in some sort of testing pattern. While it was doing this, we managed to pour lighter-fluid into the unit, and set it on fire. I still have the video somewhere, I should dig it up -- I recorded it using a parallel-port B/W Quickcam. Ah, good times, good times.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
This is amazing!!!
Oh wait, it gets dust/grime into your hard drive, reducing the life span drastically
And this was first done in 1995?
Did he put a plexiglass window in the side of his case with a neon light too?!?!?!?!
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
If it was a glass window
Where's the blue LEDs???
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
People have been doing it for years, just do a Google search for "hard drive window" or better yet an images search for the same string.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Next comes painting a swirl pattern on the platter with magnetic ink so it looks pretty when it spins.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I thought the inside of a hard drive was a vacuum.. am I wrong?
cos when I go to the page its blank
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Slashdotted after 10 posts. Ouch.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
This guy does even better in his classic article describing how to Defraggle your motherdisc!.
I wouldn't do it in a dusty basement but if you are in a relatively clean area, and don't leave the drive out facing the elements (The guy who did it put his drive in a zip lock bag.) A clean room would be preferred but just a "clean" room with little dust should work for most cases. Companies that do this a lot (Opening Harddrives/creating harddrives) will use a clean room because have say 10% failure due to dust but for a modder who is using an old drive, it would a 10% chance of dust is pretty good. You could probably make your own clean room with some clear plastic, DuctTape, Rubber Gloves, and coat hangers, Some felt and a vacuum cleaner. Hmm I may have a new SlashDot article for the future.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
will the acrylic melt if he uses the drive in his server and posts the link to Slashdot?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hard drive windowing was done in a homebrew fashion back in the late '90s/early '00s when casemodding was just making it big.
Hell, there's a 20GB Western Digital with an acrylic window sitting on my floor right now, as a result of my roommate getting bored last year after he upgraded the drive in his Xbox. It still worked until he stepped on it.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50 009562&f=77909585&m=2550903662
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
People have been doing this for literally years. This article dates from 2002, and it was the first one I found.
I had my doubts as to whether the light really did go out when the door was shut.
Up next, purple neon refrigerator undercarriage.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Done. Finis, toast
And best of all..the message in Firefox...
"The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments." Um...OK...sure
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
This seems cool and all, but I can't imagine that there would be much to see. First the discs, in any of the hard drives I have cracked open and destroyed, never had any markings on them that might look cool when they spin. and second the only part you might be able to tell if it was moving is the read head this would be cool to watch, but the odds of screwing up your hard drive seem far too high to justify watching a read head move back and forth.
but I have never seen the need to add neon lights and clear view windows to my case either.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Well even though it has been done before, and we've all read about it before... how many of them have made it into slashdot infamy? :) Not so many.
;)
So for that, I say: Great job kid. You did something I haven't done... but then again. there's a lot I haven't done. So... um... yeah.
All in all, it's a neat little thing to do, for cool-points. However, with a newer, larger harddrive it would be MUCH cooler, and worth way more points.
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
My time machine WORKS! I travelled all the way back to February 6th, 2002!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
He must have seriously reduced the reliability of the drive doing so. It still works, for now. Give it a few months, though and it'll start to wither.
A friend had once removed the entire sealing rubber strip around his HDD (circa 1995) because it was coming off by bits anyway and we were all very impressed that it was still working! But after a few weeks, he started to lose more and more data.
With hard drives, errors are not as black and white as with CPU or other "live" components of the computer. Most of what you need (and what can be damaged) on a HD is dormant and thus, hard to know the exact moment of failure.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
I've opened my drives lid, ran windows etc with it opened for a couple of days. The drive was 120g maxtor. Works fine, low dust environment. It's just about the dust level, that's all.
I have to agree, whats the big deal? Hell I ran a 20MB WD drive one afternoon with *no* cover on it what so ever and the damm thing worked just fine for about 4 1/2 hours then started developing a nasty little 'tick tick tick' that I can't say wasn't just the fact the drive was ancient and was dying anyways.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
...IN REAL TIME!
e /9/0,1425,sz=1&i=93587,00.jpg
Microsoft will be suing for patent infringement for putting windows on hard drives.
