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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."
It's called the IBM 62PC.
There's one sitting in a lab that I have class in, and it's totally transparent.
The window isn't what makes it expensive. What makes it expensive is the fact that it's the fastest non-SCSI drive available.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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
Heavily slashdotted, but here's a mirror of the video (more as it downloads).
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.