Clear Hard Drive Mods 513
Baloo Ursidae writes "In the spirit of the case window kit and the clear PC case, there are people who have made hard drive windows, and apparently they're not alone."
That ladies and gentlemen, takes balls.
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Clear Hard Drive Mods
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"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz
Sure it takes balls (Score:5, Insightful)
See them metal prongs all over the place around the case and seams? That's to prevent signals from the motherboard/CPU/hard drive from interfering with everything around it.
Re:Sure it takes balls (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sure it takes balls (Score:2)
Re:Sure it takes balls (no) (Score:3, Informative)
I used to do FCC and UL testing of PCs, so ran into this often.
Re:Sure it takes balls (no) (Score:2)
So by putting metal tabs along a non-conductive material will help, but not much. The waves will still pass right through the material and out.
It might be possible to put a mesh or something on the clear material, so it is somewhat see-through, but still blocks the waves.
Like the door of a microwave, which blocks the lower frequency microwaves but allows the higher frequencies (light) through.
Of course with microwave ovens the energy is confined to a narrow band and the interference from GHz computers is all over the place, but I'm sure some clever engineer is working on it. I can see in my newer iMac a type of mesh surrounds a lot of the circuits.
What we need (Re:Sure it takes balls (no)) (Score:4, Funny)
Bad physics (Score:5, Informative)
A good conductor reflects incident waves very very efficiently. Very little power is absorbed by the metal itself. If you surround a region with metal, all incident radiation from outside the box is scattered and does not enter the box.
If you want add a transparent window to the box, all you have to do is integrate a metal wire mesh fine enough so that the gaps are much smaller than the wavelengths of the frequencies you want to filter out. So, to filter out all frequencies below 2.4 GHz (lambda = 12.5 cm), you want a mesh much finer spacing on the order of 1.25mm - 1.25cm. (How do you think your microwave oven window works?)
Only if you are talking very low frequencies, would even talking about "goes to ground and out" have any meaningful content (like 60Hz which is essentially the same as DC from any electromagnetics theory standpoing unless your devices are the size of the continential U.S.)
Kevin
P.S. By the way, my Ph.D. background is electromagnetics and I had an office inside a Faraday cage at a former employer.
Your opinion of the X-Men movie? (Score:4, Funny)
Good, then you can settle an argument some of my friends are having. :-)
They're both engineers; one electrical, one mechanical. The dispute is about a scene in the X-Men movie, where a bunch of people are inside the Statue of Liberty. One of the heros is about to magically create a thunderstorm or some such, and Bad Guy says, "oh, real brilliant, summon up a boatload of lightning while you're standing inside a GIANT COPPER STATUE," and so the hero changes his/her mind, does nothing, and they all get tied up (or whatever).
One engineer says that this is moronic, and that standing inside a GIANT COPPER STATUE would in fact be the safest place from which to call down a lightning bolt, because you're inside a Faraday cage.
The other engineer says this is purest bullshit. Hilarity ensues.
(As a computer scientist lacking the ability to summon lightning storms, I fall into the "could not give a flying fat rat's ass" camp, but that's never helped settle a dispute.)
Re:Your opinion of the X-Men movie? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, if the potential is too concentrated anywhere during the lightning strike, you could end up standing under a glopo of melted copper.
Re:Your opinion of the X-Men movie? (Score:4, Interesting)
A lightning bolt forms a conductive path from the clouds to the ground. It essentially a capacitor discharging through a short circuit. Given the rapidity of a bolt, the EM radiation covers the whole frequency spectrum. In terms of danger, the lower frequency stuff (this is what transports the charge) is what I would worry about. (When we talk about the low frequency parts, we can use the language of currents and grounds and potentials.)
Ideally, your EE friend would be correct. Being inside a giant metal statue would protect you from the bolt. And assuming the Statue of Liberty is still a good conductor (minimal rust and what not), the Statue will still reflect the high frequency radiation.
However, low frequency concerns make using the Statue of Liberty as a lightbolt protection inadvisable. How well grounded is the Statue? Are all the metal components at the same potential?
For example, suppose you are standing near where two metal panels are abutting. Rust has formed between common edge of the panels. From an electrical standpoint, the two panels are equipotentials electrically connected by a resistance.
When the lightning strikes, current will flow through the panels to ground. You better hope that the current flow doesn't find it easier to jump through you than through the rust to get to ground!
