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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?
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
...IN REAL TIME!
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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
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
He installed Windows and it still worked.