Just for fun, a hard drive undone: http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_imag
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I did this a while ago... Worked nicely... Quite nice for a PVR box (watch the needle go to town on the platters) - http://www.absoluteinsight.net/68
Nothing new... Several guides exist in the modding community.
I just heard about a poor little girl dying of cancer and wanted to receive a postcard from every state. It's such a good cause. If you can spare a minute, please send her a postcard...
What are you on dude? I want some.
Seriously.
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
What's the lintiest room per square (cubic, even!) foot in your house?
The bathroom.
Toilet paper fuzz, towel lint, bellybutton lint, hair, bah.
(#3800? I didn't think you guys bothered anymore!)
The heads actually "float" above the platters on a tiny layer of air. Remove the air, and the heads would never lift off the surface, and would be destroyed in seconds.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Just remove the top of your skull, a dremel tool with a 1 inch circular saw blade will work nicely, cover it with a lettuce keeper turned upside down, and you too can look like a martian from a bad B movie (as opposed to a martian from a bad A movie starring Tom Cruise). Plus you will be eligible for a Darwin award (all geeks being eligible on the first qualification, no children).
I know that by my ID number I'm not a "seasoned veteran", but just thought I'd add my two cents. I'll still be at Slashdot because I don't have to search through n00b postings to see the decent ones. Theres nothing better than browsing at 4.
As far as this article goes, it would be even cooler to paint glowinthedark-glue on the heads. Then disable the top platter (if this is even possible) and install a row of LED's perpendicular to the circle. You could display the time, the latest slashdot heading, etc...
Now *THAT* is newsworthy!
- but - it won't play for some reason. (WMP/Quicktime)
As the others have said, the head needs air to float. In fact, last time I checked, hard drives actually list a maximum operating altitude, I think only 15,000 feet usually, not all that high. But I could be wrong about the actual altitude.
Infuriate left and right
"Finally, I would also like to say thanks to my roommates Mark and Ben, because with them they made this mod a whole lot easier. Originally this was Mark's idea, and he got some ideas from someplace online that isn't there anymore [NOTE: BP6.com did this awhile ago], so I would like to give credit to my roommate and whoever has done this before. If you have any other questions, feel free to Email me."
News? C'mon guys... i even recall seeing a story about a HD window right here on Slashdot not that long ago!
What are the odds that an old story be posted on the front page of digg and slashdot on the same day. The only difference between Digg and Slashdot mirroring each other now is that the so called "digg effect"(I wonder where they got that name) didn't even put a scratch in their server. 5 minutes after it hit the front page of slashdot grand daddy "slashdot effect" finished the job.
Go back to selling your teapots on ebay!
Disk drive heads ride on a blanket of air over the media. With a vacuum, they wouldn't have this air and they'd ruin the media. Thats why they have filtered vent holes.
Some drives even control the ability of the heads to move with a wind-driven interlock mechanism (sort of like the governor on a lawnmower engine), forcing the drives to stay in the proper area when the drive isn't spinning.
Why stick up for big business?
1 2 3 4
the patent office.
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
Yeah but the drive is paranoid and confused now. It keeps asking for privacy software.
The Incredible Invisible Case
Another hit from'02.
Or a stained glass window. Depicting that flying noodle whatsis. And a light to make it all spooky and glowy.
When I would have been about 14, a friend and I disassembled an ST-225 MFM Hard Drive, which we had running on an RLL controller to get however extra MBytes out of it. (not many)
:)
Anyhow, we pulled the top off, since it had so many bad sectors, it was amazing... and did a low-level format while it was open, worked for awhile...
Until I sneezed on it.
Thought I'd share that one as a playful warning to not be an idiot with a drive open.
My guess is that because there's more density to newer drives, that makes it that much more important to be cautious about dust and particulate matter. A 3 GB disk has a lower density and can tolerate dust better. I guess a comparison woiuld be that (and this is just an example) a particle of dust might cover 10 sectors on a 3 GB drive, but the same particle might cover 100 sectors on a 30 GB drive, making the 30 GB drive much more susceptible to problems caused by dusst. So, that wouldn't make higher capacity drives more difficult to mod but you would have to have a much cleaner environment for it to work than you would with a 3 GB drive. Again, I'm not a hard drive engineer, but that would be my guess.