On the other hand, I imagine the New Jersey Parks Department (oddly, the Statue of Libery is in New Jersey
I can think of other concerns, but this should give enough fodder for your friends to come to a resolution in their dispute.
Kevin
What about commercial windowed cases? (Score:2)
Re:What about commercial windowed cases? (Score:2)
don't follow their instructions word for word.... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Cover the platter part with plastic wrap and put it in a safe spot"
plastic wrap??? if i recall correctly, what keeps the plastic wrap stuck to the hard drive is STATIC ELECTRICITY. exactly the wrong thing to be dealing with when using an open hard drive.
Re:don't follow their instructions word for word.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Like the horribly sensitive GMR heads on any newer HD... or the (less sensitive but still damagable) controller card on the back of the drive.
Use a good static bag (silver, not black web, pink, blue, or bubble wrap). Fold the end over... Also, doing this in winter means you should artificially raise the humidity in the room (low RelHumidity leads to a lot of ESD and far more dust problems).
dust bunnies (Score:2, Insightful)
Morons... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm gonna open my hard drive, sacrifice the warranty, get foreign matter in amongst the platters and heads.. I'm guessing these modified hard drives don't last too long.
I'm not even gonna mention the RF that'd leak out your plastic window on the side of your case. If half your monitor goes dim, don't say I didn't warn ya.
This is about as sane as using bubblegum to fix a rocket pack.
Re:Morons... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Morons... (Score:3, Informative)
What gets written to your swap? Pages from your memory!
Pages get corrupt, swapped back in... instant swiss cheese computer.
I'd say it's a lot more safe to use one of these drives for unimportant storage, than something critical like swap. You are basically adding bad RAM to you system in essence.
What's next... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What's next... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What's next... (Score:2)
Next? Already happened. (Score:2)
Re:What's next... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sort of cool looking, actually.
No monitor, he accesses it via shell from the laptop he keeps on his bedside.
Re:What's next... (Score:3, Funny)
held together with clear plastic thumbscrews
with a clear plastic PCB, using some sort of clear conductor.. Silicon chips so thin that they are translucent encased in a thermally conductive clear material..
A fan with clear plastic blades..
Personally, I just want a full tower, in the dimensions 1 x 4 x 9 (x 16 x 25..), painted black, that makes no sound.
Re:What's next... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but what will you do when it starts eating Jupiter?
something tells me this idea is half-baked (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:something tells me this idea is half-baked (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. Hard drives are manufactured in a cleanroom environment for a reason. My guess is that these guys either got extremely lucky, or more likely they have hundreds of bad sectors that got re-mapped to the outside of the platters by the drive's circuitry. That drive is going to fail before long--mark my words.
If someone really wants to do this, the drive should be taken apart in a cleanroom and the platters kept there. The dremel work must be done outside for obvious reasons.
I suppose if anyone is in the Columbus, OH area and has a harddrive to waste--I'll help you out since I have access to a class 100 cleanroom. I won't do anything except take the thing apart and protect the platters. Someone else can be responsible for modding the case. Send me an e-mail.
Re:something tells me this idea is half-baked (Score:2, Informative)
Re:something tells me this idea is half-baked (Score:5, Funny)
telling me to Dremel my hard drive
For another Dremel-induced hardware modification, check out this guide to changing a video card [datadocktorn.nu].
I can't say I've tried it because I haven't. Heck, even if I had tried it, I might not admit the fact.InitZero
Re:something tells me this idea is half-baked (Score:2)
Re:something tells me this idea is half-baked (Score:2, Funny)
Sure it takes balls... (Score:4, Funny)
They've been around for a while.. (Score:2, Informative)
if I'm not mistaken, it was the good ole RLL harddrives (before IDE, heh)
I think it was runnin Windows 3.1 :)
The visible hard drive. (Score:5, Funny)
When everything stops moving and starts to smoke thats Windows 98.
When everything stops moving and nothing happens that's a Redhat user trying to install FreeBSD
How ridiculous... (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how well you vacuum this off, undoubtedly there will be debris remaining somewhere. Now imagine what those platters will look like after a few days at 7200RPM with the little bits of metal dust. This is the dumbest idea for a case mod I've seen yet. A joke perhaps?
Re:How ridiculous... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How ridiculous... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How ridiculous... (Score:2)
Re:Look who didn't read the article. (Score:2)
*CRASH* (Score:2, Interesting)
An average particle of dust is several times the gap between the drive's heads and it's platters. Having a head run into such a particle causes the head to bounce up and crash onto the platter. That can't be good.
