OEM Hard Drive With Window

SJasperson writes "At last, you don't need to mess around with Dremel tools and Lexan (and destroy your valuable data) to get a clear window in your hard drive. Western Digital has released the Raptor X 150GB SATA hard drive. 10,000 RPM, 4.6ms seek time, 16MB buffer, and, yes, a clear window so you can see what's going on inside. Made out of a special polycarbonate lens with an ESD-dissipative coating, the lens is designed to let case modders and their groupies see the drive platters and heads without sacrificing data integrity."

Comments

Is it just me?

[jcr]

Or is this idea just silly?

-jcr

Re:Is it just me?

[Muzzarelli]

In what way? Silly that people would want to see the innards of their hard drives, or silly that a hd company should be attempting to make money from those who do?

Re:Is it just me?

[RickPartin]

Case modding is all about being cool and different. Wasting money on things like this gives these guys a bigger e-penis. One practical purpose I can think of is for education. Letting students watch the drive work as it chugs along reading and writing data.

Re:Is it just me?

[Asm-Coder]

Yes, but you might have to slow it down a bit with the speed of HD's these days.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sillier than rushing to post a comment on Slashdot accusing it of silliness? To borrow a line from Yeats, maybe it's time for you to take a long, hard look into that dim glass the demons hold.

Re:Is it just me?

[coolgeek]

It's just you. Every gamer/case-modder under the sun will now only purchase the Raptor.

Re:Is it just me?

[crandall]

Actually, this would make discovering harddrive problems much easier.

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

Or is this idea just silly?

Of course it's not just you. Of course this idea is silly. So is putting a light inside your PC, or most case modding in general.

Then again, decorating your low-end Honda Civic with big mufflers, racing stripes, and spinny hubcaps is silly, too, but that doesn't stop a huge multi-million-dollar industry from springing up around providing those accessories for people who want to do something silly like that.

It's silly, sure. But it's nowhere as silly as a necktie. I mean, have you seen those things ? What sort of fool would spend money on those, much less actually wear one ?!?

Don't even get me started on women's fashions...

I mean, there are businesses that would sell you a hard drive with a window in it, or at least take your hard drive and put at window in it already, aren't there? The news here is that an OEM has decided that the market ( or at least press marketing opportunity ) is big enough to sell a windowed hard drive, right?

Re:Is it just me?

[HTH NE1]

Every gamer/case-modder under the sun will now only purchase the Raptor.

Oh yeah, this will be perfect for my Schrödinger Box.

Re:Is it just me?

[jcr]

In what way? Silly that people would want to see the innards of their hard drives, or silly that a hd company should be attempting to make money from those who do?

The former.

-jcr

Re:Is it just me?

[Intron]

Troubleshooting chart

1) Head not moving - drive dead.
2) Head moving too much - not enough memory.
3) Head lying at bottom of case - drive broken.

Re:Is it just me?

[toleraen]

Problems like finding lost files, damaged partition tables, and fragmentation! Is that grub installed in the MBR, or lilo? Now we'll be able to look and find out!

Re:Is it just me?

[sunwolf]

I think it would be awesome if you could fit an aquarium in there.

Re:Is it just me?

[jcr]

it's nowhere as silly as a necktie. I mean, have you seen those things ? What sort of fool would spend money on those, much less actually wear one ?!?

I've worn one when it was a requirement of the brokerage house where I was working. Mind you, I charged accordingly. ;-)

-jcr

Re:Is it just me?

[timeOday]

Is which idea silly? Transparent or not, the performance and capacity specs for the drive sound very kick-butt. I'd be much more inclined to point and laugh if they'd just wrapped up a piece of turd to make it look cool.

Re:Is it just me?

[sqrt(2)]

Wouldn't putting a window in the box defeat the entire purpose of the thought experiment?

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but modding your case, modding your car, wearing a necktie, and women's fashions are all immediately visible. The thing that makes this so utterly pointless is that it's going to be tucked away inside a PC case where nobody will see it.

Re:Is it just me?

[timeOday]

Then again, decorating your low-end Honda Civic with big mufflers, racing stripes, and spinny hubcaps is silly, too, but that doesn't stop a huge multi-million-dollar industry from springing up around providing those accessories for people who want to do something silly like that.

Except this is no low-end Honda Civic hard drive. 150 GB, 10K RPM, NCQ. Nobody makes fun of Apple for going out of their way to make iPods look good, because they are good. The same may apply here.

Re:Is it just me?

[sqrt(2)]

Then you could cool it with oil!

Mmm, fried fish.

Re:Is it just me?

[MikeFM]

It's kind of cool but I'd rather see effort spent on more reliable drives. I cool mine and everything and still have a couple die a year. They're under load but not unreasonable load. Just make the darn things last at least a couple years each.

Re:Is it just me?

[pete6677]

In true Ricer style, all case mods would be purely for appearance, while the processor is a 300MHz PII with 100MB RAM. This seems to be what they do with modded cars; putting racing stripes, spoilers and neon on a Civic while keeping the stock engine.

Re:Is it just me?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

There's a difference between a PC case mod, a necktie, and a rice rocket: the former two have (arguable) aesthetic values of their own and people buy them only for that, while the latter is a pathetic attempt by under-monied folks to deceive onlookers into thinking their econoboxes are race cars.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

if they'd just wrapped up a piece of turd to make it look cool.

Don't worry. Somebody somewhere will surely install MS SQL Server on it...

Re:Is it just me?

[ewhac]

No, it's not silly.

There are plenty of people who will tell you I'm weird, but I would find such a drive to be a help in diagnosing disk performance problems or failures. Being able to peer inside the drive would afford a good first-order approximation as to what's wrong.

Your drive starts returning bad or no data. What's wrong with it? With the black box you have now, your options are pretty much limited to the SMART diagnostics (if any) and some blind stabbing with ATA commands. With a clear cover, you can look to see if the heads are actually moving, and whether they're moving to the correct position.

How badly fragmented is your filesystem? Launch apps, look in the drive window, and see how much the heads are flopping around.

How many sectors has the drive quietly reassigned because the platter's going bad? Run dd against the whole drive and watch to see if the heads spastically flip to a random place.

Your drive starts making a funny noise, but everything else seems fine for the moment. Have a look inside and see if the platters are vibrating unusually (bounce a laser off them), or if the heads are moving in a funny way.

Like I said, some would call me weird. But I just feel better knowing what the fsck is actually going on.

Schwab

Re:Is it just me?

[LordPhantom]

Wait - with the speed of head movement you think you can visually determine fragmentation? This isn't a troll, I'm really interested - is that in fact possible?!

Re:Is it just me?

[drix]

Well, the site is /.'d to all hell and back, soooo... maybe not.

Re:Is it just me?

[multipartmixed]

Of course it is. Hell, you can HEAR it.

Assuming, of course, you're trying to load a single, large file -- not a billion little ones.

Re:Is it just me?

[God'sDuck]

Actually, this would make discovering harddrive problems much easier.

out of curiosity - on a hotheaded high-speed drive, wouldn't reducing the heat dissipation (on the assumption that the window offers less in that department than aluminum) also make creating hard drive problems much easier?

Re:Is it just me?

[DrEldarion]

Nobody makes fun of Apple for going out of their way to make iPods look good, because they are good. The same may apply here.

I don't know, I think iPod = Civic holds true. Very plain-looking, but reliable and functional. iPod skins = ricey mods, functionless (and even impeding function sometimes, some skins caused overheating problems) but some people swear they make it look better and more unique.

Re:Is it just me?

[smbarbour]

I know it used to be that mounting a drive vertically used to shorten the lifespan of the drive, but I don't think that's the case anymore. Of course, mounting horizontally will ensure loss of data in the event of a catastrophic head crash (i.e. the head has broken off the arm and is now bouncing off the platters.)

Re:Is it just me?

[jcr]

Nobody makes fun of Apple for going out of their way to make iPods look good, because they are good.

I notice that Apple makes the enclosure of the iPod opaque.

Does a window on a disk drive actually make it look good?

-jcr

Re:Is it just me?

[archen]

possibly, although the ammount of heat dissipation from the top cover is probably neglegable. If you hold a really hot drive the entire drive is pretty hot but in my experience the top cover itself isn't all that warm. Most of the heat concentrates around the spindle (which is attached at the bottom).

I may have been interested in a clear case at one point, but now I want a quiet computer and I'd be more impressed if they had some sort of sound deadening material on it than some clear plastic. But lets face it, the target audience already has hovercraft computers and probably replace their parts on a regular basis (less than 2 years)

Re:Is it just me?

[ozbird]

Don't even get me started on women's fashions...

I'd like to see windows in women's fashion - the internals are far more interesting.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the idea itself isn't necessaryly silly, but this implementation seems to be. Not only do you get to pay an extra US$50 or so for the window, the rated MTBF of the windowed drive is only half (600000 h) of the windowless but otherwise identical version (1200000 h).

Re:Is it just me?

[Tim C]

How badly fragmented is your filesystem? Launch apps, look in the drive window, and see how much the heads are flopping around.

Alternatively, just ask your OS or favourite diagnostic tool...

Re:Is it just me?

[masklinn]

Case modding is all about being cool and different.

As in "Car tuning is all about being cool and different", e.g. a redneck passion for the ones at the top of the `peoples who have no life` pyramid?

Re:Is it just me?

[funkdancer]

Silly or not, I want one. The specs alone make this a very worthwhile addition for your OS and PROGRAMS partitions; I haven't seen 10kRPM SATA drives at this capacity before.

Add a bigger, slower "media harddrive" for all your gigs of DVI captures or whatever fills'em up - e.g 400GB or something like that. Together they'll make for a screaming fast & good system.

Re:Is it just me?

[RapmasterT]

if you have a couple of drives fail a year you have something wrong. fix it. I'd start with the power supply.

Re:Is it just me?

[stor]

The thing that makes this so utterly pointless is that it's going to be tucked away inside a PC case where nobody will see it.

This is for the type of dude who has a transparent case and internal lighting. I'm sure the dude would work out a way to make the HD window clearly visible from the outside.

Have you seen the Half Life 2 case mod for example? Some of these dudes are pretty serious :)

Cheers
Stor

Re:Is it just me?

[timeOday]

I notice that Apple makes the enclosure of the iPod opaque.

That's ironic; just a few years ago it was Apple that created a huge fad that spanned the entire industry with transparent and translucent cases. Although that had less of a point because there wasn't any movement to see inside a CRT or a Palm Pilot.

Whether it looks good/interesting is a matter of taste, of course, but the HDD is one of the few computer components with moving parts. Personally, yeah, I think it'd be kind of kool to see the heads seeking.

Re:Is it just me?

[masklinn]

With a clear cover, you can look to see if the heads are actually moving, and whether they're moving to the correct position.

Exactly! Only retards don't know the physical position of their data on each of the 3-platters drive of their RAID array!

Come on, the only diagnostic that this would help you do is "heads don't move, drive is dead" or "heads ripped through the platter, box full of junk, drive is dead" and last time I checked it wasn't necessary to open the disk to see that it was dead.

Re:Is it just me?

[Ohreally_factor]

I know it used to be that mounting a drive vertically used to shorten the lifespan of the drive

That's because until the invention of stickier platters, all the bits would eventually drift down to the bottom of a platter, thus causing it to wobble out of balance.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

If there are people stupid enough to pay money for this, then it'd be remiss of drive companies not to part these fools and their money.

Re:Is it just me?

[Ohreally_factor]

I'll have you know that a VTEC sticker adds at least 40 cubic inches of displacement!

Re:Is it just me?

[punxking]

Don't even get me started on women's fashions...

I'd like to see windows in women's fashion - the internals are far more interesting.

Yes, but let's stop there. Please no case modding of women...

Re:Is it just me?

[Jerry Coffin]

Or is this idea just silly?

Yes, it's silly, but not for the reason you're thinking.

If WD had as good of marketing as some companies I can think of, they'd have put the windowless version on the market for a couple of months so the bleeding edge types would all buy it up. Then they would have released this, so those same people would replace their still nearly-new windowless version with this one.

A few months after that, they might start selling a new version with pre-installed internal LEDs. If they knew their fans were really loyal, they'd even start with just one color of LED, and then a year later (or so) come out with new versions in various different colors, and not only rake in the dough yet again, but get to listen to their fans proclaiming to the world what a privilege it is to get to buy from such a brilliant and innovative company.

Of course, if they were really that brilliant and innovative, they'd have to do all of this with a 40 Gb drive that was slower than anything else on the market -- if you have to engineer a decent product to sell it, your reality distortion technology is clearly inferior!

Re:Is it just me?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

As in "Car tuning is all about being cool and different", e.g. a redneck passion for the ones at the top of the `peoples who have no life` pyramid?

No, Car modding is all about making a car go faster or, in the case of Jeeps, making it climb sheer walls.

Re:Is it just me?

[Jafafa Hots]

All case modding is silly. Neon lights? Gimme a break.
Case mods like that are for the trailer trash of hi-tech. The guys who would put little blue lights in the rear axle of their Ford Bronco.

The only case mods that make any sense to me are either the highly artistic and whimsical - just as a joke, or something to blend with your home decor, like for instance mission oak or something.

Re:Is it just me?

[vermox]

Now you just need a transparent cat

Re:Is it just me?

[bxbaser]

sure that window will help.
Now i can see the click of death as well as hear it.

Are you gonna mount the drive outside the case so you can see all those things you talked about ?

or better yet maybe a strobe and a high speed camera so you can slow the motion enough to actually see whats going on.

This has limited uses in diagnostics unless you have a lot of free time to fud around trying to determine by sight whats wrong with the drive.
Time would be better spent running diagnostics and replacing the drive.