Of course, there's also the whole "risk" issue. This guy was only willing to risk this with an arguably obsolete drive. Would he be willing to do the same thing with a much newer drive that is more susceptible to dust? I think that's also where the whole "big whoop" attitiude is coming in.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I know you people are really anti-Microsoft but come on guys, installing Windows successfully on a hard drive can't be that newsworthy.
I couldn't find the old link, can anyone else find the slashdot post on this from several years ago?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I've taken apart several hard drives, usually to visually inspect them as a post mordem after they crash. Given the amount of work involved it seems pretty lame to bother putting a 3GB drive back together again. The resonably strong permanent magnets inside the drive are probably more usefull than another tiny drive lying around gathering dust. /still working on my RAUD (redundant array of USD disks)
"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."
you've got roughly the same amount of guts as the other guy. We all have about 7 meters of small intestines, on average...
Our intern was messing around with old hard drives and decided to take off the cover of one, plug it in and let it run. It worked fine, so I touched my finger to it. It still ran, so I licked my finger and touched it. Oops. Blue Screen. I didn't think the heads were close enough to the disk to get a good read so I put some pressure behind it. Let me tell you, the noise that makes isn't nearly so annoying to the person doing it as it is to everyone else in the room. The hard drive platter now looks quite similar to an LP record's grooves. Cool. Okay, I didn't put a window on the drive. So what? This was more fun.
But why is the rum gone?
Something similar was featured on hack a day a few days ago, someone brought a 20GB laptop hard drive back from the dead, after first practicing on a pair of 160GB drives.
I don't think I would do that with my HD It just is too expensive to corrupt.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Anyone who has even dipped into the modding community knows that this has been done before
Though this was familiar...
/. in the first place...
Then quotethed said same Taco: Besides inspiration, the site features practical advice, like why not to window mod hard drives.
Course, pointing these things out only serves to help one reflect on exactly how much time one has wasted reading
Come on TripMaster, have a heart!
Really to be safe doing this you would need a clean room. One speck of dust could ruin the drive. When you install the window you better be sure you seal it will so no dust can sneak in. Kiss any warranty on the drive goodbye.
I really don't get these case mods at all. All I want to see of my computer is the monitor and all I want to here is what comes out the speakers.
When a few people did them it was kind of cool. Now that you can BUY a case with a window big deal.
Want to impress people. Show me an AMD X2 system with SLI and four really fast big drives in a RAID 0+1 that is totally silent and does need to have it's coolant tank filled. Oh and it has to fit under my desk.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why has no HD manufacture made windowed w LEDs Hard drives? Is it the shielding? I have seen clear materials that provide EMI shielding! That would be sweet. Then all the case manufacutres would start rearanging their drive bays so you could take advantage of them. I think something like a comercial windowed HD would sell like crazy.
-What if the Hokey Pokey is what its all about?-
re flect o porn
Digg vs Dot is a simple website that was put together to highlight the act of crossposting articles among two very popular sites, digg.com and Slashdot.org.
:)
Points are scored in the following manner:
+3 for first post
+1 for ties (within 50 min)
-1 ripping off the title & url.
Have a look at the scores
A graduate student did this already at my University while doing reasearch for his thesis.
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
A nice laminar flow hood with better than 3 micron filtration should do the job nicely. Wash an clean then dry the drive. Make sure everything is fresh and there is no linty things around - then work in the clean air stream.
Laminar flow hoods are not that expensive. You can buy one for about $500 or less and make one for a little over $100. Any good biology/mycology lab should be able to provide leads. Or just take a class in biology and mod the drive in the lab. It'll give new meaning to the idea of keeping your code bug free.
Network Mirror has all of the pages of this and (almost) every other multipage article that hits Slashdot.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Many people have done it over at www.overclockersclub.com. I almost did it to mine until I started cutting the acrylic and realized my dremmel skills were horrible. The key is making a dust free or as close to possible dust free environment. Everyone I have heard doing it used the bathroom trick. Get the shower running real hot and steam up the bathroom. turn off the water and let the steam go away. It will trap the dust in the air in the steam and drop it to the floor. Make sure you work fast and have everything cut and ready to do the work. Make the switch and you are done. People also do the work in plastic ziploc bags.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
You buy a hard drive for 50 bucks, try it, if it doesn't work you're out 50 bucks.