IMHO his drive still works out of pure luck, but he's probably increased his bad sector count somewhat significantly.
Re:*CRASH* (Score:2)
Static problems (Score:5, Funny)
At least.... (Score:2)
Old concept (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah HA - it's a conspiracy! (Score:5, Funny)
This is a transparent (sorry) plot by IBM or Maxtor to get us to ruin our hard drives so we have to buy new ones!
This is a suicide mod!
Balls != Smart, so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not real smart, IMHO, to lower a pickup and mod it to hell, but the guys that do that like the way it looks. They aren't doing it so their vehicle will be faster. Just so it will look better.
That is what these guys are doing. Let them have their fun. I wouldn't do it, but I like the way it looks.
Re:Balls != Smart, so what? (Score:3)
That is what these guys are doing. Let them have their fun. I wouldn't do it, but I like the way it looks."
I think the analogy to lowering a truck to make it look better not faster doesn't quite fit. This is more like putting sand into the pistons because you like the sound it makes.
This is a destructive mod. It would be STUPID to try this unless you're in a clean room.
Ooooo...Aaaahhhh... (Score:3, Funny)
Back to work.
Sounds like an incredible waste of time - even for a seemingly nifty hack.
Re:Ooooo...Aaaahhhh... (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the guy who bent the platters and shone a laser pointer at the drive as it spun?
I'm thinking you could do the same thing with this mod - but instead of bending the platters and killing the drive, shine the laser pointer onto the point where the heads move back and forth, or onto the nuts that hold the platters in place.
You still get the laser light show, but you might also get to use the drive.
(No, I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than a swap partition either, but it sounds like a neat extension to what's already a pretty insane mod.)
The riskiest part of the mod looks like the stage where the plastic wrap lies on the disk. I'd have pulled the plastic wrap tight across the surface of the drive, just in case any oils on the plastic wrap find their way onto the platters.
One other thing I'd suggest for this mod is to leave a portion of the drive's housing intact, and mount that funny little air filter on it. Drives need to "breathe" through that filter. I suppose the risk of doing the mod in a non-cleanroom environment shortens the life of the drive to the point that the air filter is a moot point...
Finally, there may be additional risk from the outgassing of components in the silicone/epoxy/goop used to affix the plexi to the drive housing. God only knows what winds up being deposited on the drive platters over the next six months.
Still, a damn cool mod, and something to try some weekend when I've got nothing to do and an old 1.2G drive I don't need... and, of course, a modded case to show off the results.
A little advice. (Score:3, Informative)
Blow off the plexi glass and your cut cover before gluing them together. Then blow them again once their have been glued. Don't, as in DO NOT, blow the open HD though, as any dust in the air will go streaking across your platters. I get my canned air (Spaceballs, anybody?) from Stratus [stratusnow.com].
Yikes! (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, many years ago, some hard drives did come with plexiglass covers. (We're talking the big 14" ones here.) They also had metal covers to go over the plexiglass for safety reasons. I heard one story about a drive which spun out of control. (the speed control circuit used an optical feedback which was prone to dust) The platter fractured and pieces of platter were stuck in the walls around the office. Luckily it happened on a weekend.
Just like the old days (Score:2)
Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Transparent HDD mod == brick (Score:5, Informative)
The case is nearly sealed-- the only opening is for pressure equalization and is protected by a pretty advanced catacomb filter. Drives are assembled in clean rooms to minimze the internal particle count after manufacture. Remember that the distance between the (moving) head and the (spinning) media is measured in nanometers!
Why does a hard drive stop working when it takes a shock, sometimes not when the shock happens but a few hours/days/weeks later? It's becuase the heads slapped into the media, chipping off some of the magnetic material. That doesn't immediately kill it-- the disk automatically notices that it can't write those bits anymore, and reassigns them to one of the spare areas. It's the little bits of magnetic material floating around the drive that kill it. Eventually, they find their way to one of the heads and block it from reading/writing. Or, more spectacularly (and more rare) if the debris is big enough, it will wedge in between the head and the media and score the substrate (aluminum or glass), which sounds a little bit like a turbine exploding.
Hard drives are incredibly complex and sensitive devices. Unless you also think it would be cool to crack open your processor case and put a little window on it-- don't do your hard drive. Now, if you have a hard drive you don't need, you can add the window to make it look cool, but don't expect it to work. Also, it's unlikely the arms will move much, so just expect to see the platters spinning.