This is just a cosmetic thing for people whos computers are not used as tools but as hobbies.

For the multitude of computers out there that are used as tools everyday this will not be utilized , unless some it department somewhere decides that the 16,000 desktops in the company will be better with windows on the drives.

Re:Is it just me?

[jaydonnell]

but some people swear they make it look better and more unique

And some people think their lj blogs that are black with red text look better and more unique. Most of humanity just think their ugly. ;)

Re:Is it just me?

[SkankinMonkey]

Yea, but more often than not you see water cooling or some other cooling display hooked up to these modded computers. So yea, it's about the same as car modding. Wanting it to look cool (or tacky) and go faster (until it blows up).

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides your optical media. Now where's my see-through DVD-ROM? Maybe they should have a rapid eject DVD-ROM where I can push a button and see it spin after launching the tray out? Cool!

As someone that owns a Raptor, having a polycarbonate window only dissuades me from buying the Raptor X. I bought the Raptor for its speed and its warrantied reliability. I didn't buy it to be k-rad.

Re:Is it just me?

[drinkypoo]

Note that no one gave the Honda NSX (best-handling stock car under $100k) or the Mitsubishi GTO (320HP AWD) shit for looking good... Or an AMG mercedes, etc etc.

Re:Is it just me?

[CastrTroy]

This assumes you run a crappy OS which uses a filesystem where fragmentation is even an issue.

Re:Is it just me?

[drinkypoo]

Rice burners (The term "rice rocket" is generally reserved for motorcycles, as a mutation of "crotch rocket") can also be fast as fuck. It's true that you can't turn a fart into potpourri or a honda into a ferrari, but you CAN build a civic that will beat lamborghinis. I have a neato video of a serious pissed-off VW Golf (third gen I think) kicking the shit out of anything and everything including porsches and so on. Jun (Japanese tuning company) has a 2 liter turbo nissan S15 Silvia (Never made it to the US, but the S13 and S14 Silvia are known here as 240SX coupes) with over 800 horsepower, and which pulls well over 1 lateral G. IIRC it's metallic purple (otherwise blue) and covered in ricey stickers. Sure, you can laugh, but when it passes your (the global "your") viper like that bigass 8 liter mofo is standing still, the laughter will end... And that's not even bringing up the 1,600 horsepower (not a typo) Nissan Skyline...

Re:Is it just me?

[drinkypoo]

I dunno, I'm a big fan of tattoos and body piercing...

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

Except this is no low-end Honda Civic hard drive. 150 GB, 10K RPM, NCQ.

Hey, Honda Civics are *great* cars. Mine ( though not really low-end as Civics go ) actually has a pretty kicking engine. I'd still feel silly putting racing gear on it though, and *anyone* putting spinny hubcaps on *any* car should feel silly no matter what... as should someone who puts a window in a hard drive. It serves no purpose. You shouldn't be seeing the hard drive at all, really.

The iPod looks good because it is actually quite plain and designed for it's function... you can't see inside it and the only light involved is so you can see the screen at night. Sure, it's a pretty blue light...

Make the case to the computer look good. Unless it's an external component, though, the extra money spent on asthetics is truly silly. Of course, that's just MHO, I'm not spending extra on a clear-case hard drive, but if someone else wants to... I'll not laugh at them until their back is turned. It'll be interesting to see how well these sell, and if they fail more often than non-clear-case ones.

Re:Is it just me?

[timeOday]

Besides your optical media. Now where's my see-through DVD-ROM?

I know you're being sarcastic here, but many portable CD players do let you see the disc spin through a window in the lid. Although they usually don't let you see the read head seek.

Re:Is it just me?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

So yea, it's about the same as car modding. Wanting it to look cool (or tacky) and go faster (until it blows up).

Nah, you're confusing car modders with ricers (the ones who stick cold neon tubes in the PCs with the bigass window in the side and garish stickers and grapefruit launchers on their cars).

Re:Is it just me?

[ArcticCelt]

"...So is putting a light inside your PC, or most case modding in general..."

"...Then again, decorating your low-end Honda Civic with big mufflers, racing stripes, and spinny hubcaps is silly, too..."

"...It's silly, sure. But it's nowhere as silly as a necktie...."

"...Don't even get me started on women's fashions..."

Exactly, and if we start overanalysing what really matter in everything we do we will end up only eating, reproducing and going to the craper. What's the point of watching sports on TV? To me totally boring and useless, to another something he can't live without. For that reason I can understand people who have pleasure moding those things even if I don't.

I am sure that if we analyse the whereabouts and lifes of the people who always proudly write a "get a life" post, they end up doing lots of stupid useless stuff. The only difference is that the stupid useless stuff they do is accepted by a majority of individuals in our society since long time now and it's arbitrary called "normal".

Re:Is it just me?

[sgage]

No, not just you. Yes, it seems silly to me, too. Especially since with your typical pee-cee, the hard drive is tucked away in an opaque box, so you won't be seeing the little bugger at work anyway. But some people just don't have a life, and need to see their hard drive innards at work. News for nerds, indeeds. Woot!

- sgage

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

This is for the type of dude who has a transparent case and internal lighting. I'm sure the dude would work out a way to make the HD window clearly visible from the outside.

Did I mention they missed the boat by not including an LED light on the internals? The case mod dudes almost always do stuff like that! They're going to be pissed that the option isn't offered, so they'll have to dismantle the drive to mod it anyway!!

I've actually seen the HL2 casemod before... it pales ( IMHO ) in comparison to the Doom 3 case mod. That guy is in a pretty special class of his own due to his expertise with plastics molding and airbrushing. He's something of a pro, it seems... but, yea, some of these dudes are unbelievably serious, as are some of the dudes in the Honda Civic riceburner moding community... some of them build really nice, fancy Hondas with real race engines, like some guys build really nice gaming machines that look like a scene out of Doom 3. But there are also the guys who modify cases for machines that need better graphic cards and motherboards, or who screw up their cooling for some cool lighting, just as there are guys who spend money first on spinny hubcaps and mufflers withou improving the engine. Both communities are large, and have small industrial empires serving their desires. I picked the two to compare quite deliberately...

Frankly, I'm a bit puzzled that larger companies have so far left the gamer/mod community almost entirely to companies like AlienWare and such. It has to be a pretty big market, judging from all the case mod-community web sites...

Re:Is it just me?

[rapidweather]

2) Head moving too much - not enough memory.
Back when hard drives made a lot of noise when they were acccessed, I used to enjoy hearing them quieten down when more memory was added. I imagined that the drive would then last a lot longer.
On that note, I find that booting Windows 98 causes a lot of noisy drive activity until the desktop is finally reached. Even more activity if something like Norton SystemWorks has to boot. For this test, I leave that out, at my peril, if Win 98 goes on the internet. Comparing that to running Knoppix, with the "fromhd" cheatcode, where a /knoppix folder is present on a hard drive partition, I find that the drive activity is a fraction of what it is when running Windows 98. Of course the CDROM drive spins a little for perhaps 20 seconds or so, until the system finds the /knoppix folder, then it's quiet, and the hard drive takes over. Seems to me to be perhaps only 20 percent, or less of the activity Windows 98 requires to get Mozilla Firefox 1.5 going, and with a site like usatoday.com ready for viewing. Same computer, hardware, etc.
It is true that the cheatcode "tohd" has to be used once to get the /knoppix folder placed in the partition, but from then on, that does not have to be repeated, unless one uses a different Knoppix. I usually do not place the /knoppix folder in with Windows 98, there I place the restoration files for Knoppix. Then I can write to them, but could not if the /knoppix folder was there, and I booted up with it. I place the /knoppix folder in a partition of it's own, and do use a generous swap partition. Knoppix only uses what it wants of that, not all of it at once, so the size of the swap partition does not color this test, unless the swap is not present, or is turned off at the boot prompt. Even then, Knoppix still causes a lot less drive drive activity than Win 98. This test is on a box with 128 MB of ram, so the "toram" boot cheatcode is not possible. Naturally, with a GB of ram, the "toram" cheatcode quietens everything down.

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

I've worn one when it was a requirement of the brokerage house where I was working. Mind you, I charged accordingly. ;-)

A yes, the good old days of contracting. I don't miss the dressing up or the hours, but I do miss the pay :-)

Re:Is it just me?

[Crizp]

Except this is no low-end Honda Civic hard drive. 150 GB, 10K RPM, NCQ

So this would be more like mounting spinny hubcaps on and apply stickers to a Koeningsegg CCR?

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

Yes, but let's stop there. Please no case modding of women...

That's a HUGE industry,over 12 billion dollars in 2004 in the U.S., and you know it's a bigger market now... of course, that counts not only women, but still... lots of case modding of women going on.

Re:Is it just me?

[MikeFM]

Hardly. It happens on many different computers of different ages and makes and in different locations.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you can laugh, but when it passes your (the global "your") viper like that bigass 8 liter mofo is standing still, the laughter will end... And that's not even bringing up the 1,600 horsepower (not a typo) Nissan Skyline...

Blah blah blah. Okay, so that's one of the .0000001 percent of ricers ARE capable of the bite that their bark portrays.. my bog standard STi will still cream most of them.

Go put that Nissan piece of shit on a drag strip with John Carmack's Ferrari and watch it get vaporized like the piece of uncultured trash that it is.

Re:Is it just me?

[fbjon]

Wasting money on things like this gives these guys a bigger e-penis.

Absolutely, this thing is a real love magnet. Just let her watch it for a minute while copying data around, and she will be hypnotized into submission.

Re:Is it just me?

[RapmasterT]

well, if you're talking less than 20 hard drives total, something just aint right. If you're talking about more than 100, then it's something you just have to live with. somewhere in the middle, I'd start paying attention to what make/model of drives were failing.

Re:Is it just me?

[sdo1]

Finally... a reason to rejoice in a BSOD.

Re:Is it just me?

[Doctor Faustus]

Personally, yeah, I think it'd be kind of kool to see the heads seeking.
Imagine how cool they'd look dancing in unison in a RAID 0. Of course that's $700 of hard drive, so I'm not going to do it.

Re:Is it just me?

[balloonpup]

I don't know, I imagine a grapefruit launcher could be rather useful against tailgaters and unruly traffic. "Load tubes 1 and 2! Fire!"

Re:Is it just me?

[level_headed_midwest]

Hey, Honda Civics are *great* cars. Mine ( though not really low-end as Civics go ) actually has a pretty kicking engine.

I hope yours is a Civic Si because the base ones pretty well suck. The top engine choice in a 2005 Civic is 127hp out of a engine of less than 1700cc. They might be okay cars, but the engines are not that powerful or fast. Even the Si with its 200hp has little torque, and it's all the way up in the rev range.

If I have to have a little engine, it better be blown WELL. That means no laggy hack job of a turbo. Or just give me a bigger engine, like a six-cylinder or a small-displacement V8.

Re:Is it just me?

[Izago909]

You forget one thing good sir. Such highly tuned vehicles are not daily drivers. While I wouldn't call a Viper or any other large displacement vehicle one either, anyone who works on their own car can tell you that routine maintinence and upkeep can be serious hassle if you have a turbo or super charger. It's not the purchase of these fast cars that kills you, it's parts and labor. If you want some fun, iamgine stuffing the engine from a BMW 535d into a Honda.

Re:Is it just me?

[Izago909]

sorry. wrong link. http://www.auto-report.net/index.html?535d.html

Re:Is it just me?

[Reziac]

And remembering that sometimes it's a specific manufacturing batch that was bad, not inherently a problem with the drive or model itself.

Re:Is it just me?

[Y0tsuya]

some people swear they make it look better and more unique

Yeah, him/her and several thousand others who bought the same skin.

Re:Is it just me?

[MikeFM]

Out of about half a dozen drives I buy a year for personal use probably one, on average, goes bad in less than a year. All different brands and models. I'm a little hard on drives (constantly on PC that usually writes files almost constantly 24/7) but not harder than I think fair to expect them to handle. On systems I manage that are under 'normal' use I still see about one in a dozen die within the year. Pretty crappy survival rate IMO which has caused me to start switching to all RAID redundant drive configs so that all files are restorable without having to dig through backups. I can pick up a TB of drive space for about $700 now without to much effort so I think it'd be great to stop worrying about cramming more into less space and lame coolness options and instead just make the drives reliable. Three years of life under on-going but not heavy load is all I want.

Re:Is it just me?

[Y0tsuya]

Of course this idea is silly. So is putting a light inside your PC, or most case modding in general.

A built-in light and a see-through window in your PC case do have practical uses, as I've discovered. I'm not a case modder, just happened to have bought these things for other reasons (price, etc). It's pretty easy to check on fan operations with a quick glance without taking the cover off and going in with a flashlight.

Re:Is it just me?

[Y0tsuya]

Already been done by those wacky Japanese. Check out the "light up dress". Needs better execution though.

Re:Is it just me?

[SteeldrivingJon]

The really stupid people are the ones who will inevitably buy these and put them in PCs in which the drive will not be visible.

Re:Is it just me?

[nacturation]

It's already there, as long as you don't look for it.

Re:Is it just me?

[WebCrapper]

You'd really have a blast here in Germany then. The people here tend to ride right up on your butt to get you to move out of the way - and they don't break when you tap your breaks. If you slow down, they flash their lights, honk and get closer - its absolutely crazy.

Re:Is it just me?

[kosmicki]

"Direct hit to the windscreen of the Neon sir! Rinds everywhere!"

"Sir! Retirement home bus passing off the port bow!

Load grape shot into tubes three and four! Fire!

Direct hit! A large bunch is stuck in granny's hair!"

Re:Is it just me?