This is what is considered "guts" now, putting down 50 bucks on a whim? Man you need to get out a little.
This is "Guts", not some nonsense with a hard drive window.
Eh - hate to rain on your parade, but a 10g (I assume you mean gigs) MFM drive, uh, doesn't exist, I'm pretty sure. It's been a LONG time, but I think MFM went by the wayside at around 100-200 MEGABYTES.
No, I'm sure he did all the necessary ritual purifications. Otherwise the Cybergods would have struck him dead.
For christs sake, I had installed a window in a Western Digital Caviar drive about 3 YEARS ago... AND I got the instructions from the internet so people had already been doing this FOR YEARS. Some breaking news. This guy is hardly the first.
If you google for installing a window in a hard drive you will get thousands of howto/tutorials. Man, I'd expect this "quality" from Zonk but not Taco.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I was just about to post this exact comment, and then saw yours ;-). So I'll just second your thought -- why has no manufacturer done this on a production drive? Then we could long lasting drives and bling too.
Yes, people have been doing this for years.
And Slashdot has been reporting people doing this, for years.
It's just that Slashdot keeps reporting it as a "never-been-done-before" event, when it should be reporting this as "another-person-has-just-performed" event.
I was writing a disk imaging utility for my company and I had to deal with bad sectors properly. Couldn't find a drive with bad sectors so I decided to make one. I pulled the cover off an old hard drive and hooked it up to my machine, figuring the dust would cause bad sectors soon enough.
The blasted thing ran just fine for a week.
Eventually I tried writing on the platter with a dry-erase marker while it was spinning. That didn't even kill it. But a little scratch with a screwdriver killed it dead.
While this is very cool, it's not impressive at all. My friends and I did the same thing while in 11th grade. The drive is still at my old highschool, works perfectly.
One time at band camp - my roommate ran a 500MB drive without its case in his butt crack for three or four hours . . .
OK, this really leaves the following question. Is modding your hard disk in this way a precursor to moving out of your parent's basement? Or is posting something as lame as this, and for that matter replying to it . . .
~ Either way it still beats actually working. (messing w/ the drive that is, not living in ones parents basement, )
Get your tagline off my lawn.
I had a WD Caviar 22500, which broke down like 15 minutes after the warranty had expired. That's the only time I've lost data due to a hdd failure. My friend bought a larger Caviar at the same time, and it only lasted for about three years.
A working WD drive from 1997 is worth a mention, this mod, however, is not.
Really... A modern hard drive isn't any more complicated than an old one. You just have the issue that more data is crammed into the same space, meaning that physical damage affects more data.
:-)
The trick is to create a totally dust-free environment. If you have a clean room, there is no reason why you couldn't do this with a 250 GB hard drive. This means if you are a HDD manufacturer, NASA, or the like, this is trivial. DOing it yourself though might be possible but it would be a much bigger project
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
News for nerds. Stuff that's really really old!
Has this story been stuck in a moderation queue for 5 years or something?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
8')
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Yeah, not news here. Cutting open a harddrive to install an acrylic window is a good concept. Knowing that it ruins it should be reason enough not to.
And, proof that it is at least one year old, November 8th of 2004 begs to disagree. I even have proof!
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
"It's just that Slashdot keeps reporting it as a "never-been-done-before" event, when it should be reporting this as "another-person-has-just-performed" event."
Here's something to try. Put a plexiglass window into the side of Slashdot, so we can see Taco, Neal, and others sit around and do nothing.
Windows are the most useless thing ever.
This finally answers the question, how far will modders go in their hardware and lighting fetishes? I'm waiting for people to start chroming and putting windows into the chips in their systems.
I've decided to go the anti-modder route, an all black case with NO windows or lights (except for indicator lights). I just use it for, *gasp*, computing.
