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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."
I will take an external 400Gb drive.
Is the window worth paying more than $1/gig of storage? Let alone over $2?
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
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!
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
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.
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.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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!
I'll be darned, NewEgg has this RAID-Optimized hard drive in stock. Limit one to a customer.
What's that called, RAID -1?
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
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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.
Here you go, a picture of four 62PCs sitting on shelves, hooked to an IBM System/34 (IIRC).
s ks.gif
http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/s34_di
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.