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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."

9 of 411 comments (clear)

  1. up next... by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  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. in other news by shitzu · · Score: 5, Funny

    Kingston is planning to release ram modules with a window by Q2 2006

  4. The Title by McGiraf · · Score: 5, Funny

    The title scared me , buy a OEM drive and it has Windows on it!

  5. Also insanely fast (benchmark links below) by larsoncc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  6. Re:Is it just me? by Intron · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  7. Re:Why would it be silly? by Knight+Thrasher · · Score: 5, Funny

    Isn't it funny that my case has windows, now my hard drives will have windows, but not contained within either is Windows®?

  8. NOT GOOD ENOUGH by Stoutlimb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  9. 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.