[bhiestand]

And some people think their lj blogs that are black with red text look better and more unique. Most of humanity just think their ugly. ;)

Surely you don't think the ones with the black background and green text are ugly?

Re:Is it just me?

[almagill]

Intron wrote:

Troubleshooting chart

1) Head not moving - drive dead.
2) Head moving too much - not enough memory.
3) Head lying at bottom of case - drive broken.

Could be modified as:

CSR Troubleshooting Chart

1) Head not moving - CSR dead?
2) Head moving too much - too much caffeine.
3) Head lying at bottom of case - Not a CSR it's a serialkiller.

Re:Is it just me?

[Vo0k]

I have a drive that's extremely noisy when horizontally. I turned it vertically (sockets up) and it went very silent (while still working! ;), and runs nicely in my home server for some 2 years now.

Re:Is it just me?

[xtracto]

It is also a m0r3 1337 way to look at pr0n :)

Re:Is it just me?

[LanMan04]

150GB? I'd call that a 1999 used Toyota.

Re:Is it just me?

[SubtleNuance]

No, I agree with the website. It is clearly (pun intended) "an engineering feat unrivaled in the annals of the hard drive industry."

Sheesh, i mean, COME-ON MAN! Its a clear WINDOW!

Re:Is it just me?

[Fweeky]

Seagate NL35 are near-line versions of their consumer drives, with MTBF's of around 1M hours.

Of course with a failure rate on your existing drives ~15x what you might expect, I'd consider getting one through a different vendor/courier, although 24/7 writes isn't exactly the sort of duty cycle you might expect for a cheap consumer drive either.

Re:Is it just me?

[MikeFM]

Maybe we just need to switch to flash-based drives. They are pretty reliable so long as you don't write to the same area over and over.

Re:Is it just me?

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, you top out around 400hp for a reliable daily driver in the 2 liter nissan, and you'd better have the oil+water cooled turbo and the big fat FMIC. Skyline is around 500 or so (It's only 600cc more, though it is a six.) Personally I'm aiming for the 1.8 liter CA18DET with a hybrid T3/T4; you can get 300hp relatively cheaply. Granted, you have to give up just about all your low-end torque by going to an engine that small but the stock motor redlines at 8k and the transmission is close ratio. The rear end's low, too. And they're cheap as hell.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there maybe some truth about that. There is a big conspiracy about what way you should mount a hard drive in a carputer. When the drive was mounted horizontally the heads tended to crash into the platter from driving over bumps and potholes. So everyone started mounting their carputer's HDD vertically. Then there were reports of the motor that controls the armature dying well before it actually should because those same bumps would constantly knock the heads out of place so the motor would have to strain to keep it in place.

Moral of story: you're damned if you do; and you're damned if you don't.

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

I hope yours is a Civic Si because the base ones pretty well suck. The top engine choice in a 2005 Civic is 127hp out of a engine of less than 1700cc. They might be okay cars, but the engines are not that powerful or fast. Even the Si with its 200hp has little torque, and it's all the way up in the rev range.

Wow, we're pretty far off topic here, but my current car is actually the EX model, VTech bla bla lots of valves all that yadda yadda. The specs I just looked up say 127hp, but the car is damn light so that gets you on the freeway real quick, I've never found myself lacking acceleration when I wanted it. I used to have a little CX, and I was glad it was manual 'cuz boy, did it have a tiny engine. Sipped the petrol, though, I wish I had it now... I don't need a high-performance engine. Unless you're racing with it ( or driving a truck ), I honestly don't understand all you guys who say you need a 6 or 8 cylinder engine. What the heck for ? I wouldn't want to have an automatic transmission in that CX, but my EX is automatic and I have power to spare, really...

Sometimes with that CX I'd have to really work at it to keep my speed up hills and get onto the freeway fast enough, but hey, I like a little challenge, that kind of thing helps you be a better driver since you have to pay attention and know when to change gears ;-)

Re:Is it just me?

[javaxman]

It's pretty easy to check on fan operations with a quick glance without taking the cover off and going in with a flashlight.

Man, and I thought I was wasting time posting on slashdot...

But seriously, you must be talking about processor or GPU fans, right? Because whenever I'm wondering about my fans, I stick my hand over the exaust port... not that I'm often wondering...

Re:Is it just me?

[Fweeky]

That's what hardware wear leveling is for. The company I was talking to about solid state drives claimed one of theirs would last decades even with constant writes, although we're talking on the order of $1k for a few GB here.

Re:Is it just me?

[MikeFM]

Expensive but no doubt the prices will continue dropping as they become more mainstream. Standard flash memory has came crashing down in price thanks to the popularity of things like MP3 players, digital cameras, and thumb drives. Even at $3/GB I'd go with a flash drive if they could hit that price range in a unit that offered at least 100GB of space in a normal hdd form factor. I figure that on average I pay about $.50/GB for hdd space now so that'd be a fair increase in price for me but worth it if the drive was reliable even under a work load.

Most of my file space is write-once and then read-only so I'd not even mind some sort of massive optical drive. I remember talk of write-once holocube systems that could hold terabytes of data in a 1 inch cube - that'd rock.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. I don't know what kind of sissy blinged-out PC you've got that you can't monitor internal operations. Put a penny on top. The number of seconds it stays on without vibration carrying it off the edge is how many fans/drives have failed. If the penny sticks because heat is softening the case material, time to clean out the insides.

Re:Is it just me?

[WasteOfAmmo]

Not just replying to your comment but also all the rest along the line "modding is stupid, yadda, yadda, yadda".

No I am not a modder, yes I have looked at several modding projects and thought "that's neat, not sure why you would want to but whatever". Some mods are cool (like the laptop case made out of exotic woods, etc.). Just slapping a neon light and some plexiglass on something (be it a car or a computer case) is not interesting to me and not something I would waste my time on.

But I have to admit, this "windowed" hard drive made me think "hey, now there is a reason to have a clear case". Basically I'm a mechanical geek at heart. Seeing things move and work is interesting (this is why I'm a steam engineer in my spare time). Now I would not put out a ton of extra cash for the privilege but it is the first decent reason to consider the whole clear case mod business.

Now modding a case with artwork... that is something that I would take before neon lights and clear plastic. The new Dell XPS system case is really cool!

Merlin.

Re:Is it just me?

[rthille]

If you think this is silly, try picking up an 'In Style' magazine the next time you're in the supermarket.

Re:Is it just me?

[cfuse]

Wasting money on things like this gives these guys a bigger e-penis.

E or meat, bigger is always better.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like, say, Linux, or a BSD, or Windows, or BeOS, or pretty much any operating system which has filesystems?

Re:Is it just me?

[mink]

Do you know how hard it is to go all the way to OZ and get one of those beasts?

Reason for size limitation ?

[rfinnvik]

Why haven't WD released 146 GB drives until now ? Is it just a question of price ? (Since 10K 146 GB SCSI/FC drives have been available for a long time - and even 300 GB SCSI/FC drives are pretty common now).

I've had three Raptors running in RAID0 since the original release of the 36 GB version ('03?) - time for an upgrade methinks :)

Re:Reason for size limitation ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking the same!

I run the 36gb original, & the even larger + faster 74gb model as well now as my 2nd disk for storage/backup!

(Story on the 74gb, how I got it, which IS imo, a GOOD one:

WD was VERY COOL giving me as a replacement for the other 36gb I had which went sour, a rarity with WD disks from my experience running them for nearly 12 years now (& yes, I have used others by other manufacturers but always came back to WD) for NOTHING no less!)

That 5 year "enterprise class" warranty they come with's absolutely worth it, especially if they cover you this way, don't you agree?

The older models, @ 10,000rpm with SATA & NCQ + 8mb buffers, the versions of "raptors" I have now fly as is...

HOWEVER, this new one carrying 16mb worth of on-disk buffer can only prove even moreso for many tasks imo as well!

* :)

IMO, on Raptors in general:

They're great disks, fastest there is in the EIDE/SATA world, & can take on & beat many UltraScSi disks as well for many tasks (except for the damned Quantum/Maxtor/Seagate Atlas 15k units from what I've seen/read)... they're worth every penny!

APK

P.S.=> The clear window thing is just a nice "value add" imo... I'm after the performance and extra space this model has vs. its older brethren from the same model/class/family from Western Digital... apk

up next...

[User 956]

And coming soon, the first OEM Hard drive where you can literally see your data go bad.

Re:up next...

[Anonymous Coward]

And currently, the OEM's site where you can see it being slashdotted.

Re:up next...

[wayne]

And coming soon, the first OEM Hard drive where you can literally see your data go bad.

No, this would be far from the first OEM hard drive where you could literally see your data go bad. I watched, through a glass window, an IBM 2314 disk with a crashed head scrap the surface when the heads retracted. These disks had nice glass windows that you could *open* and remove the disk pack and replace it with another disk pack. Once the glass window was closed, the 2314 would blow air across the heads to clean any dust off the platters.

Oh, I also once saw an IBM mainframe catch fire. While smoke was pouring out of it, the system wouldn't let us shut it down because we had a pending tape mount request. Being a BOFHs, we killed that job. ;-)

Re:up next...

[SquadBoy]

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Mainframes on fire off the shoulder of the hard drive. I watched blinkenlights glitter in the dark near the modem rack. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to boot."

Hey look !

[bushboy]

... what ?

wasn't that a porn movie you just downloaded ?

Huh, how can you tell ?

Well, I swear the heads started moving faster ?

Yeah - look, the platters are spinning like crazy !

Bzzzzt - bzt bzt bztttt - click clack clack thwack click clack

What was that ?

Er, windows update I think .. ?

Re:Hey look !

[renehollan]

There used to be a text porn program for the Apple ][ (gotta write it that way, just gotta!) that slowly displayed parts of a raunchy novel on the screen.

As the stepper motor movement and overstepping attempts on the floppy drive were quite audible, this was made use of in various sound "effects" that accompanied the display of said raunchy text.

It was not exactly good for the drives: loss of the ability to read one's floppies lends a whole new meaning to "going blind".

Re:Hey look !

[bushboy]

Yeah, it's never good to have a floppy when porn is involved !

Well that's no fun :(

[reverendG]

They're taking all of the fun out of it! What's the point of modding your case if it doesn't involve power tools and the risk of damage to expensive components?!

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[RavenDarkholme]

What's the point of modding your case if it doesn't involve power tools and the risk of damage to expensive components?!

Oh come now. What about all the poor unfortunates with no access to nor knowledge of power tools? What of the non-geek guys trying to impress the geek grrrls? The poor fools that everyone laughs at during lan parties with their Micron Windows ME PC's from Costco?

The poseurs. Will no one think of the poseurs?

Truly, this is a fine day for wannabes everywhere.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[RickPartin]

They did the same thing to case windows, neon lights, and everything else. Now it's hard to buy a case without a damn window. This pre-modded hard drive is just makes modders go out and try out more wild and crazy stunts.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[hurfy]

Ok, i suppose that is a point :)

I ran our minicomputer's HD (13" platter) with the drive open a couple times. Incredible to watch the magnetic shaft the size of my wrist bounce back and forth. One of the computer experiences i'll always remember :) Also got to see the results of it turning itself into a lathe once hehe. Surely these little ones will be nowhere near as entertaining to watch but since i cant get the 13" platters into my clear desktop i'll be interested :)

But we can be lazy too and building a clear cover that is fairly safe for current drives is hard ;)

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[dR.fuZZo]

Don't worry. Installing the curtains is still pretty risky.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[Anonymous Coward]

...Micron Windows ME PC's from Costco?

Haha, you joke, but at the time, they were the fastest PCs that you could buy from a mainstream manufacturer. Thankfully, I bailed from the company before they got stupid.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[Anonymous Coward]

There are geek grrrls?

What have I been missing?

You lie!

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[pdbogen]

Non geeks have no business impressing geek grrrls. There are already few enough of them as it is for us tried-and-true.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[Jerrry]

Yep, I remember this as well. One of the routine things I had to do years ago was replace the filters in all of the drives. They had replaceable microfilters that looked similar to the air filter on a car that filtered out all the airbourne stuff that could make the drive crash. Letting them get too dirty was a sure way to wreck a $10,000 drive.

Another fun thing I did back then was write a program that made the drive seek in such a way as to make it "walk" across the floor. Of course, we're talking about drives the size of a washing machine here, not the tiny drives we have today.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[jerk]

Haha, you joke, but at the time, they were the fastest PCs that you could buy from a mainstream manufacturer. Thankfully, I bailed from the company before they got stupid.

So what do you think of MPC now that they're profitable? Mostly government contracts, but it's a good job.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[protohiro1]

They exist. But they may not be geeks in the same why. My fiancee is definetly a geek. But she is more of a literature/craft geek. Compate the magazine Ready Made (that kind of geek) to Make (my kind of geek). Believe me, any woman (excluding female IT pros) will appreciate an onsite IT guy. Just make sure that any male or female non tech geek you live with does not use windows. They will break it. I require all family members and friends. I do this by saying that my free IT services do not include windows support.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[Ed Avis]

Duh, you can buy a Raptor X and mod it to replace the boring transparent window with a shiny metallic-finish case.

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[Vo0k]

Seriously, they don't. It's fun when you risk damage. It's no fun if you're sure to damage it.
Modders kept putting windows in harddrives for a LONG time, but recently they stopped, because any drive above some 60GB doesn't survive it. Not sure what is the reason - pressure/humidity change, microparticles in atmosphere or whatever, but the drives invariably die. If you want a windowed drive, play with an old-fashioned 20G ATA66 drive, forget anything SATA....

Re:Well that's no fun :(

[toofast]

Here's a modding tip: go ahead and buy the Raptor drive, and mod it by removing the clear cover to install a solid, opaque one!

Why would it be silly?