Head Crash (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Head Crash (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, one of the IBM servoids said that his boss, when he was being trained at some remote IBM campus, was shown a video of a drive whose axis was deliberately seized, in order to demonstrate the power of the spinning disk platters, so the people who work them respect the, er, "mechanical handling constraints" they require...
The whole disk drive cabinet (as large as a clothes washing machine) simply went cartwheeling accross the room.
No wonder it took several minutes for the drive to spin up to speed...
IBM hard drive engineer, lol (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Transparent HDD mod == brick (Score:4, Informative)
RF Signals from PC's (Score:5, Funny)
Just calculate the wavelength and use a wire mesh with a grid of half that size. Anything larger is a window that RF can use to escape.
The metal fingers mentioned in another post just reduce the "window" size of the gap between two metal edges. Uh, it is important that the mesh be conductive of course!
Think of a microwave window...notice the little black mesh that keeps those nasty signals from cooking your eyeballs as you peek in to watch your tomato sauce explode all over. Same thing.
-Bollux
"Code monkeys aren't engineers!"
That's NOTHING (Score:2)
And anyone remember that game "Mouse Trap"? You know the one... it starts with one movement which triggers another
How about we mount the game inside one of these PCs and then people will REALLY have something cool to look at.
Oh! Better! How about a gerbil running on an exercise wheel? Yeah!! All that inside a PC case!
...and here I was thinking that speed and output mattered... what was I Thinking?
Re:That's NOTHING (Score:2)
For what it's worth, I used to work at a semiconductor company and we would pop the tops off of chips in the lab all the time. We'd then put a little piece of clear plastic (or tape) over the opening. They worked just fine afterwards, though I wouldn't put too much faith in their longevity. Granted most of these were CPGA and CQFP packages that can be opened very easily, but every once in a while we'd send a plastic part out to have the tops removed, usually to do some sort of failure analysis. It was even more impressive when we stuck the chip under the photoemissions microscope so we could see the hotspots on the chip while it was working. Great fun.
..and I tell ya, it would've been even better with clear hard drive covers.
- j
Poll suggestion (Score:2, Funny)
I myself would be pretty interested in the results.
I think some people are missing the point... (Score:5, Informative)
But, it's a mod that you do because you want to, damn the consequences. It's done....for fun, for the hell of it, because you can, because it's there.
Chill out, lay off the "Yeah buts" and applaud the chutzpah that it takes to actually do this....but do not try it with ANYTHING mission critical!
So what ???? (Score:4, Funny)
Admittedly and ALL clear hard drive would be cooler
I also split heads on the same drives (10 meg Seagate MFM, and set it up so 2 INDEPENDENT sets could be running on the same set of platters, 1 set was READ only , the other could read and write, the concept was 4 sets in the end (I never got there) for network transfers and reduced seek times
I spent a total of 2 month making all the mods, the clear was to show the seperate control on the seperate head arms, I choose the drive I did because it, and all the components were friggng HUE and tolerances were less than what they were even in other drives of the era. I still have it in storage somewhere.
Anyone wanna BUY it ???
I wanted to apply this to a CDROM at the time in parraled, several sets of heads, for speeding up archive retrieval on a cd juke. I thought several people could access different data simeltanous, OR run in parralel for GREATER than 2x spees, kind of a read ahead with another 3 heads doing the read ahead....
Yes, I drink WAAYYYY too much coffee
Visible hard drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
During my senior year of high school, I covertly colocated an old 486 in one of the labs. I graduated and managed to leave the server there. It worked great for two weeks, after which it stopped responding. Two months later, one of my friends managed to gain access and recover the server. he reported that one of the hard drives was making horrible noises. I drug it home and opened up the drive and saw this [festing.org]. Apparently the head crashed and the platter spun, grinding away for two months. It's hard to see in this picture, but there's actually a hole part of the way through the drive.
This is what I would consider a catastrophic head crash.
I'd love to see the inside of my hard drive spin, but I'd rather not have that happen to it. A little dirt can be a very bad thing.
Re:Visible hard drive? (Score:3, Funny)
I once found a drive in a client's machine that was so hosed that the head had actually *severed* the platter. I picked up the drive and *rattle*rattle*. Fairly easy to troubleshoot that one.