Ok, I admit Lian-Li's case aquarium is pretty cute.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Can anyone explain to me what's up with Disney and (dancing) elephants?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
lol no that's not a window.
One of the first thing modded "back in the day".
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Neat freaks... I suppose that I'm not allowed to eat my tunafish sandwich.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
1) find the same type of drive in a junk box.
2) take off the cover and use it as a mold over some mold material like clay
3) drill air holes through the mold material
4) put plexiglass into a warming oven
5) clamp warm plexiglass over mold on a vaccum table and suck out air. This molds the hot plastic to the exact same internal shape as your old drive lid
6) after cooling. Machine and fit it to same flatness and holes as original lid.
7) test fit on junk box drive
8) when a perfect and clean fit... do your lid swap in a clean environment
9) Seal
The problem with doing this with a new drive is the alignment. Once you loosen the screws you have changed the alignment - it may never come ready again. The dust is not such a big deal, the drive has an insternal filter to catch the loose particles. The first time it spins up it will likely knock off any dust or particles. I wouldnt store my digital photo collection there...
Did this with a 50MB SCSI drive from an Amiga about 10 years ago, except I never put the lid back on and it still ran fine for about a month (it housed 12 MP3s, and I knew EXACTLY when it failed...)
Both of them.
Does this modification void the harddrive warranty?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
One might think with all the talk of this being old news, that the frequency of posts bringing this fact to light would subside. But they are going just as strong as the old news, dupes and reposts. We got it. Someone has already done this. Stop telling me.
and was it worth to be in /.?
Actually...I worked for both Digital Equipment Corporation and Conner Peripherals building HDDs and both had clear drive lids that we'd use in R&D and Failure Analysis. Maybe if you sweet-talk the manufacturer they could sell you one?
I'm getting 403, You don't have permission to access /hard-drive-window-2/ on this server.
Anyone else have another link?
Why is this a problem? If you just make sure you do it in a clean environment, and that you carefully check your seals (maybe have a dead one to test on first), there shouldn't be a problem. At least I would assume. I'd be will to try it on a hard drive, I just need a piece of plexiglass, and a few tools to cut it out with.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
i did it once with a cheap drive. i was able to replace the entire cover plate with a pice of acrylic. it worked just fine, the trick is not to let any dust in. have everything sanded and cleaned before you void the warranty.
Meh, back in the heady days of $5,000 5MB hard disks (Circa 1982) when I was a lowly PC technician we had a doctor come in with his drive that had crashed and that he hadn't backed up.
He just had to have his data back. Being the game sort of guy I was I opened the drive case, cracked the drive and powered up to see what was happening. When the power was applied the heads would stutter and not load properly. The obvious fix was to use a little bit of bluetack to hold the counterbalance mechanism a little more firmly. The drive span up, the heads loaded and I was able to copy all his data off. Not one lost bit. Got me a nice little bonus for that. As the drive was useless to him he let me have it. I kept it running on my desk (because the business only allocated me a floppy drive computer) storing all my WordStar files and StarTrek hand copied from a magazine in GWBasic. It ran for about a year after opening - still with the bluetack inside, still with the cover just sitting on top (Not screwed down) so I could get to the mechanism easily.
A few years later the Seagate ST225 came out. (The drive with the 120% failure rate) After working out the perfect solution for sticktion (A large hammer) we got a couple where the guard band had been overwritten. The solution for these was pretty much the same. Take off the lid. Power up. Manually load the heads. Put the lid back on. Grab all the data.
I really can't see how this teenage n00b who has the "guts" to disassemble his drive is newsworthy when any tech worth his salt has been doing it since the HDD was invented, AND with live and valuable data!
After all, Mainframe disk packs from the 70's and before (Which I used to load & unload on the nightshift) are open to the air devices and they ran for years.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
this is older than dirt. why post it now? oh thats right, slashdot doesnt know how to post up to date material, or something hasnt already been posted.
The problem is not getting it to work at all. The problem is not seriously shortening the life span of the hard drive by opening it up in an unclean environment.
:D
Ok, so if the problem is not getting it to work, and is not the unclean environment, then what is it?
yeah, I know, I'm a jerk
"So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet
He installed Windows and it still worked.