[Nichotin]

Just because you don't understand it, does not mean it is pointless. I think it fits nicely on the Raptors, because they are the 'premium' of S-ATA drives. As long as the window part does not make it cost 100$ more, though.
Raptors are about the fastest you get without going SCSI.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[jargoone]

I wasn't surprised to see that they put this on the Raptor. The drive costs enough already that it seems like an extra nicety rather than paying for the window. Though, it will probably also draw in the modder crowd. I don't belong to that group, but I think it's still pretty damn cool.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Knight Thrasher]

Isn't it funny that my case has windows, now my hard drives will have windows, but not contained within either is Windows®?

Re:Why would it be silly?

[ilikejam]

You still running DOS?

Re:Why would it be silly?

[masklinn]

In this case, not only dies the drive cost more indeed (compared to the regular version), but the MTBF is halved or something...

And it's not even like you can really take a look at your drive when it's screwed in it's cage...

Bah, I guess that if that one works the next move they'll do is sell hard drives with leds inside the drive...

Re:Why would it be silly?

[keltor]

Or Linux, OS X x86, OS/2, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HURD, FireflyBSD, or umm like 200000 other free OSs. (oh let's not forget BeOS)

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[CastrTroy]

Doesn't Beings a "Modder" actually require that you modify something? I really have respect for people who do the work themselves and make their case look really good. But for those who just spend a lot of money putting together stock parts, well, I don't think they should really be called modders.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[floodo1]

And it's not even like you can really take a look at your drive when it's screwed in it's cage...

thats why you make a custom case to display this drive!
think about it, with all the time saved in not having to mod the drive for a window it will be a piece of cake to mod your case so you can view the drives! /end of semi-sarcasm

really i do agree, i cant really think of a mainstream(ish) case that you can easily view the top of the hard drive from.....other than a plexi case, but im not even sure if that is easy viewing.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[demonbug]

Bah, I guess that if that one works the next move they'll do is sell hard drives with leds inside the drive...

Rumor has it they developed a DVD writer with a window, but nobody has seen it (twice).

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free, yet oh so useless.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello mods, parent is supposed to be Funny! DVD writers have LASERS. "nobody has seen it (twice)". Get it? Get it?

Re:Why would it be silly?

[level_headed_midwest]

Well, aren't some of the 500GB 7200rpm drives just about as fast in the I/O department as the Raptor is? The only difference is the Raptor's seek time is 4.6ms and an average 7200rpm drive's is low-to-mid 8s. But for $350, you can almost get that 500GB drive and get roughly the same performance but 350 more GB.

The Raptors would make more sense if they were larger drives (320GB?) and could really take advantage of the increase in RPM. But now, they fight the small/less-dense platter part of the transfer equation and and up being very expensive per GB compared to other drives.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're more akin to ricers than anything else.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[level_headed_midwest]

The condition is called Asperger Syndrome. It is characterized by the affected individuals having normal or better-than-normal intelligence but below-average social development. It prevalence is estimated at between 3.6 and 7.1 per 1000.

Oh, and it is more prevalent in females than males, and there is no cure as it is a form of high-level autism.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[osu-neko]

In this case, not only dies the drive cost more indeed (compared to the regular version), but the MTBF is halved or something...

I believe the MTBF time on all the hard drives I've owned has been significantly longer than the MTBU (mean time between upgrades -- I only use a HD for so long before it's just too dinky to hold my data).

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

The condition is called Asperger Syndrome.

Yeah, thats what I said. Ass-burger Syndrome.

It is characterized by the affected individuals having normal or better-than-normal intelligence

Sure, just keep telling yourself that.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill? Is that you?

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Peeptophe]

Isn't it funny that your computer contains a central processing unit and your body contains a brain and not within either is any appreciable sense of humor?

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Hydroksyde]

Personally, I judge cases on art rather than modding. You can have a self modified case that just looks like a whole lot of random mods with no thought put into the bigger picture, or a bunch of stock components, put together in a carefully thought out way, that looks good. I'd prefer the latter. And hard drives are a lot more difficult to modify than other components. These are best done by the manufactuer.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Jedi Alec]

Oh, and it is more prevalent in females than males, and there is no cure as it is a form of high-level autism.

Although those that are female tend to suffer a lot more from the affliction than men do, the symptoms tend to be a lot more visible. Then again, being an insensitive prick is just an extreme form of manliness, so people tend to notice less. Also note that Asperger is one of the most recent "hits" which means everyone and their dogs get diagnosed as such.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Jedi Alec]

argghhh, never actually got around to saying what I wanted to say. Far more men have it than women, or at least get diagnosed as such.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[pluggo]

Sort of reminds me of a friend's house I was at. An electrician laid out his networking for him... ran all the cables and whatnot back to the wireless router... inside a metal box.

*slaps forehead*

Re:Why would it be silly?

[m50d]

None of those is useless, though I don't think they're all free. (If someone knows where I can get a free copy of OS/2, please tell me)

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Anonymous Coward]

01000110 01101110 01101111 01110010 01100100 00101110

Haahaha... you must be completely screwed to believe that

Re:Why would it be silly?

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

how do you plug your mouse into software. . . oh wait, that's ps/2, my bad.

Re:Why would it be silly?

[Sarisar]

The goggles, they do nothing!

They are just now making these?

[RickPartin]

I'm surprised something like this has never been built before purely for educational purposes. I can see someone making a good amount of money selling a hard drive like this for 5 times the price to schools. Hell I'd like to have one of these myself (for a few bucks more) since I've never had a hard drive I was willing to gut and even then I wouldn't get to see it work.

Re:They are just now making these?

[mustafap]

>I'm surprised something like this has never been built before purely for educational purposes

Yes it's odd isn't it? Internal combustion engines, yes. Harddrives and chips? Nah. How do these devices get explained at school then? Maybe someone in school could enlighten us. In my day the audio cassette was the storage medium for PC software.

Many a happy lunch break spend disecting those all over the school yard!

Re:They are just now making these?

[bhtooefr]

It's called the IBM 62PC.

There's one sitting in a lab that I have class in, and it's totally transparent.

Re:They are just now making these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you hugged your Model M today? YES I HAVE!

Re:They are just now making these?

[Asm-Coder]

I have seen one of these before, and even considered gettign one to mod, but those tings are INSANLY expensive!

Re:They are just now making these?

[Morgalyn]

How do these devices get explained at school then?

Poorly created diagrams. Sad but true! There's also a heavy handed amount of 'here is what is going on at the microscopic level' jumping directly to 'here is the system level', often with complete handwaving at the intermediate steps.

Re:They are just now making these?

[merreborn]

I'm surprised something like this has never been built before purely for educational purposes. I can see someone making a good amount of money selling a hard drive like this for 5 times the price to schools.

Bah. There are millions of old useless drives out there, in landfills and elsewhere, all across the country. When I was a kid, I found a 40 megabyte harddrive in the garage (with the $400 price sticker still attatched) and disassembled it. The rare earth magnets that were inside (with a pull of over 100 lbs) are still stuck to my parent's fridge.

Why would a school want to spend $350 on a new drive with a window when they can get an old drive for every individual kid to tear appart free? It's a learning experience they'll never forget.

Re:They are just now making these?

[AaronW]

I have an old IBM SCSI hard drive that has a small window in the side, though it's a dark orange in color and difficult to see through, it is there and you can see inside. This drive is over 10 years old though.

Re:They are just now making these?

[ChrisA90278]

They did. Many of the 14 inch drives I remember using had lexan covers. 14 inch removable platters where the industry standard for many years in the 1970's and 80's. Specs where like 3600 RPM, 10MB to 200MB. Early drives used hydrualic head motors and later ones linear voice coils. Computers typically had a dozen or more of there devices the filled an area of a room. Smalled mini-computers would have maybe one 20MB drive. Each drive looking like a home type washing machine with clear or smoked platic lid to raised to access the platters. 14 head drives where not uncommon Later when small 8 inch drives came out just before the PC era some did have plastic covers but I don't thing they where for sale, just used by the sales people toshow the drive off. So yes they've had platic covers for as long as there have been disks.

Re:They are just now making these?

[Hes Nikke]

How do these devices get explained at school then? Maybe someone in school could enlighten us.

Your teacher has you read section from a pack of paper bound at one end called a book. This Book explains how a hard drive works (or just about any other part of a x86 PC - past or present) pretty well. After you've read it, the teacher tells you all about how things work while drawing diagrams on the white/black board. After that, if the teacher is good, he's got 3 or 4 hard drives at verious points of being disasembled and passes them around the class to "play" with.

yeah... i actually took a class before i took my A+. sue me.

Re:They are just now making these?

[jcnnghm]

Could you elaborate on this a bit.

All of the information I could find says an IBM 62PC "Piccolo" is a 64.5MB 8" rigid disk drive featuring six disks produced in 1979. It is mentioned as the first rigid disk drive, but nowhere do I see information about a transparent material, or even a picture.

A used 62PC can be had for about $150 according to Froogle, and if it is in fact transparent, I wouldn't mind having one to tinker with.

Re:They are just now making these?

[bhtooefr]

Here you go, a picture of four 62PCs sitting on shelves, hooked to an IBM System/34 (IIRC).

http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/s34_dis ks.gif

Note that two are facing the camera, and show the transparency. I can also try to get a few pics of the one @ my college.

Re:They are just now making these?

[gmby]

My brother had two(four drives) of these racks a few years ago. We scraped them for the metal and made a profit of over $300. It was so cool to take them apart. Two inch voice coil for head movement; they were driven with what apeared to be just a DC liner audio amp. A big 3/4Hp AC motor to spin the disc. I scraped the nice power supplies for testing electronics.

Was lots of fun recycling these.

And yes I did want them in my living room; but I could'nt pay the electric bill if I did. Kinda like running your clothes washer 24hrs a day.

Re:They are just now making these?

[Keith McClary]

some did have plastic covers but I don't thing they where for sale, just used by the sales people to show the drive off

Like those dishwashers with transparent doors.

I really wanted one of those.

Re:They are just now making these?

[parkrrrr]

Also the Quantum Q2020 and Q2040. (20- and 40-megabyte 8" drives.)

I have one of each, somewhere, though probably no longer in working condition.

Marketing Mistake

[Ohreally_factor]

This product shouldn't be called "Raptor". It should be called "Schrodinger".

Re:Marketing Mistake

[setirw]

No, covered HDDs would be Schrodinger HDDs. The whole purpose of Schrodinger's paradox was its ambiguity. "Anti-Schrodinger," perhaps...

Re:Marketing Mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

But a closed box would be so much more effective. Think of the massive increase in data storage if your bits could be both 1 and 0 at the same time! Isn't the quantum superimposition of states the basis for quantum computing?

Re:Marketing Mistake

[vertinox]

This product shouldn't be called "Raptor". It should be called "Schrodinger".

I dunno about that... Every time I looked inside my hard drive, my data would always die.

Re:Marketing Mistake

[dargon]

Personally, I think Pavlov's Bell would be most appropriate, all the geek modders and modder wannabees just started drooling with this announcment :)

case modder....GROUPIES???

[tupshin]

wow...this is one twisted universe we live in. :)

-Tupshin

Re:case modder....GROUPIES???

[TubeSteak]

It's fairly linear last time I checked.

But then again, the process of checking it changed the universe's state.

Dammnit. I just can't win.

Might be more useful

[zegebbers]

if the hard drive with a window wasn't in my case without a window :)

Darn it

[GmAz]

I just bought two 250gb Western Digital SATA2 drives four days ago. I saw this drive there but didn't know it had a window. that would be awesome. I always wanted to mod a HD and add a window, but never wanted to waste money. Oh well, i guess getting 500gb instead of 150gb for the same price was worth it. And my Striping Raid config is probably close to the same performace as the 10k drive. Maybe I should do some benchies.

Re:Darn it

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. Striping RAID doubles your transfer rate, but also doubles your seek time.

So for writing large files, your array should be faster (until fragmentation rears it's ugly head), but for reading a bunch of small files (booting/using an OS) is is going to be slower.

Furthermore, given how often IDE-class drives fail, RAID0s just don't make any sense - unless you don't mind wasting time in 6-12 months when one drive fails and you end up without a valid array. And if you don't back up your data - well, may god have mercy on your soul... all it takes is 1 drive going down for a RAID0 to have 100% data loss.

And your data is the important thing, right? Your time is worth money, right? Just think, for the cost of 1 more drive & a decent SATA controller you could have had the same amount of space but with RAID5 redundancy.

Eh, I guess it's true what they say... a sucker IS born every minute...

And hey, I think you should move forward with that mod-your-own-HD-with-a-window idea. I hear the best environment to do those kind of mods in is a dusty garage.

Re:Darn it

[Tony Hoyle]

150GB aint enough these days, with movies at 20GB a throw.

If they were a bit bigger I'd consider them, but with 300GB drives at throwaway prices now why pay the extra for a bit of plastic?

Re:Darn it

[Anonymous Coward]

yes but this is an enterprise drive.

Re:Darn it

[GmAz]

So i take it you didn't read that I said I haven't done it because I dont' want to kill my drive. And also, yes I do backup my data. I have two other hard drives in my system for backup purposes and an external I only use when I back up my data I really don't want to lose. And there are also my DVD backups of stuff like pictures that obviously can't be retaken and music that would just take way to long to have to re-rip. As for OS operation, i have seen very little slow down from the Raid0 config. The only slowdown i notice is the right click menus. Other than that, none. As for fragmentation, I leave my system on saturday nights and have it defrag once a month. Saturday is also my weekly backup so it works out. Sooooo, no i am not worried about data loss. I have only lost data once because I formatted the wrong drive, ya, it was a stupid mistake.