We used to do this where I used to work... (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to write servo firmware, and I'd get to go on recruiting tours to local colleges sometimes... we had clear-case drives at our display. We also used them to debug problems with the spinup and headload algorithms sometimes. Even when they were changed in cleanrooms, the drives usually wouldn't last very long before they'd stop working.
Speck of dust, speck of dust, like a broken record (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure there will be many people screaming "But a speck of dust can wreck your hard drive!", and a few personal experiences of horror stories of drive damage. Here's my personal experience:
I have seen a new hard drive, untampered and sealed, run for 18 months, then start to lose sectors gradually. After about 3 full months, it had lost about 25% of its capacity and the owner gave up on it. At that point, we opened it up for a post mortem, and a tiny pile of grit fell out. The top platter was visible scored and marked... and it was still 75% usable.
I have personally swapped the platters on two 2.5" HDD's (from one with a broken arm to one with a hard ass password lock stored on the platter). Both drives were effectively write-offs, so I didn't even bother with the bathroom trick and had them open for about an hour at work, during lunch, with greasy fingers and food crumbs everywhere. To my great surprise, the result was one working HDD, no bad sectors, six months and counting. I trust it exactly as much as I trust new sealed drives, which is to say: not at all.
I'm sure that there are plenty of counter-stories, but it's my (limited) experience that even the most extreme manufacturing defect won't necessarily kill your drive immediately, and that if you've got an old drive you don't mind losing and fancy playing with, go on and have a poke around. At the very least, you'll get the pleasure of having friends and co-workers do a double take and begin the shrieking mantra of "Speck of dust! Speck of dust! Speck of dust!" ;-)
Re:Speck of dust, speck of dust, like a broken rec (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, two identical IMB Travelstars. Same size, same model number. One ticked and burped on startup, the other had a password lock on the platter (which the controller knew about, and so wouldn't play ball). They were bought as seen on eBay for next to nothing, so I didn't expect them to work, and really had very little to lose.
Isn't the 75GXP the model that a lot of people had problems with? And the problem was with the physical platters breaking down? I'm not sure what you'd gain by moving the platters to a new drive, unless you know that it's the head, arm or motor that's screwed. In the first instance, you could try the controller from an identical drive. Swapping platters really is the last resort of the desparate, I think. ;-)
What next? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What next? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course they will probably tell you to wrap it in Saran Wrap so that you don't lose any of the smoke that is inside the processor.
PC geeks and Honda "rice boys" don't mix (Score:2)
Re:PC geeks and Honda "rice boys" don't mix (Score:2)
Lighten up. It's not like they're telling you that you have to do it. The site clearly states that you'll probably destroy your harddrive. What do you care what I do to my boring beige box?
Damn, both sites are now dead (Score:2)
Next mod: the plexiglass CPU.
My favorit part (Score:2)
Wonder what happens when the mositure condenses on the inner workings of the drive. Make a dust particle look like a cake walk.
Oh, and as a photographer, most of us don't use high mosture areas for development work, we have an HEPPA air fliter in our darkroom.
The next step (Score:2)
As others have posted... (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the BP6 mod - toward the end there is tons of specs of dirt on the disk surface everywhere - hell, I think I even saw a fingerprint or two. At least the other article seemed "cleaner" - but still, the idea of doing this in a bathroom - wha? - are you on crack?
I don't understand why no one (or at least it seems that way) has built a "clean-tank". In theory, it would be pretty simple - maybe not clean enough for major work, but enough for some mod like this, or anything else that requires a relatively clean environment (not that I would still trust anything afterward).
You would need a plexiglass tank, completely sealed on the edges. The tank would have rubber gloves or something (new and clean, non-talc coated - maybe washed down, too) to work inside the tank, and a mounted HEPA filter on one tank wall, a hose leading to a blower unit, and a HEPA filter just after the blower, and a HEPA filter on the intake of the blower (after all those filters, the unit won't blow much, but you want clean air). Then, you would have to clean your tools as good as possible, put them in the tank (always handling them with rubber gloves), along with the device you are working on (cleaned and handled with gloves again), then start up the blower and let it run for a few hours to clean any residual particles out (maybe there should be another HEPA filter on another wall, open to the room, to let the excess pressure out, along with particles).
Even in such a homebrew tank, I doubt after working on the drive, etc that it would be very stable. While doing such a mod or surgery on a drive seems like something worthwhile and cool, it really isn't worth it unless it is a "last ditch" effort to get data back from the dead.
