I recently watched a training video in which the instructor showed a hard disk drive operating with the cover removed. The arm moved so fast that it seemed to be in two places at once. You could see which partition it was accessing by the way it moved. I would like to watch the antics of my hard disk, too.
Hard disk drives are sealed because dust between head and platter can cause damage. So the manufacturer could offer a line of disks with transparent casings, for a premium.
Or else, somebody with the necessary clean room facilities could do business taking apart new hard disk drives and putting them together again with transparent covers.
And an led at the end of that cantilever arm (carrying the heads) that flashed green for read and red for write.-- neelandan, Mar 21 2003 (?) Transparent hard drive mod http://www.hitechmo...eq=showcontent&id=5This isn't mine, but this is how I did it. [Freefall, Oct 17 2004] The Quantel Paintbox had Fujitsu hard drives with transparent covers. Fun to watch, for a short while.-- bristolz, Mar 21 2003 +1 nice idea-- po, Mar 21 2003 Hard drives are also shielded to protect against EM interference, which could corrupt data. I've got an old hard drive in my computer (only 4 gig) that I've modded the cover on, and it looks cool, but I don't put any important data on there, just some games. The drive itself seems to operate fine, but occasionally, the data gets corrupted and I have to re-install something. I performed the disassembly and re-assembly in my bathroom, after steam-purifying the air. See the link for instructions.-- Freefall, Mar 21 2003 Not much to see, I'd think. The platters turn at 5,000+ RPM and the read/write heads travel across the platters in milliseconds. Still, there is a very high cool factor.
As [Freefall] points out, this is not a whimsical mod. *Any* particulate left in the drive will destroy it eventually, so be clean.-- phoenix, Mar 21 2003 128 cans, hell, make it 1024 - numbered 0-1023-- thumbwax, Mar 21 2003 wouldnt there be a problem with the lasers or something?-- joshkouri, Mar 21 2003 definitely an interesting idea, for looks... maybe i'm wrong, joshkouri, but i'm pretty sure that drives with lasers are 'optical drives,' such as CD or DVD drives.-- Electric Monk, Mar 22 2003 First, no, hard drives don't use lasers to read or write the data.
Second, I've seen at least two HD mod articles before seeing this, so I'm afraid it's baked except for the LED part.
Third, I wish you'd give an explanation when deleting comments, especially considering that I didn't fishbone this. I almost feel like doing so now.-- galukalock, Mar 22 2003 Yes, for a short while.-- bristolz, Mar 22 2003 Deleted not, not me, Your Honour!-- neelandan, Mar 22 2003 How about a hard drive webcam, so that you can keep the magnetic sheilding and the case together, and see the action on a pop-up window? Illumination by white LED.-- Cedar Park, Mar 23 2003 Doesn't it move too fast to be detected by the refresh rate of a web cam? Open up a broken hard drive, snap a digital picture. Open the picture, and tell yourself you're watching a web cam of your hard drive.-- Worldgineer, Mar 23 2003 random, halfbakery