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

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!

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!

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?

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

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: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.