That said - either the BP6 mod was faked (because of all the dust), or he actually did it for real, and did another in a dirty fashion - but I would think that if he wanted to show the technique, he would have tried to keep the whole thing clean as possible - and he didn't, which makes me suspect the whole thing (as in, "hey, lets see what other fools will try this!")...
In Case of FBI Raid: BREAK GLASS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hidden away (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The important part here (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe Apple will see this and make see through drives in there next iMacs. Or at the very least some external drive manufacturer will make some.
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:2)
Of course ANY hard drive will suffer from catastrophic failure "after awhile" from just normal use.
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:2, Informative)
Or the particle could be whipped up into the air inside the drive (what with it spinning at 1000s of RPMs), and get stuck between the head and platter at some point. Griding platter again.
Normally (AFAIK) the head doesn't get badly damaged until the platter is ground up coarse enough to break it off.
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:5, Informative)
I am a firmware engineer for Maxtor...
The heads on our drives, and everyone else's in IDE land are currently flying at some fraction of a micron, if they aren't burnished already (sliding through the layer of lubrication on the surface of the platter).
Put to scale, the head of a disk drive is like a 747 jumbo jet flying at mach 4 at an altitude of 1/4" over the rocky mountains.
A single particle of dust inside the drive is HUGE, and can easily cause catastrophic data failure. If the head touches the media at all, you can basically forget the adjacent 10-20 tracks on each side, which on a modern drive is roughly 15 megabytes at least. If the strike happened while the drive was seeking, you get a radial scratch which can be destructive to a much larger area of the drive.
Bottom line: don't do it, no matter how cool you think you might be. They're fragile enough as it is.
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:2)
Ah for the good old days, running DEC RP04's, with those nice see through sliding tops and removable (oof) disk packs. Even at ~10 microns we forbid anyone to smoke in the computer room, because an airborn tar ball landing and attaching itself to the platters would gum up the heads even on those low tech beasties.
I wouldn't even attempt such a feat unless I had at my disposal a clean box with the propper atmosphere for the job. Open air is just nuts, after what a tiny bit of humidity did to fog the crystal of my swiss watch over time. (Now I send the watch to someone who changes the cell in a clean, nitrogen atmosphere box, like it's supposed to be done.)
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:2)
Put to scale, the head of a disk drive is like a 747 jumbo jet flying at mach 4 at an altitude of 1/4" over the rocky mountains.
It's not that I don't agree with what you're saying in general, that hard drives are very fragile, but you could really use a better similie. The engineering structure of a hard drive would be more like an F16 flying over Oklahoma. To say the rocky mountains would imply that your platters had bumps and ridges in them, which i would hope they don't (I have 2 maxtor HDD's), and to say a 747 would imply that the read head is bulky and has little practical precision. An F-16 would be more accurate, being smaller and much more manuverable.
~z
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:5, Informative)
A GMR head is visible to the naked eye (tiny tiny black speck on the end of the actuator) The actual read element is not visible to the eye.
It is basically shaped like a huge surfboard, where there is a tiny element on the back end of the surfboard that does the actual reading / writing.
There are 20-60 data tracks at present in modern drives within the thickness of a piece of paper. That is the required lateral accuracy.
Vertical accuracy is assisted by the use of an "air bearing". This is common to all drives to my knowledge. Basically, our head flies along similar to the way a low altitude helicopter flies upon a cushion of its own prop wash. The heads are designed like wings, and they channel a tiny bit of air underneath the head. If the head drops lower due to a bump in the media, the air pressure increases, forcing the head to resist the change to a lower altitude. Similarly, no cushion of air is created at high altitude, so this causes the head to settle down on the platter.
When you compare the size of the head to its distance from the ground, a 747 at 1/4" was accurate as of 18 months ago. Now it is even lower.
As to the rocky mountains, ok, sure, the bumps might not be quite that big, but they're at least the Appalachians. On the fractional micron scale that everything works at, there's no practical way to flatten the media that perfectly. Besides, if the media were perfectly smooth it would create too much surface tension and the head would stick to it (called "stiction"), so actually parts of the media are intentionally textured to reduce the amount of surface that might actually touch the head at any given time.
As to your F16 comment, just how maneuverable do you think the head of a drive is? We can't steer our heads onto a track, we can only recognize that we missed the track and need to adjust.
Perhaps I should have said we were an oil tanker flying mach 4 at 1/2" of altitude down an olympic slalom course.
Hell I am amazed the things even work, knowing what I know about them.