Re:Darn it

[masklinn]

I'm pretty sure OP mentioned Raid5, I strongly suggest you to look it up since it has near Raid0 speed with security on top at a minimal cost overhead.

Re:Darn it

[GmAz]

Yes, I do know about raid5, but this is just my home computer and I am an enthusiast with a budget. If by chance all my hard drives with all my data backups were to fail, it wouldn't be life threatening, just annoying.

No WAY!

[freeze128]

...And just let some flunky with a laser pointer come by and screw up all my data? You must be shrooming!

Re:No WAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

A laser pointer wont do diddly to your data. You must be shrooming.

Re:No WAY!

[guitaristx]

If you think that a laser pointer is going to mess up the magnetic encoding of your data on the disk, you must be "shrooming"!

Re:No WAY!

[c_fel]

Then you'll have to explain to me why a laser beam (that is light) could be damaging your data (that is stored in a magnetic form. Did I miss a physics course ?

Re:No WAY!

[XMorbius]

I'm no expert on this stuff, but what would a laser pointer do to a hard drive platter? It's all magnetic, right?

Re:No WAY!

[RickPartin]

You could use one of those uber powerful laser pointers that can pop balloons and melt plastic. But for the price of $200-$1000 you should just use a hammer.

Re:No WAY!

[Compholio]

hen you'll have to explain to me why a laser beam (that is light) could be damaging your data (that is stored in a magnetic form. Did I miss a physics course ?

Wikipedia:
Electromagnetic radiation is a propagating wave in space with electric and magnetic components. These components oscillate at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation. (emphasis added)

You still probably wouldn't be able to damage it with a laser pointer though, that'd make for a pretty poorly designed hard drive.

Re:No WAY!

[MoralHazard]

Electromagnetic radiation is a propagating wave in space with electric and magnetic components.

I think you do not understand electromagnetic radiation as well as you think you do.

True, light waves are made up of oscillating magnetic and electric fields. But whether the material and the wave interact in the way that you suggest depends entirely on the material in question, and the wavelength of the EMR.

Light waves, for instance, interact with shiny metal things by either bouncing off them and scattering or being absorbed as thermal energy. Usually its some combination of the two. No matter how powerful of a light you shine on a piece of metal, you're not going to affect it magnetically. You may melt it, if the light is bright enough, or possibly induce an electric charge due to the photoelectric effect (depends on the wavelength and the metal), but you're not going to alter the magenetic domains that store data on a hard drive platter.

Re:No WAY!

[ajlitt]

E/M radiation that we usually experience like light or radio usually isn't powerful enough to destroy the data directly (though the EMP from a nuke set off nearby might be). However, if a laser pointer could get the surface of the disk hot enough, the patterns of data on the surface of the disk would start to bleed together (see here). That's one reason (besides the melting and all) that thermite makes a good HD eraser.

Re:No WAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

But for the price of $200-$1000 you should just use a hammer.

Wow.. I didn't realize hammers have become that expensive.

Re:No WAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he works for the Pentagon.

Re:No WAY!

[tindur]

Maybe you could cover the window with tin foil?

Re:No WAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron

Re:No WAY!

[Skowronek]

In fact, if you heat it above the Curie temperature for ferromagnetics, they are going to lose the domain arrangement and therefore the information while still being solid.

Re:No WAY!

[EnsilZah]

Hey, the guy made a mistake, no need to badger badger badger him.

Re:No WAY!

[MoralHazard]

Ooh, dammit--I forgot about that one! Good call. Assuming that the Curie temperature of the metal is less than the melting point (which is true for all ferromagnetic materials, I believe) that would happen first.

Re:No WAY!

[sdo1]

Bah. You're just not using the right laser pointer.

-S

Re:No WAY!

[Vo0k]

Actually I've seen quite a few institutions with a policy against getting magnets anywhere near CD disks.

a dream come true

[BushCheney08]

Ooooooohhhh! Spinny AND shiny!

Re:a dream come true

[goodenoughnickname]

I was planning on making a necklace out of it so I can be cool like G-Unit.

Just in time for E3

[bravehamster]

Well, just like last year if you didn't have an SLI setup at E3 your display was a joke, I think this year if you don't have a RAID setup of these (do a RAID-1, so the heads move in a synchronized fashion), you'll get laughed out of the Staples center.

Re:Just in time for E3

[sqrt(2)]

SLI is the joke; and Laughing hardest is nVidia's marketing department.

Re:Just in time for E3

[afidel]

Most RAID-1 card's do NOT require the heads to move in synchronous movements, in fact you get MUCH lower performance if you do, because you can't get simultanous reads of different data off the two drives if you do. There were (are?) some packages of drives and controllers for the hyper paranoid that would force head sync, but I don't think they are out there anymore because the majority of failure modes are going to make the head sync irrelevant.

For $350 ...

[hackstraw]

I will take an external 400Gb drive.

Is the window worth paying more than $1/gig of storage? Let alone over $2?

Re:For $350 ...

[poopdeville]

The window isn't what makes it expensive. What makes it expensive is the fact that it's the fastest non-SCSI drive available.

Re:For $350 ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the window worth paying more than $1/gig of storage? Let alone over $2?

No, but the transfer rate and seek time is. No other SATA drive, and certianly no "external" 400GB drive can match these at anything. These drives are the kings.

Re:For $350 ...

[Xugumad]

You're mostly paying for speed and reliability - Raptors come with a 3 year warranty, rather than the standard 1 year (although I'm sure they used to come with 5 year - hmmm)...

Re:For $350 ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Raptors come with a 3 year warranty, rather than the standard 1 year (although I'm sure they used to come with 5 year - hmmm)...

And let that be a lesson to WD and Maxtor: the last two hard drives I bought were both Segates. Why? Pretty much exclusively because of the 5yr warranty.

Re:For $350 ...

[mj2k]

that's what I've never understood about PC modders... They spend hundreds on lights, see thru cases, etc... My case came from a pentium mmx comp, as long as the PS works, and the case can protect the delicate internal components when I kick it, I'm quite satisfied. Geez, you could double your porn capacity for the extra cost of having a see thru window (and be honest, which is really more attractive? A hot girl, or the sexy platters in a HD?).

Re:For $350 ...

[masklinn]

Given the fact that the version with plexi has half the MTBF of the regular version for (at best) the same price, the window does make it expensive (potentially, as far as WD is concerned).

Re:For $350 ...

[masklinn]

Oh, and the regular unit is $300 to boot btw, so that shiny window means you're paying $50 extra (+17%) for basically nothing.

Re:For $350 ...

[masklinn]

Actually, the StorageReview article on the Raptor150/RaptorX states that both versions are backed with a 5 year warranty.

Huh?

[Poromenos1]

a clear window so you can see what's going on inside.

What, the spinning?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

> a clear window so you can see what's going on inside.
>
> What, the spinning?

No, the curtains...

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the sparks when the heads crash.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you will just have to buy one and find out.

in other news

[shitzu]

Kingston is planning to release ram modules with a window by Q2 2006

Re:in other news

[setirw]

Yeah, so you can see the buffers through the large heatsink.

Re:in other news

[heson]

Bah thats old school, the eproms im my old 8bit machines have windows.

Re:in other news

[ReverendLoki]

Really, I'm looking forward to the Opterons with magnifying windows so you can see all the circuits clicking away....

Re:in other news

[jim_deane]

Kingston is planning to release ram modules with a window by Q2 2006

We used to call that "EPROM".

Re:in other news

[obeythefist]

I've seen old semiconductor chips with little bubbles over the silicon so you can see the chip. The bubble, however, is not 1337 for cooling purposes.

Re:in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were EPROMs. You use an ultraviolet lamp to erase the data on the chip. Kind of neat, actually.

Re:in other news

[Panaflex]

Those were probably just EPROM chips. They can be erased using UV light. A lot of the old 8 bit machines used them, even some of the 16 bitters. You'd usually see a little round sticker on them with a version number.

Sometimes there were mixed core chips that had an EPROM next to a CPU as well.

To be fair though, I have seen some non-eprom chips with the window on just because it looks cool.

Re:in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

WD is only copying Norwegian university of life sciences, they installed windows on cows 10 years ago. Shame on those who think that hardrives are more hi-tech then Norwegian cows

Re:in other news

[Short Circuit]

Unfortunately, doped silicon is susceptible to light...each photon absorbed creates an electron and a 'hole'. In the case of a memory module or a CPU, a illumination would change the electrical charactaristics of the circuitry medium, which would probably lead to a lot of errors.

Yeah, yeah, I know you're joking. But still felt I should point it out.

Site is already slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot believe the WesternDigital would release this website and not expect it to get pounded!!!
These guys are not some miniblog site... WTF!!!!

I hope the HDD performs better than there site

THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE THE *WORLD*

[SilentOneNCW]

Wow, this is going to be a relief with the .02% of people who have been struggling with this problem for years. I mean, this is amazingly world changing, mind blowing stuff!

In a related story, a shoe has been developed that has a window cut in it -- so you can see those toes moving AS YOU WALK. For all of the feet geeks who've been tired of drilling holes in their feet trying to install their own window, fear damaged feet no more!

Re:THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE THE *WORLD*

[bp m_i_k_e]

The marketing dept decided to call it a...sandal.

LED?

[phorm]

Well, the site is running about as fast as a two-legged dog, so all I'm getting is a verrrrry slow loading flashvertisement. Does anyone know if the drive comes with an LED behind the window. As LED's inside the case would likely reflect off the clear cover (and no LED's in the case = too dark to see), the best visibility would be gained by a LED behind the window. Perhaps they could make it an "activity LED," so that it would change colours or flash brightly when the drive is accessing. At $350 already (which seems a bit steep to me, but then I haven't bought have any 10000RPM SATA drives to compare to) they could probably tack on a few extra bucks just by putting some little LED's in there to add to the "oooooo look at me" factor

Re:LED?

[Gogo Dodo]

The non-clear cover Western Digital 150GB SATA drive is being sold for $295 at Newegg. Also, the price quoted is direct from WD, so I imagine that the $350 is a bit higher than what you could get it for if you shop around.

Re:LED?

[Kesch]

Make it an "activity LED," so that it would change colours or flash brightly when the drive is accessing

Oh man! Can you imagine the fun!?

Wannabe Modder: Guys check out what happens when I write this file
Modder groupies: OOH! AHH! WOW!

Of course, this would cut drive lifetimes in half as the people who would buy the HypnoSpin 3500 this would be the same people who would do big write-intensive operations all the time to watch the pretty colors.

Although I do admit, being able to go ADD with a HypnoSpin(I'm trademarking this by the way.) would be fun while doing some video encodes.

Re:LED?

[masklinn]

Quote of the StorageReview article;

Cosmetically speaking, the Raptor X pays homage to the DIY crowd that enjoys things such as clear PC cases with... well, a transparent cover. Though the actual top plate remains a jet-black aluminum compound, the portion that actually sits atop the spindle assembly, constructed from polycarbonate, permits a clear view of the drive's interior. To further the product's unique appearance, WD investigated incorporating an LED into the device but ruled it out due to engineering constraints.

Long story short, no LED for yuo

(and about the price thing, you're paying the window+jet black casing $50 extra over the regular version of the drive)

How long ....

[malraid]

... before some case modders opens one of these to replace the clear window with some opaque material?

Re:How long ....

[xiando]

Thanks. Now I got the idea to replace the metal on my old harddrive with see-through material (when it's time to replace it, anyway..). And since I managed to get the idea, someone else will inevitably try it out. To whom it may concern, post some pictures in your blog and share how that experiment went..

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about a neon light inside the HD?

Support nightmare...

[tktk]

And soon after, customers will call into complain that they don't see anything being written onto the platters.

Re:Buy, install and bam! it's already obsolete

[xiando]

..at least that's the impression I have of the rate technology seems to be moving forward these days. So don't tell me you haven't taken apart and looked inside a 2GB or similar sized harddrive yet? :) Regardless, a peek into a new one is always welcome, specially after I got a new very cool PSU with blue-light that makes the inside of my CP look cool in it (it wasn't even my choice, it was the only 450W they had..)

Oh good lord people...

[radiotyler]

What is the deal with putting windows on things? I'm just not buying into this one. What's next? Is Quiznos going to put a window in the bread of my sub so I can see the "meat and cheese performance"? Let's all mod our skulls with plexiglass 4 x 4 inch plexiglass windows! That way... HEY YOU! Put the dremel tool down! And the neon tube too.

Re:Oh good lord people...

[TubeSteak]

What is the deal with putting windows on things?

I think it started back when we got tired of living in caves...

Re:Oh good lord people...

[ettlz]

Well I want a transparent engine block in my car.

The Title

[McGiraf]

The title scared me , buy a OEM drive and it has Windows on it!

Re:The Title

[Tyger]

Reminds me of the days of BBSs. One BBS I frequented crashed once, and the owner posted news that she was installing windows and the BBS crashed.

Deliberately being misleading, in that she was installing windows in her house at the time it crashed.

Re:The Title

[Anonymous Coward]

I once bought a harddisk which turned out to have Windows on it. Returned it for a refund and stopped shopping there.

hardware windows?

[legalize.ganja.now.]

does this guy work for WD now?
i for one DON'T welcome our new windowed hdd overlords because it would give me a very uncomfortable feeling to have windows at hardware level!

Re:hardware windows?

[TubeSteak]

Relax

It's a feature.

Western Digital has released the Raptor X

[Andy Gardner]

And?

Also insanely fast (benchmark links below)

[larsoncc]

The new Raptor - it's far faster than even several SCSI drives (in real world, "gamer" stuff), it's got more than 2X the storage than its predecessor, and it's coming at a price point of $300-350. (that's just $100 MSRP higher than the 74GB version).

