Slashdot Mirror
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."
Or is this idea just silly?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And coming soon, the first OEM Hard drive where you can literally see your data go bad.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
... 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
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
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?!
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
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.
This product shouldn't be called "Raptor". It should be called "Schrodinger".
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
wow...this is one twisted universe we live in. :)
-Tupshin
...And just let some flunky with a laser pointer come by and screw up all my data? You must be shrooming!
Ooooooohhhh! Spinny AND shiny!
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I will take an external 400Gb drive.
Is the window worth paying more than $1/gig of storage? Let alone over $2?
a clear window so you can see what's going on inside.
What, the spinning?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Kingston is planning to release ram modules with a window by Q2 2006
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
... before some case modders opens one of these to replace the clear window with some opaque material?
please excuse my apathy
The title scared me , buy a OEM drive and it has Windows on it!
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!
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
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.
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...
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
Isn't it funny that my case has windows, now my hard drives will have windows, but not contained within either is Windows®?
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...
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!
Better a hard disk with a window in it than a hard disk with Windows on it.
I'll be darned, NewEgg has this RAID-Optimized hard drive in stock. Limit one to a customer.
What's that called, RAID -1?
Heavily slashdotted, but here's a mirror of the video (more as it downloads).
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.
Now that seeing the spinning disk is easy, how long before they start putting visible (but magnetically transparent) images like this on them?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Like Crystal Pepsi?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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
Whoosh.
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.
Rumor has it they developed a DVD writer with a window, but nobody has seen it (twice).