YUP! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Works great if you ... and here is maxtors que (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Consider the source (Score:2)
I don't have a clean room...
Re:Consider the source (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll back that up, and I'll report success on actually swapping platters between identical 2.5" HDD's, with exactly zero hygiene precautions. In fact, I was eating lunch at the time. A turkey and salad ciabatta, if I recall, onions but no coleslaw. Both drives were effectively unusable, I really had nothing to lose, and it was just a fun piece of lunchtime surgery.
To my immense surprise, six months down the line, I have one working hard drive, no bad sectors.
Perhaps we were both immensely lucky. I certainly wouldn't advise opening a drive that you couldn't afford to lose. But if it's a old drive, or a dead drive and you can't afford the retrieval fees, give it a go. My personal experience is that it's not as hopeless an operation as the speck-of-dust brigade would have you believe.
Re:Consider the source (Score:5, Funny)
In fact, I removed my own appendix the other day, without even having to use a sterile field. If people knew how easy it is, they wouldn't pay those bastard hospitals $10,000 to do it. I'm real tired though, and the incision is still dripping quite a bit. I'm sure it'll get better in a few d
(dull thud of body hitting floor)
Re:Consider the source (Score:3, Funny)
Yes and no (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure I might have been able to use those drives for years more but, I could have just as likely had a microscopic piece of dust hose a 30GB database two weeks later. Drives aren't so expensive that I would take that sort of risk.
Re:Yes and no (Score:2)
Anyone who relies on an opened/modded hard drive to store files of importance, however, is being a fool.
Re:Consider the source (Score:2, Informative)
Older drives have had fly heights higher than a particle size, meaning little effect from the presence of trace amounts of dust.
Current drives (last 4 years or so) have VERY low fly heights. They are designed to maintain an altitude over the drive platter that is generally smaller than a visible dust particle. A dust particle that becomes lodged like this on the disk head will draw cyclical patterns of dead/error sectors on the disk (yes, I have seen this, many times). In many cases, you will not have catastrophic drive failure, but you *will* have damaged sectors.
Even if the platter is "tough" enough to take this, the contamination is likely to accelerate corrosion (something that a disk head has no tolerance for), you risk damaging the head from particle impacts (at 7200+ RPM, that particle sticking to the drive surface can do some considerable damage).
Dust contamination may take weeks or months to develop problems (there is a small whirlwind going on in your HD, it is just a matter of time if there is any free dust in there). Taking a drive apart, then putting it back together, and watching it spin up would be an extremely naive method of calling it functional. If you are lucky, you didn't drop too much dust in there, and the filters in the HD would pick up most of the particles.
Also, some of the damage is not permanent. Reformatting the drive, or rewriting the sectors will clear the damage (really partial corruption). The heat from the particle being dragged across the surface of the disk may flip a few bits here and there.
Now, TVs, VCRs and power supplies are ALL DESIGNED TO BE OPEN to the air. You wouldn't crack open the TV tube, connect your Hoover to it and plug the hole with Fix-a-Flat, would you? The only part in a VCR that is really a problem to have dirty is the head (which is already exposed daily). That can be remedied with a solvent. You'd be an idiot to use any solvent on a modern HD surface, you'd be sure to crash the head then (film residue, most platters are coated).
As for the conspiracy theory regarding data recovery: it is your risk to take. If you can't afford the recovery fee, find as clean of a place as you can find to open the drive, and DO NOT TOUCH THE PLATTERS WITH YOUR FINGERS. Only touch them at the edges with clean plastic. Read the data off the drive, and consider the "new" drive dead. It will not live forever.
Also, this is only useful if the head dies in your drive. If the platter is scratched, it will destroy the head of the new drive as well (if it works at all).
Re:Consider the source (Score:2)
Bad example, but I know where you're headed.
Seriously. I'm not saying that dust isn't an issue, but it's blown WAY out of proportion.
Some people forget that there are POLAR opinions to issues. I think it's not a HUGE issue to take apart your HD. Others here think RF emissions from an 'unprotected' HD will interfere with air-traffic control...
YMMV
Re:Consider the source (Score:2)
All I can say to that is:
Have you ever had a WD 1.6 GB? As soon as they were taken out of the box, I found out those things had MBTF's of two weeks.
They must have had a 50% failure rate. So much for the exalted "clean room".
Again, YMMV
Re:Noise Issue? (Score:2, Interesting)