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OEM Hard Drive With Window

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the making-it-just-to-easy dept.

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."

15 of 411 comments (clear)

  1. Is it just me? by jcr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or is this idea just silly?

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    1. Re:Is it just me? by RickPartin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Is it just me? by crandall · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually, this would make discovering harddrive problems much easier.

    3. Re:Is it just me? by javaxman · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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?

    4. Re:Is it just me? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.
    5. Re:Is it just me? by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    6. Re:Is it just me? by pete6677 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:Is it just me? by ewhac · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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

      --
      Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
    8. Re:Is it just me? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

  2. They are just now making these? by RickPartin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. How timely... by NerveGas · · Score: 2, Insightful


        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

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  4. Just a *window*? Feh! by pla · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  5. Re:Why would it be silly? by masklinn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

    --
    "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
  6. Re:Why would it be silly? by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  7. Re:Why would it be silly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Free, yet oh so useless.