The raw data were:
So today we pay as little as $0.36 per GB. The drive in the Parent's Break.com advertisement represents $166,333 per GB.
How times have changed :-)
The disks spin so fast you cannot see it,
and the head armature moves back and forth
so fast that would look like a blur too.
Seems a bit silly, but I do not know if it
would be much of a risk if you did it in a
dust free environment and did not touch
anything sensitive.
Absolute bunk. I regularly use my laptop on major commercial flights flying at 30,000 ft or more, never yet had a problem!
Unless you're flying on a really, really low budget airline (I kid!), the cabin is pressurized to the equivalent to less than 8,000 feet altutude. This is actually an FAA regulation and a major safety issue. The atmosphere is quite thin at 30,000 feet and you'd have a hard time getting enough oxygen to stay alive.
You should see the acrylic window I put on my old Tandy1000 EX's external 3 1/2 drive!
Yes, the ones at the grocery stores. The lights are always on in there. :)
Slashdot does it again..... this story is about 3 or 4 years old.
News? um no
+5 FUNNY!
"I'm not religious, but at the same time I don't get why science always has to have something to prove."
that bitch got DOTTED yo :-\
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Only idiots think that opening a hard drive will somehow destroy it. Hard drives can be opened, left that way, and run for quite a long time. It's not recommended, but having a running hard drive in the open air is nothing special. It's even less special if you cover it back up again.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
A colonial pilgrim has done what was thought to be impossible: he cut a hole in the wall of his house and added a window. Great ... now we're all going to want windows in our homes.
This may be old news, so my appologies if it's already been blogged somewhere.
You don't have to remove the platters, just the case. That won't change the alignment.
The only drive I ever put a clear cover on was a 10-meg RLL unit. Worked like a charm for months afterward. Of course, it always claimed to be 20-meg anyway, so I guess it was just a little weird. (Attempts to access past the middle cylinder failed.)
After the never-been-done-before "linux on USB mass storage" article, look for one entitled "Finnish hacker writes his own kernel!", coming soon!
I remember hearing and reading about the tight spacing between the head and the platter. It was said that a speckle of pollen would destroy the hard drive.
About two years ago, I pulled a computer out of the trash. Powered it up, and the system indicated it had a hard drive problem. While the system was running, I attempted to reseat the cables on the hard drive and found the hard drive was too hot to touch. Figuring the hard drive was toast, I opened it up, and it physically appeared OK. So I left the hard drive open, and reattached it to the system. Powered it up and it started to boot fine. Let it boot up, ran it, watched the heads moving around the platters. Turned it off, put the case back together, and after two years that 20GB hard drive is still solid.
An extra bonus, the person that threw the computer out left some hot (nude) pictures of his girlfriend (I know 'cause she lives really close to me) in some wild poses. It makes porn on the Internet look tame. Thought about giving the pics a date with the Internet. Think twice before thinking your hard drive can't be read.
Reminds me of the time in high school that my friend and I had his computer torn apart, I don't remember the reason. After a few boots, we both realized that it was beeping a few seconds after power was applied, despite the PC speaker being unplugged. Turns out, his hard drive did a rapid seek before coming ready, and it made a pretty loud noise in doing so. Had us really puzzled for a minute there!
I'm told there was also software that would drive the head stepper motor in the Commodore 1541 with varying-width pulses, to play music. I've never tracked down a copy though. (Given the fact that the drive had its own 6502 processor, it could probably be unplugged from the C64 and continue playing.)
That's news? I saw the same thing on hackaday about a year ago, but that guy put a picture of a penquin on it too :-P
Seymour was fond of transparent gizmos too. He also used to say that disks were for people that couldn't afford enough memory - maybe this would have changed his mind....
This would explain the dupes. I remember reading the original windowed hard drive posting on /. too. Either that, or he smokes crack.
