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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
Every gamer/case-modder under the sun will now only purchase the Raptor.
Oh yeah, this will be perfect for my Schrödinger Box.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Troubleshooting chart
1) Head not moving - drive dead.
2) Head moving too much - not enough memory.
3) Head lying at bottom of case - drive broken.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Problems like finding lost files, damaged partition tables, and fragmentation! Is that grub installed in the MBR, or lilo? Now we'll be able to look and find out!
I think it would be awesome if you could fit an aquarium in there.
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!
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.
Don't even get me started on women's fashions...
I'd like to see windows in women's fashion - the internals are far more interesting.
I know it used to be that mounting a drive vertically used to shorten the lifespan of the drive
That's because until the invention of stickier platters, all the bits would eventually drift down to the bottom of a platter, thus causing it to wobble out of balance.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Now you just need a transparent cat
---
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).
It's already there, as long as you don't look for it.
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