New Egg has the drive for $295.

This performance comparison has the drive's gaming performance... It's as fast or faster than 15K SCSI drives! (single user, single app performance on this page, BUT - the article does have full benchmarks)

And that's just ONE drive. So, RAID 0 is probably pretty rockin.

And if you're already a Raptor user, it's my bet that this will lower the price of the other models. It's time to get my RAID 0 on!

Re:Also insanely fast (benchmark links below)

[ErikTheRed]

My main desktop system stores programs, operating systems, and swap space on two 72GB Raptors in a RAID-0 array. Windows XP installed in 12 minutes, MS Office 2K3 installed so fast I throught the installer had crashed.

RAID-0 Raptors do indeed rock.

No, I do not store any user data whatsoever on this array or this machine for that matter (it's on a 1TB RAID-5 array on my server).

Re:Also insanely fast (benchmark links below)

[floodo1]

umm raptors get TROUNCED by scsi in multi-user. raptor is only godly in single user environment.
if you need to do a lot of essentially random file access the raptor is far from the best.

and i guess you dont read the reviews on how raid0 for the desktop (single user) isnt all its cracked up to be, esp considering durability.

still tho i agree, im glad they came out with it, so now i can get a 74gb used for a lot cheaper im sure :)

Re:Also insanely fast (benchmark links below)

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, you mean a hard drive that features a 733t lexan window isn't meant for multi-user server scenarios?

Whodathunkit.

Re:Also insanely fast (benchmark links below)

[Chalex]

And that's just ONE drive. So, RAID 0 is probably pretty rockin.

No, actually, it doesn't make more than a couple of percent difference in regular desktop tasks. Here's an example benchmark. If you're constantly writing multi-gigabyte files, then maybe, but you ought to think hard about the double likelyhood of failure at double the price.

Re:Also insanely fast (benchmark links below)

[floodo1]

Gee, you mean there is ONLY a version with a window?

Furthermore, multi-user type loads dont solely exist for servers.

ps- nothing about that tiny window is leet. especially since it comes from the factory.

Transparent Auto Engines

[prakslash]

This is pretty cool but one thing I always wanted to see was the insides of an internal-combustion engine in action.

Don't know if one can be constructed given the high temperatutres and pressures involed.

I think it would be way cool to film and observe in slow-motion the actual real-life view of the whole sequence of the up-stroke, fuel injection, the spark, the explosion and the resulting down-stroke of the piston and exhaust.

Re:Transparent Auto Engines

[setirw]

Transparent Alumina would do the trick.

Re:Transparent Auto Engines

[Anonymous Coward]

It is quite common to see model ones of these at car maker stands at motor shows.

Re:Transparent Auto Engines

[Anonymous Coward]

Theses transparent engines are around. I saw one in auto mechanics class back in 1980. It used a glass cylinder and the rings were made of leather if I remmeber correctly. It ran on rubbing alcohol

Re:Transparent Auto Engines

[multipartmixed]

No, it wouldn't. The cylinder sleeves would still need to be cast iron or ceramic or something.

Re:Transparent Auto Engines

[setirw]

Why do you say this? Transparent alumina has a rather high melting point.

Re:Transparent Auto Engines

[drinkypoo]

The melting point is very much not the problem. You do not find combustion temperatures (even at the exhaust ports) hot enough to melt just about any metal that has a little bit of mass and some place for the energy to go eventually. The primary characteristics which are significant are the ability to resist abrasion (even with oil attempting to protect the surfaces, there will be friction) and the issue of heat expansion.

No LED light ?!? STUPID! They don't get it!!

[javaxman]

Dude, if it doesn't have a little blue LED light, all you've done is saved some case modder a little time with a Dremel tool. They really need to get on the ball an offer these with your choice of lighting styles and colors if they want to spark real interest.

Video

[darthservo]

I think the video would be more interesting if they had a live stream of these drives in their servers right now.

Re:Video

[paulius_g]

Agreed. And it's also something that is easily do-able.

Oh, god

[Aranth Brainfire]

I just spent forever trying to get Windows out of my hard drive, and now they want to sell me more? Yeah, right.

$50 window

[wgaryhas]

This drive costs $50 dollars more than this version of the 150gb 10k rpm raptor. The window is nice and cool looking, but not enough for me to spend the extra $50 over the standard one.

Groupies?

[Scareduck]

Great, so am I to believe that case modders now have psycho chicks stalking them?

Re:Groupies?

[TubeSteak]

The difference between a groupie and a stalker chick is that you have sex with groupies.

Or so I've been told.

What's the deal?

[SammysIsland]

Why does Slashdot never get slashdotted? Is this site hosted from some extra terrestrial super server?

Re:What's the deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly Hu-Man, you must be new here.

How timely...

[NerveGas]

    Yesterday, we took an old drive out of a server as a preemptive measure, and for fun, we popped it in another machine, booted it up, and pulled the top off of the drive. Today, we got tired of watching it run, so we did various destructive things to it as it ran.

    The point is that once things are in your disk cache, it's rather boring - it's a spinning disk and an arm that's stationary, or doesn't move much. To make things really exciting, you've got to get some really good random seeks happening. "updatedb" does a good job, but only the first time - after that, it's all coming out of disk cache.

    Sure, some guy loading his favorite game will hit the disk a bit, but unless he's gone out of his way to fragment his drive really badly, I don't think that it's going to be all that fun to watch. Of course, if he's short enough on memory to cause the thing to thrash to the page file, that might be kind of fun... but that sort of defeats the point of having a Raptor, doesn't it?

steve

Re:How timely...

[jrockway]

Windows doesn't cache as aggressively as Linux does, so this drive might be more entertaining for XP users.

Re:How timely...

[drinkypoo]

Windows also crashes more aggressively than Linux, and there's nothing cached during the boot process, so there is plenty of disk activity then...

Not only....

[erik umenhofer]

Can I HEAR the click of death, now I can SEE it.

Great....I wonder what 200 gigs of Tara Patrick videos being lost looks like...

Re:Not only....

[Tumbleweed]

Great....I wonder what 200 gigs of Tara Patrick videos being lost looks like...

They're not lost, they're just correctly spelled as 'Tera Patrick'. :)

I really miss the Tera Show. *sniff* Wish I could find an archive of that somewhere.

Re:Not only....

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what 200 gigs of Tara Patrick videos being lost looks like...

It looks exactly like this:
>: O
: /
:' (

It's just you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I spend a fair amount of dollars on the furniture in my rooms, and even care how kitchen appliances look when I buy them.

If you just keep your computers in an unfurnished basement with a cardboard/milkcrate table, you may not care what they look like; but as they become more standard household appliances in rooms where other family members or guests might encounter them, you will start to care.

Re:It's just you.

[masklinn]

Not with blinking lights, neons, stripes and other transparent panels, because... let's face it... the other family members don't give a flying fuck about a transparent christmas tree in midsummer.

Nice looking cases such as the Lian-Li stuff is a whole other matter (because they just, you know, actually look good on top of being high quality) which we're not discussing here, you see.

Re:Transparent Auto Engines - OT

[modemboy]

Well I couldn't find video but there have been transparent engines built before for flow analysis. Here is a link with some pics of/from a single cylinder one, scroll down a ways:
http://www.tvu.com/PSCylTEngweb.htm

Everybody say it with me...

[DumbparameciuM]

Oooooold neeeewwwwwsss!

"ESD-dissipative coating"

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

This just in: Western Digital confirms that ESD is DYING.

Another lightning bolt hit the beleaguered ESD community when Western Digital released lab test results proving that ESD was DISSIPATED. Of all the causes of hard drive failure, ESD was DEAD LAST.

You don't need to be a Benjamin Franklin to know that this technology spells the last days of ESD. ESD will never grow beyond its narrow core audience of people who rub cats with balloons. Add the departure from the pantheon of key lightning gods Zeus and Thor, and it's obvious ESD will soon be DEAD.

Another link

[texaport]

"The WD Store is only available to customers in the United States"

Slashdotted every time the only link refers to a picture. You break it -- you buy it.

If only everyone would read the disclaimers ...

Actually...

[Transdimentia]

It's to tantalize you with the disilicate pouch that you aren't supposed to eat, but secretly yearn to.

Special Ed says,

[Molochi]

"Yaaaaaaaay! I got mail! And a window on my Hard Drive! And sound activated lights on my memory! Yaaaaaaaay!"

Cool idea...

[__aaclcg7560]

If the drive spindle blows out, sound of the window shattering and smoke pouring out should make it obvious that there's a problem. Gotta love Western Digital for their exploding hard drives.

Excuse me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to go jerk-off now.

huh?

[stevebob2019]

Case modders have groupies? Like, female groupies? Man, I've seen some far out stuff on /. but this is just too much.

Just a *window*? Feh!

[pla]

I'll wait until they release the model with the entire body made of something transparent.

And if you mod this "funny", you've missed my intent. Quite serious, why go for a window rather than at least the non-board-half fully transparent? Not like these things have a lot of stress on the shell itself, that they need to use metals to protect them...

NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[Stoutlimb]

If they're catering to the modders, then this is just not good enough unless it has blue LED's inside. Or any other colour. Selectable colours by jumper would be good. Or better yet, have the colour fluctuate when reading from the drive.

If I was in charge, I would make the colour smoothly change across the RGB spectrum, the colour depending on where on the HD the last read was. Red being the beginning of the hard drive, and blue being at the end. That way you could see with a glance from roughly where on the HD your data is being read from.

That would be way cool. Kudos to these guys for a good start.

Bork!

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[thinkliberty]

Tie it in to smartd on a linux box and you can see when the drive starts to die...

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[Stoutlimb]

That's funny!

I think that if someone were to defragment a drive, all the colours would blend into white.

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[deander2]

green for read / red for write?

no no no, we need LEDs on the platter, so that we can spell out cool words as it spins.
(like that floating clock on thinkgeek!) :-P

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[JacobO]

That way you could see with a glance from roughly where on the HD your data is being read from.

It might just change colour too fast to really see anything...

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[strikethree]

egad! you should have patented the idea and made a fortune.

*sigh*

some people will never learn.

strike

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[Vo0k]

If I was in charge, I'd put sockets and transparent light guides to put any kind of LEDs in the drive at strategical point and drive the light to the most interesting spots. And place at least one LED on the head :)

Re:NOT GOOD ENOUGH

[rwhamann]

You're right. This hard drive has extremely sharp knees. I wouldn't hit it.

Think positive

[nsayer]

Better a hard disk with a window in it than a hard disk with Windows on it.

Re:Think positive

[TeknoHog]

Even better, a hard disk with a linuk.

Considering the OEM...

[Anonymous Coward]

the lens is designed to let case modders and their groupies see the drive platters and heads without sacrificing data integrity.

Except that it's a Western Dig. hdd, so you're already sacrificing data integrity.

But if you like watching your hdd while you reformat every few months, fuggedaboudit!

without sacrificing data integrity?

[MoFoQ]

Just by using WD drives is sacrificing data integrity in my opinion....
(and I just lost another WD drive to the mysterious disappearing partition table and hence ppl around here call it "Whore Digital").

Plus I question the safety of the data especially since many of the newer drives do tend to get hot which causes metals to expand and warp which might put more strain on the polycarbonate as I'm sure that the heat expansion rate/ratio of the clear pc window is different than the metal that surrounds it.
And how safe is the window if the head were to fly off (granted, WD is no IBM ["DeathStar"]; let's not forget, WD did license IBM hard drive technology, etc.).

O, for the record, I'm no Maxtor fan either....or as they are known in my circles as MaxWhore.

ahhh....feel the whoring love. :p

What's next?

[chewties]

Clear Pepsi for soft drink enthusiasts?

Re:What's next?

[sqrt(2)]

Like Crystal Pepsi?

Re:What's next?

[chewties]

It's a shame they discontinued it. Unfortunately I'll have to continue modding my pepsi with clorox.

Re:What's next?

[sqrt(2)]

Sound like an improvement over regular pepsi.

unnecessary "expose"

[BadassJesus]

So every simple Joe can now see all that expensive technology looks much like the old fationed "record-player".

Sweet Irony

[ZoneGray]

I'll be darned, NewEgg has this RAID-Optimized hard drive in stock. Limit one to a customer.

What's that called, RAID -1?

Re:Sweet Irony

[rob_squared]

Shouldn't they be considered RAD instead? After all, they're not exactly inexpensive.

I'd suggest RAED, but that just looks like a typo.

Re:Sweet Irony

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The I in RAID stands for "independent"

Re:Sweet Irony

[bill_mcgonigle]

The I in RAID stands for "independent"

Oh, that's just newspeak.

Disk space is ridiculously cheap these days. Unless it's SCSI.

Re:Sweet Irony

[Doctor Faustus]

It wouldn't be redundant, either, with only one.

Re:Sweet Irony

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What's that called, RAID -1?

That's probably more like RAID -2 because RAID-0 is kind of a negative RAID as well.

Re:Sweet Irony

[rob_squared]

Actually, it's either:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3ARAID &btnG=Google+Search

Video mirror

[vidnet]

Heavily slashdotted, but here's a mirror of the video (more as it downloads).

Re:Video mirror

[bfizzle]

The video is so porn.... almost scary how target this is towards sex hungry geeks. They even have a desktop background image that says "X-Rated for Explicit Technology".

Western Digital marketing team hard at work.

Re:Video mirror

[m0ng0l]

This video started playing about the same point my MP3 of Pat Benatars' "I need a hero" started playing. Nearly perfect syncing for the 40 odd seconds of the video.....

Semi-related: Darth Vader's helmet

[sdo1]

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. They've got all kinds of props that were used in the movies, including Darth Vader's helmet from Revenge of the Sith (the one you can see the inside of while they're putting it over his cripsy burnt face).

