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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.
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
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"
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
I definitely remember the same. Article with lots of pictures.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
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
"10g full-height MFM hard disk."
10g?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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.
While it was doing this, we managed to pour lighter-fluid into the unit, and set it on fire.
And after a good slashdotting, he'll get the same effect sans lighter fluid.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Sorry, it's been a while! I did mean to say m, not g, as in megabyte. Here's the vid. It is in a format of which I have no idea: http://www.zhrodague.net/~drew/images/fire2.avi
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
...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
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
I did something on the top side about 5ish years ago, seethis pic of what I called "cleardisk"
Trolling is a art,
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
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.
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 Incredible Invisible Case
Another hit from'02.
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?
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.
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?-
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
The thing about a bathroom is you can turn on the shower very hot, causing a lot of steam. This will cause all of the lint, fuzz, and bellybuttong gunk to stick to something, leaving the air a little more dust free.
Or something like that.
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.
Higher density means the heads fly closer to the platter and small dust particles would 'crash' the head. This means the head will hit the particle and either drag it, or bump over it. Kinda like hitting a body with your car. I wouldn't worry too much, both the heads and platters are covered with a diamond like coating. Also, any 'floating' particle would be spun off when the disk started to spin up. I once took apart a working 6G WD drive and the inside looked like my car's brake pads with all of the dust in the drive.
For mplayer, edit codecs.conf. On my system (Ubuntu), it's in /etc/mplayer/. Search for ffh263 and add the following line:
format 0x3336324D
HTH
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
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
He installed Windows and it still worked.
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.
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