I remember a while back there was a post about this guy who "explored" the sonic capabilities of some old, discarded HDs. They claimed the sound wasn't all that bad. Case windows are soooo yesterday anyway.1 1&tid=133
e akers.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/16/14392
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdsp
What you need is a portible one. like this
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
The laser on my LG CED8120B is Class I--says so right on the laser safety note. I think that class is "too little power per area to cause eye damage even on direct exposure." IR diode lasers close to the visible might put out enough red to be seen--I swear the inside of my Liteon was bright red with obvious laser speckle when I had this happen, but I'm not going to pull out my DVD drive just to check the laser diode out. Then again, it's probably different from a CD drive, being a DVD writer and all.
Now my "Aurora" laser pointer here is Class IIIa, which is pretty bad for your eyes on direct or specular reflection. Of course, it also says that is output ranges between 400-800 nm. Getting out my handy dandy diffraction grating (read: compact disc), I don't see much blue or green in that spot. Maybe the output's too low to be seen by the eye, and it's just one of those dumb engineering numbers copied from the spec sheet and pasted onto the tag.
Come on, don't you people even care that your just ripping stories off of Digg now? It looks pretty pathetic when four or five of your top stories happen to have been on the front page of digg for 24 hours already.
Maybe we've found out where they got their name from?
I guess installing a window would have solve the dilemma of Schrodinger's cat for us. Did Schrodinger have a hard drive or CD drive? What about his cat? Could you install a window on the cat?
Yoshi did this on the July 19th, 2000 episode of The Screen Savers. I didn't google it very hard, but I came up with this link.
(and a buzzkill and shoot down your little attempt at humor) but with a window, it would not be a closed-system (photons being able to enter and leave the container) and would therefore invalidate the whole experiment.
Karma: NaN
Site looks like it's been slashdotted (giving me a 403), so here's a coralized link to the site that works: Hard Drive Window
Obviously cutting open your hard drive is not a very sensible idea, but you'd think that one of the manufacturers would have started making HDDs with a window by now.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I would not recommend any doing this unless you just want to have some fun. I think this was a 20 or 30 GB drive. The only problems I had was the Lexan would crack once the drive got hot. I made my swap file drive for Windows and Adobe (don't do this, it makes for really cool movements but also when it crashes and it will it really messes up the OS). The pics were a little later in the drives life; the drive crashed a few weeks after they were posted, but ran for a few months before that. I waited until I had though it would "work forever". You can try to build a clean room all you want, it hardly ever works out. I used giant plastic bags and a whole lot of water on the floor and around the work area. I also used RTV sealant to make the gasket for the Lexan to seal to the drive. As far as why would anyone want to make a clear window on a drive? Why would anyone want to make a tub float on the water? Why would anyone want to make combustible fluid drive a buggy? Why would any sane person want to fly? It is a part of the humans evolution, small steps do equal miles in the long run. It might not seem important right now, but who knows maybe at some point it is the foundation of a new architecture.
:-)
HTH
my new hdd makes funny noise when i carry it arounf and he managed to open it cool@
...but the window isn't going to make a bit of difference.
:-)
In actuality, the idea of of "observation" from a quantum physics perspective is generally misunderstood. Rather than "observe", perhaps "interact" would be a more colloquially accurate term.
For the waveform to collapse to a single state does not require a conscious entity to literally observe the closed system. Anything which interacts with the system would be considered an observer, whether it be a single x-ray passing through the box or even any kind of gravitational effects from the mass inside (since in theory, given sufficiently sensitive equipment the center of gravitational mass of a cat that's standing up and a cat that's lying dead on the floor are measurably different from outside the box).
In reality, the box would almost have to exist in a different dimension to be a truly closed system, and even then there remains the possibility of interaction on a quantum level.
I swear to you, I'm not posting this to be a dick. It's only because you brought it up first, and I think this stuff is fascinating.
Cheers!
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
not to flamebait but maybe they should call it SLASHDOT Where Old news is New news
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
As a systems programmer, I used to spend HOURS watching the platters spin, the arm/head assemblies move in and out, and feel that sexy big drive vibrate as the computer slowly generated an operating system from a tape.
Bonius: The TAPE drives even had windows!
The IBM 3330 disk drives (and their OEMs) had all of 100 Meg as I recall, and we could even open the window, (while the heads were retracted of course), take out the platters and swap the whole disk assemblies back and forth.
Now why can't we do this with our current WD, Seagate and Maxtor drives?
.
- aqk
F U