As most people know, movie props are often made of common items and then painted, dressed-up, etc, but you don't often notice them as such. Now here's how this is related to the subject at hand (don't mod me off-topic just yet).

I'm not sure how many non-geeks (or even semi-geeks for that matter) know what the inside of a hard drive looks like or what the parts look like. But there, inside Darth Vader's helmet... the one used as a prop in ROTS... are two stacks of hard drive head arms. They just look like some high-tech gizmo to give it a cool futuristic cyber look.

I wonder how many people actually saw them and recognized them for what they are. I have no idea if they can actually be seen in the movie or not. I just though it was kind of cool that there are hard drive parts inside Darth Vader's helmet.

-S

Re:Semi-related: Darth Vader's helmet

[TheoMurpse]

putting it over his cripsy burnt face

Well, that explains it! Now I know why Obi-Wan was fighting Anakin -- Obi was representin' the Bloods!

Heat Dissipation, Anybody?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it might look "cool", assuming you have the transparent case, and you can mount it in the right spot where you will have a vantage point to see it; but how does this affect heat dissipation and drive temperature?

Personally I don't see the point of all this - unless you have a fully transparent case, and plan to place your PC at the center of the room, this "feature" won't be put to much use.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[mal69]

Back 20+ years ago, when I was bored sitting and waiting for evening jobs to finish before I could go home, I would open the side cover on the IBM System 36 I worked with at the time. The 2 drives in that machine (I believe they were about 400 Meg each) WERE entirely encased in clear plastic, so I could sit and watch the heads move in and out. Oh yeah, the platters were also more than a FOOT across, so it was rather easy to see what was going on... Nothing much to see on a 3.5" drive!

That is cool

[technotot]

that would be the perfect companion to a clear case pc i saw at micro center.

filesystem research

[0xABADC0DA]

This could be good for designing new filesystems for example to maximize throughput or minimize seeks. It's hard to get an overall feeling for how much work each design choice causes for the drive itself, especially with factors like automatically remapped dead sectors.

Re:filesystem research

[GlassHeart]

No serious file system developer would monitor drive activity by peering through its window. They would most likely perform logging at the device driver level on events like head movement and read or write operations. These logs can then be subject to statistical analysis that would actually tell them about improvements or regressions.

Re:filesystem research

[Steveftoth]

Are you trying to say that programmers need to use their intuition more when programming? That the code need more emotion, more feeling, and less hard cold logic or something?

Go Western Digital! Go!

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that someone did this on their own?

How cool is a hardware company that takes up a community idea that fast?

I guess that's what we call competition, even though this is senseless and silly, it is what some people want.

Maybe they were developing this when that guy made his own on an unrelated whim.

Though, if they were really driven by what people want, they'd still be producing drives that last forever.

So the next step is...

[ch-chuck]

Now that seeing the spinning disk is easy, how long before they start putting visible (but magnetically transparent) images like this on them?

End Users

[queenb**ch]

Having had end users crack into closed hard drives on their own, I'm thinking that having a window in the blasted thing will just encourage them to "open the window".

2 cents,

Queen B

Spinners?

[fordracerguy]

Ok so we have spinner wheels and spinner hub caps for cars. What about spinner's for hard drives? It would look like it's not moving when on, and it would move for a while when you turn it off. Ya!!!

Burn your initials in it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure some folks won't be able to resist going at it with a magnifying glass... MTBFry?

1'm s0 l337...

[Abuzar]

1 can r3ad f1l3s, l1s73n t0 MPE's, & wa7ch m0v13s r19h7 0ff 7h3 hard dr1v3 :) ... 0h l00k, 7ha7's As1a Carr3ra sp1nn1n9 by!

No way!

[SuperKendall]

Does anyone know if the drive comes with an LED behind the window.

Come on, if it came with an inside LED too there's be absolutley no reason to take a dremel to it!

Western Digital and MS subliminal messages...

[Zantetsuken]

The window lets you see the hard drive, which if it is running Windows, it shows images subliminally encoded into the written data, and when the platters spin, it shows you "Microsoft will rule you, now and forever - BTW: go do something we could possibly sue you for so we can milk you for all you're worth"

Time for more sleep

[Anonymous Coward]

I first read that as "BSD-resistant" coating.

That's one way to kill it.

But can you make them WALK?

[pivo]

When I was in school, the PDP-11 hard drives where the size of a washing machine. They had clear covers, and the platters were removable (swappable.) The best part was that, if you carefully programed the heavy read/write head so that it rythmically moved from the inside of the platters to the outside, you could make the entire enclosure rock back and forth. And if you were lucky, that would cause it to "walk" across the computer room floor. Lots of good cheer from that one.

Re:But can you make them WALK?

[Reziac]

[laughing] I don't know the model number of the whopping great hard drive attached to my high school's venerable IBM-1620, but it was of much the same description, and tended to migrate to the end of its cable. And it held a whopping 5 MEGS of data!!

A performance idea I had in the shower this morn

[Atario]

How about multiple read/write heads? One more would mean double the throughput. You could easily get four in there though (one at each corner of the frame). A 7200 RPM drive with 28800 RPM throughput? Sign me up...

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one, and would like to see about getting it hooked up to a current system. Now *that* would be cool.

Not silly at all

[jtcm]

Pfft. How can anyone call this silly?

It's perfect next to my RAM w/digital readouts, blacklight sensitive motherboard, and glowing power supply

(none of which are silly)

Re:Not silly at all

[jo42]

No, not silly at all, but very, very gay.

Re:Not silly at all

[devilspgd]

No, it's PC gear, not designed for the fruity amongst us.

microsoft will never stop

[bxbaser]

until they get windows on everything.

whats next hard drives with googles ?

don tget so uptite this is just a joke.

True story

[Doctor Memory]

I was racing at Watkins Glen one weekend, when I got the Glen's unique blue-with-a-yellow-slash flag, which means "fast traffic coming up behind you". So I glance back and just turning onto the front straight (a good quarter-mile or so behind me) was something yellow. He caught me before I made the esses, and stuck tight until we reached the top of the hill and I waved him by. Bright yellow Honda Civic, no stickers, no "fart pipe", no stripes. I happend to see him in the pits after our run group, and said "Hey, nice car. What have you got in it?" And he says "Nothing..." I look inside and it was true: there was nothing there -- no back seat, no carpet, no headliner, and half the dashboard was gone. From ten feet away, it looked bone stock. I wonder how many "tuners" actually race their cars (more than a quarter mile at a shot, anyway).

Re:True story

[javaxman]

And he says "Nothing..." I look inside and it was true: there was nothing there -- no back seat, no carpet, no headliner, and half the dashboard was gone. From ten feet away, it looked bone stock.

yea, it's my experience that the more beat-up and stock a car looks, the more likely the guy owning it has been putting money under the hood, not into the chrome. If they guy has any money or is into cars, of course.

I'm pretty sure the fastest Honda Civic I've ever heard tell of was a very plain-looking white hatchback model... with a full nitro kit. It's the kind of car you buy because it's cheap, so you have money left over for the kits you'll be installing...

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[njh]

I think it is more a matter of heat dissipation. Metal conducts better than polycarbonate and spreads the heat out evenly to resist buckling. When we can make diamond on demand you can have your transparent case.

Why?

[Belial6]

"Then again, decorating your low-end Honda Civic with big mufflers, racing stripes, and spinny hubcaps is silly, too, but that doesn't stop a huge multi-million-dollar industry from springing up around providing those accessories for people who want to do something silly like that."

Why is it silly to decorate inexpensive stuff, but not expensive stuff. Racing stripes and spinny hubcaps are no more or less silly on a $12k car than they are on a $120K car.

Re:Why?

[javaxman]

Why is it silly to decorate inexpensive stuff, but not expensive stuff. Racing stripes and spinny hubcaps are no more or less silly on a $12k car than they are on a $120K car.

You may think so, but I'm going to have to disagree. I'll tell you why. If you have a low-end car, and you're thinking of spending money on it, guess what? You can upgrade your suspension. Or you could upgrade your exaust system. Or you could replace the engine with a higher horsepower model. Or you could upgrade your stereo or interior, even, or make any number of alterations which actually improve the performance and utility of your car.

Same goes for your computer. I'd upgrade the CPU, add memory, get better graphics, sound, I/O cards, whatever...

Of course, that's me, and probably JCR, and that's why we think it's silly; the money could be better spent, in our opinion. Of course, if asthetics are your #1 concern and you're just trying to impress someone who might not ask to look under the hood... by all means, paint racing stripes on your stock Civic. But there is a *real* reason to think doing so is silly- that money could actually go into performance enhancements. Once your car is all tricked out and you can't think of what else you'd spend money on, then sure, your car has earned it's racing stripes. Until then, it's sort of silly, isn't it?

In terms of the windowed hard drive, that money could go to, I don't know, extra memory. How about I buy a backup hard drive with the money I save on a regular hard drive and a more boring, but nice case? If you have all the money in the world, sure, I guess... why not... but I'd still rather stick that cash into a bank account or do *something* with it besides buy a windowed hard drive, really... to each his own I suppose...

my window.......

[Anonymous Coward]

Now thats the ONLY kinda window my hard disk is ever gonna get

HD1=System,HD2=Media

[funkdancer]

Use one of these for your system/applications, then add a slower terabyte-or-thereabouts drive for your media.
Two drives make a lot of sense; you can format your systems/applications drive without affecting the media, should the need arise.

At last......

[Fantasio]

Windows without security holes !

WD lies

[ImaLamer]

Their website says the "only clear cover hard drive".

Re:WD lies

[bhtooefr]

Well, if you twist it the right way, it's the only OEM clear cover hard drive. The 62PC is probably one of the few clear casing hard drives.

However, I'm still not going to buy a WD drive. I've had WAY too much bad luck with WD.

Re:WD lies

[Anonymous Coward]

I've only had problems with Maxtors and Seagates (and of course the infamous Fujitsu batch). Now that Maxtor and Seagate are merging, WD is one of the few other options.

But...

[HermanAB]

does windowed hard drive run Linux?

Corvus Apple II drive of 1980

[oldzoot]

Corvus sold a 5MB drive for the apple II about 1980 which also had a clear cover on the case. I believe the drvie was > 5" and the case was about the size of a shoebox. It appeared to the operating system as a whole bunch of floppies, all on-line at the same time.

They did release one of these

[commodoresloat]

But nobody could see it so it didn't sell very well.

Hmm, so the server was slashdotted..

[killa62]

Oh, of course, they forgot to put these drives in the servers.

What are they using? an old 4800 RPM 100 mB IBM HD from 1993?

Where are mod points when I need them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod. Parent. Funny.

Now, off to M2...

LAN party?

[No Such Agency]

"The poor fools that everyone laughs at during lan parties with their Micron Windows ME PC's from Costco?"

I doubt they'd be LAN'ing anything more than "Warcraft 2" on those. You can barely play Counter Strike Source or BF2 on a P4 these days.

Re:LAN party?

[RavenDarkholme]

I doubt they'd be LAN'ing anything more than "Warcraft 2" on those. You can barely play Counter Strike Source or BF2 on a P4 these days

That, my friend, is why we laugh.

Another possibility

[No2Gates]

What if we were to use the same technology to see into the minds of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and while we're at it, George Bush.

Re:Another possibility

[Vo0k]

Good idea.
Actually, I wouldn't like to see into their minds really. Just the idea of them having a hole in their head covered with a lens appeals to me... Actually, screw the lens, I just want them with holes in their heads...

Re:Another possibility

[EmagGeek]

Inside the mind of:

Bill Gates: The world will be MINE! And I will use deceitful and unlawful business practices to get it!

Steve Ballmer: The world will be MINE! But, I must destroy my boss, first!

George Bush:

There ya go...

Re:A performance idea I had in the shower this mor

[imsabbel]

Well, you are not the first one to have this idea.
In fact there are actually 2 approaches:
(using the multiple heats at once, or putting two actuators on the disk).
Both have problems because they need much better/explensive electronics on the disc.

The multiple actuators have problems because of more cost, more space needed in the drive, more power usage and problems with ressonances when moving both actuators at once.

The multiple heads suffer from the problem that it would be prohibitively expensive to calibrate the disks so well above each other that they are all "in sync" on the tracks at the same time (be are talking about 100nm precission here). When only using one of the heads at once like modern disks, only that single on has to be kept on track, which allows MUCH larger manufactoring tolarances.
Not to mention that access time would actually become worse because they actuator would have to wait longer for the heads to stop oscillating and being able to read.

Coral Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

Click Here

Cheers

What?!?! Have the kids actually use TOOLS?

[Ellis D. Tripp]

In this day and age? Are you insane? Think of the children, for Dog's sake! What if one of the kids pokes themselves with a screwdriver, or pinches a finger between the magnets in the drive? Their parents would sue the school district faster than you can say "bottom feeding lawyer"!

Besides, how many school teachers nowadays would be competent to show the kids how to dissasemble a drive anyway? In case you haven't heard, we are now living in the "information economy" where nobody needs to learn such mundane skills as how to work with tools. That's what Chinese factory labor is for! After all, the schools have done a pretty good job of killing shop classes (and driving out those who taught them), leaving education purely in the hands of the "educrats", who look down their collective nose at people who actually work with their hands.

Screwdrivers in a classroom? Would you want to send YOUR kid to a "trade school"? Heaven forbid...:)

Re:What?!?! Have the kids actually use TOOLS?

[merreborn]

What if one of the kids pokes themselves with a screwdriver, or pinches a finger between the magnets in the drive? ...nobody needs to learn such mundane skills as how to work with tools ...Screwdrivers in a classroom?

Oh, don't worry, it hasn't gotten that bad yet. In bio, kids still get to disect fetal pigs with real scalpels. And there are still highschool hardware classes in which you get to do real PC maintentence with real screwdrivers.

Re:heat

[danknight]

Maybe WD got the formula for Transparent Aluminum !

You know, I should have just Googled first

[Atario]

Because in doing so, I just found an explanation with a citation of someone actually trying this, and even a quasi-related previous Slashdot story.

Rule #1: Google it!

Re:You know, I should have just Googled first

[imsabbel]

Also, you can look here: http://redhill.net.au/d/d-o.html
For the baracuda 2HP, who used the dual actuator approach....

Maybe those things will be coming again, if the storage density stagnates like the last years.
Bot otoh, if its too expensive, falling ram prices may create alternatives for applications that NEED that much performance...

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[gmby]

It's not heat or even mech stress. The problem is RFI on the heads. Those little heads use such small levels of signals it's a wonder the noise floor is not to high with the RFI inside a computer case.

Or so I would think.

Maxtor

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

If Maxtor ever does this, they could call it the "Holy shit I'm losing all my data this fuckings sucks I wish I spent $20 more for a Maxtor or some shit" Window (TM).

Lightscribe?

[PhYrE2k2]

Can we combine this with lightscribe and make spinning designs (swirls anybody?) on the platters?

-M

It's all relative

[User 956]

Except that it's a Western Dig. hdd, so you're already sacrificing data integrity.

You think they're bad? Maxtor makes Western Digital drives look like a Formation ToughDisk.

I Believe...

[mjohnson13]

I believe that it was Derek Smalls that said it best... "There's a fine line between stupid and clever..."

This is not the first hard drive with a window

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have an 5.25" Quantum hard drive, 4GB, that had a small plastic window about 1" long and 1/4" wide placed over the drive heads. Certainly the view is much more impressive in the Raptor, but it cannot claim the title as the first drive with a window.

So so at first but then saw video

[duodave]

OK I was like "why" when I first read the story and looked at the site, but damn they have a hell of a marketing department. I looked at the video and went "I want one."

-dave

Re:Must be a parallel universe you live in

[Forbman]

Yes, but check out an Avanti. Those who like them love them. Personally, they're just too ugly.

Or the new Bugatti Veyron. Good thing they're making it. At least it's going to drive, but it's just as silly as that 16-cylinder supercar that Chrysler developed a couple of years back, the Viper-Engined-Motorcycle, the souped up Cadillacs, etc. (Didn't the Cadillac designers see the first Vacation movie? Their front-ends look like they were lifted right off of the Family Truckster).

Come now...

[Belial6]

Really, how many cars have you ever seen in your entire life that could not be mechanically upgraded? 0? Now, how many have you seen where money was spent on asthetics? Every single one? This is definitly a case of 'My shade of gray is better than your shade of gray'.

Re:Come now...

[javaxman]

Really, how many cars have you ever seen in your entire life that could not be mechanically upgraded? 0? Now, how many have you seen where money was spent on asthetics? Every single one? This is definitly a case of 'My shade of gray is better than your shade of gray'.

Let's put it this way : after original purchase, I've never spent money making any of my cars prettier, unless you count actual repairs. Probably the *majority* of people do the same, unless you count bumper stickers and antenna balls ( meh not so much what we're talking about, huh? )

Then again, my car to me is a form of transportation, not a point of prestige or an extension of my manhood. It's not a matter of what color paint you like so much as a matter of lifestyle and what is important to you. There is a certain subculture, a portion of the population where a great deal of value is placed on how your car looks, but not so much on how it runs. There's a different group where those priorites are reversed. To everyone else, it's transportation, and neither thing is such a big deal.

Re:Come now...

[Belial6]

"To everyone else, it's transportation, and neither thing is such a big deal."

I would be more inclined to agree with you if I saw a whole lot less SUVs on the road. 95% of which are purchased for looks, not utility.

You said:
"You can upgrade your suspension. Or you could upgrade your exaust system. Or you could replace the engine with a higher horsepower model. Or you could upgrade your stereo or interior, even, or make any number of alterations which actually improve the performance and utility of your car."

You made it clear that you considered upgrading these items would be legitimate while improving looks are not, yet now you say that for you a car is just transportation, and not an extension of your manhood.

I say that all of your examples of non-silly upgrades are just as silly as improving looks. You see, for most of these "ricers", the stock car they bought has 100% of the utility that they need. The upgrades you suggest would be silly, as they would not make their cars perform their primary job easier.

If the a car gets you from point A to point B every time, it is a good car. (excepting the few things like hauling) Anything beyond that is entertainment. When you say that your form of entertainment is better than someone elses, you are pretty much saying that your gray is better than their gray.

Personally I have a 3/4 ton truck for hauling (thats about all it is used for), a minivan for people moving, and a Suzuki Swift as my primary car. Since the Swift gets me from point A to point B every time, and does it at a much lower cost than almost any other car on the road, it is a true utility vehicle. Anything more is entertainment. Certainly putting a high horsepower engine in that Swift would be FAR more silly than painting a racing stripe down the middle. Either entertainment is silly or it isn't. I only consider it silly if you can't afford it.

Re:Come now...

[javaxman]

Certainly putting a high horsepower engine in that Swift would be FAR more silly than painting a racing stripe down the middle.

Only if you're never going to race it.

Which I guess sums up my feeling on the matter; if you're not going to race your car, making it *look* like a race car just makes you a poser, which is silly.

Buying a multi-passenger off-road-capable vehicle which you only ever drive by yourself on nicely paved roads is equally silly, but, obviously, people are silly, and buy cars not as transportation but as status symbols. I guess I should have restricted my previous comment to the world of after-market modification, but you're right that it applies at time of purchase as well, so the majority involves themselves in the sillyness. Most people just don't take the effort and time to do much after-market customization, not because we don't care about asthetics, but because it's a pain and we've already put the spoiler on our Honda ( well, my wife put it there, really... dumbest thing ever, but what are you going to do ) before we drove it off the lot.

We also wear ties and silly dresses, and mod computers ( or needlessly spend extra to buy stylish ones ) and, well, that's people for you... we're silly. If you got the cash, someone will sell you the bling, even if someone thinks all that bling makes you look silly... which was my real point, going back. This hard drive with a window is just a company selling the bling that the market clearly demands, silly as many of us may find it to be.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[cffrost]

I imagine that cracks are likely to develop, especially around screw holes, in a lid made of material not conducive to handling the vibration, stress and thermal expansion you get with a 10kRPM drive.

Besides, even with the window on the drive (and the PC case), it's unlikely you'll see anything when the drive's installed. I suppose anyone willing to buy a window-drive is also prepared to install an internal webcam in order to watch it access and transfer.

Makes a nice mirror when it conks out.

[Keith McClary]

Makes a nice mirror when it conks out.

You can hang it by your door so the ladies can check their hair and makeup reflected in the shiny platters.

Re:Makes a nice mirror when it conks out.

[Vo0k]

You can hang it by your door so the ladies can check their hair and makeup reflected in the shiny platters.

Wishful thinking, slashdotter.

Re:Go Western Digital! Go!

[aXis100]

People have been doing this themselves for a good 6 months - 1 year, maybe even longer.

I wouldn't call a spinning platter an education

[Anonymous Coward]

Comon, there's more to hard drives than a head and platters. This is first about a company turning a profit and then about e-penis and bragging rights. Education doesn't fit in. If people want education they'll read a text book or wikipedia.

Now if they released a whitepaper explaining all the physics behind how their hard drives work...that would be education.

Window will most likely be hidden!

[acidream]

Most pc cases with windows that I've seen have the hard drives mounted in such a way that the top of the drive is not even visible. It's usually in some sort of tray or area covered in metal. I'm sure there are cases out there with the drive facing the window, but there few and far between. Average joe who buys this drive wont even be able to see the moving parts, although the specs on the drive are reason enough. My 02 cents.

This looks like a job for...

[inphizzible_friend]

Raptor_X! The most well equiped dinosaur on the planet!! Now complete with clear plastic siding. Raptor_X!!!! Idiot narator included...

Re: At startup, it goes VRRROOOOOM!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shows what you know, "poseur". It's not the box, but what's in the box. This costco rig is a sleeper, baby. It will blow your doors off!

They spinnin'!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo man, I got some 120gb sittin' in my 22" drive caddy! They spinnin' playa, they spinnin'!

in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft to sue IBM

Blaeh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Car tuning is for people who can afford a sports car.

Case modding is for people who can't afford an Apple.

Then you'll like this

[aliquis]

Check out the middle image.

Marketing Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is an attempt to bring more users/gamers to buying the higher-end drives.

I mean, why would you buy a Raptor when you can get a SATA drive for significantly cheaper, more space and still has very good performance.

This is just a gimmick to make more money.

MIX and match insane speed and insane size

[Muchsake]

No you dont get JUST Raptors.If your motherboard is an SLI Deluxe or similar you get 4 Raptors in RAID 0+1 for systems and and urgent data and four of the biggest drives you can get in RAID 5 for non urgent data. You can also have a pair of opticals and two big PATA drives on the IDE channel (for data that you dont mind losing). IF 300GB ultra fast + 1200 GB secure + 800 GB insecure is not enough you could also go for a few USB drives.
I built my system last year so its 138,698,0,232 (no PATAdrives at the moment and overheads mean its not 150,750,0,250)

Capacity isn't everything

[Andy Dodd]

The capacity of this hard drive IS low, but did you bother at all to look at the other specs?

10k RPM (almost all consumer drives are 7200 RPM) and NCQ support.

Did you know that the non-windowed Raptor X's predecessor was only 74 GB? Despite that it was an extremely popular drive for those that wanted high performance.

Maxtor's Atlas 15k II is 150GB and costs $710... Not much capacity, but it's basically the fastest hard drive on the planet.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[ivan256]

It's actualy a matter of vibration. The top of the case has to be rigid enough to prevent micro-vibrations and resonance from causing the head to hit the platter. If you look at the pictures of this drive you'll notice that the top is still metal with a few plastic areas to keep the stiffness high.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[adrenalinerush]

It's not about protection. It's about the structural stiffness needed to make the head-positioning servo system feasible/fast enough, and the incredible tolerances that must be achieved to make modern hard drives work.

Internal vibration is the main problem in hard drive design nowadays (speaking from experience), due to the ever-shrinking size of the data tracks on the disk. Modern drives are around 500,000 tracks per inch (radially), meaning a single data track is only 50nm wide! At that width, vibration is a killer. Making the baseplate out of plastic isn't going to reduce vibration as much as steel.

Tolerance-wise, the components are assembled with pretty extreme fits, which non-metal baseplates aren't going to allow.

That said, we used to have some drives at work with covers (just the piece of metal on the non-PCB side) made entirely from polycarbonate. They were really just for demonstration purposes, but they worked! A bit noisy, sure, but pretty nifty (the real covers are typically engineered to provide a lot of sound dampening). Really gives one an appreciation for how fast the components inside are moving when the head is seeking from track to track.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[merikari]

I'll trade that for models with anything transparent...

Poseurs - Cars, Computers.

[BigBlockMopar]

Then again, decorating your low-end Honda Civic with big mufflers, racing stripes, and spinny hubcaps is silly, too, but that doesn't stop a huge multi-million-dollar industry from springing up around providing those accessories for people who want to do something silly like that.

Those kinds of people don't get my respect unless they put a real engine in there. A Buick 3.8L V6 more than doubles the displacement, and fits into a 1993 Honda Civic *relatively* easily once you've cut out the floor pans, welded in a driveshaft tunnel, and converted the car to rear-wheel-drive to avoid the front-wheel-drive's *horrible* acceleration characteristics.

Or, of course, you could just put a $49 obnoxious coffee can muffler on it, start calling it a "race car" and drive around like a jackass with something to prove.

Hacking things requires skill, knowledge and a substantial investment in time and tools. Off-the-shelf mods just make you look like another boring drone who is trying to impress with their lack of originality.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[njh]

Ok, sounds believable. Though I would have thought that a similar thickness block of solid PMMA or PC would deliver comparable stiffness, but then the thermal resistance would be too high. I suspect there are a number of related reasons. Again, using solid diamond would sold the stiffness problem ;)

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[ivan256]

Though I would have thought that a similar thickness block of solid PMMA or PC would deliver comparable stiffness

Polymers that have a comperable stiffness to steel or even aluminum have a nasty habit of either not being transparent, not maintaining their stiffness under increased temperature, or not maintaining their transparency under increased temperature. Plus, they're not cheap. This wasn't a problem back when drives were lower capacity and slower. Manufacturers made drives with polycarbonate tops all the time for marketing. Somewhere around 80GB at 7200 RPM it didn't work anymore. The drives would eat themselves after a few hours.

Even steel has it's problems. I've seen arrays of 2.5" SAS drives where, unlike current 3.5" arrays, the drives were racked in multiple rows instead of one row across the front of the chassis (picture a grid of discs on their side from the top down*). When aligned this way in a perfect grid, the vibrational resonance of striped access caused signifigantly decreased drive life, and the manufacturer had to rotate each row of disks slightly to solve the problem**.

Again, using solid diamond would sold the stiffness problem ;)

And the thermal problems... And it would be shiny... What's taking those nanotech engineers so long? I'd rather they used it as the substrate for semi-conductors first though...

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And now some extra text to get my diagrams past the lameness filter... hopefully... There should have been 4 rows of 8 in each of those, but it made me delete some.

Re:Just a *window*? Feh!

[njh]

So that's why they do it! Thanks for your info. I wonder if there is some kind of DSSS type chipping to avoid that problem.