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Data Storage Toys Hardware

The Lego Brick Hard Drive 133

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-christmas-is-coming-up dept.
Billosaur writes "With Lego being in the news after completion of their lawsuit against Mega Bloks, I found this interesting little tidbit on Boing Boing, about a company that makes stackable Lego Brick-shaped Hard Drives. With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder. Available desktop models are: 160GB (white), 250GB (red), 300GB (blue) and 500GB (red). But can you build a Star Destroyer out of them?"
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The Lego Brick Hard Drive More

The Lego Brick Hard Drive

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  • Not lego sized, just lego shaped (Score:5, Informative)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:02AM (#14100829) Homepage Journal
    These hard drives are LEGO shaped but not LEGO sized. It mimics the look and feel of a LEGO brick but it really isn't compatible (unless the bottom has much smaller divisions).

    Stackable hard drives is a fine idea but I'd like to take one apart to see how ventilation is. I've had a much higher failure rate in external drives than internal drives (almost 3:1) over the past 6 years. I still wonder if it is heat or just bad power supplies in these things.

    I'm more of a monotoned desktop kind of guy -- if I'm OCD about anything at all, it is definitely crazy colors all over the place. I think on my desktop (where I could have up to 5 different sized external drives depending on projects in action), these drives could end up looking like a bad website from the early days: color hell.

    I think the pricing is decent though, and would love a breakdown of what "Power Supply Kit" means and how hardy these things are.
    • Internal drives tend to not be thrown in backpacks and generally abused, though.
      • Not all external drives are toted around.

        I've had 2 die on me in the last 5 years. Both just sat on my desk attached to a usb hub. Neither was even 2 years old at the time of death.

        Whereas, I'm currently using ~12 internal hd's between work, laptop, and home. All over 2 years old, most over 4, a couple almost 8 years old.

        I've only ever killed one internal hd myself, and it was a pos that I kinda expected to go.

        But you are correct too, hd's that are toted around all the time, possibly even dropped, are absol
      • But modern hard drives have non-operating shock ratings in the hundreds of G's. If hard drives were so fragile that they couldn't be toted around in a backpack, then laptops would be useless.

        Ventilation and cooling is what bothers me with these drives. I had a 500GB Lacie drive in which BOTH drives failed within days of each other. I never carried the drive arround except packed in its original cushioned box. I suspect that heat killed those drives. When I replaced the unit with a 1TB model, I was sure neve
        • It doesn't take much to generate hundreds of Gs of shock.

          A three-foot drop onto a hard surface can do it easily. Banging it against your desk accidentally can do it as well.

          Hundreds of Gs sounds like "a lot", but in the context of collisions between hard objects, it's very easy to get there.

          -Z
          • I wouldn't say a 3 foot drop from an object light as a hard drive is going to create hundreds of G's. Indy cars traveling over 200mph hitting a wall only produce in the mid 150's.
            • a 3 foot drop from an object light as a hard drive
              ma=GMm/r^2 so an object as light a a hard drive will hit the deck as fast as an object as light as a hard-drive-shaped block of uranium.
              • Wrong equation - d = 1/2 at^2 or a = v^2/2d

                Velocity of object dropped from about 3.2 feet - about 13 ft/sec. Take stopping distance at .01 inches and you come up with acceleration around 2500G

              • ma=GMm/r^2 so an object as light a a hard drive will hit the deck as fast as an object as light as a hard-drive-shaped block of uranium

                That would be right, if we were on the Moon. On Earth, though, we have an atmosphere. In an atmosphere, when you drop two objects of the same size and shape, the heavier one falls faster. Try this. Take two shoe boxes, one empty, and one full of bricks. Drop them both from 6 feet, or whatever you can comfortably reach. The brick-filled shoe box wins easily.

                The reas

                • You say that on earth beause of atmosphere that heavier things fall faster? What has atmosphere to do with heaviness? How does the atmosphere know what is inside the shoebox?

                  You say drag does not depend on mass [which would make drag the _same_ for two shoe boxes] but acceleration does depend on mass (which it does).

                  Paragraph 3 "reduction in acceleration by having more mass" because as you say but you say "constant acceleration independant of mass" it shows you meant to say that more massive objects have a
                  • I think you meant to say that the atmospheric drag depends on surface characteristics and shape, so a feather and a ball bearing drop at different speeds, but I don't see how two shoeboxes with the same profile should drop at different speeds on account of the internal mass!

                    The acceleration of an object of mass M subject to force F is F/M. (These should all be vectors, but lets just do forces along one axis, so we can just deal with scalars).

                    Consider two objects of the same size and shape, but differen

                    • This time you are making sense, but I still think you got it wrong.

                      If M1 and M2 are both shoeboxes they have equal function Fd(|velocity|) and so at any later time as they are both subject to the same accelleration they will have the same speed and drag values.

                      You stated that the heavier shoebox would fall faster.

                      The water balloon and air balloon are a vivid example, however I still think you made a mistake.

                      Let's take a helium balloon inflated just so that it hovers in the air. Why is it not falling? It is
                    • If M1 and M2 are both shoeboxes they have equal function Fd(|velocity|) and so at any later time as they are both subject to the same accelleration they will have the same speed and drag values

                      They have equal Fd, but that's equal force, not equal acceleration. The acceleration is force divided by mass, so that equal Fd results in unequal acceleration. Fd/M1 for the first box and Fd/M2 for the second box.

                    • Well put.
                      I suspect you are right, I will have to think more on this, thankyou for explaining so well.

                      I'm not convinced about the balloons being due to this feature you have been explaining but the boxes appear to make sense.

                      Thanks

                      Sam
                    • Of course it's not. The air-filled balloon has an appreciable bouyancy in comparison with its weight; above poster ignored this to try and support another argument. The bouyancy of an object in air is the weight of air displaced, so for an air-filled balloon in air it's (volume of balloon)*(density of air)*g. This means that an air-filled balloon will fall slower than an unfilled balloon. This contradicts parent's statement: weigh an unfilled balloon and an air-filled balloon on a set of balances (which
                  • I think you meant to say that the atmospheric drag depends on surface characteristics and shape, so a feather and a ball bearing drop at different speeds, but I don't see how two shoeboxes with the same profile should drop at different speeds on account of the internal mass!

                    But it is so. Fairly obviously. For the same reason a baloon filled with water falls quicker than a equal-sized baloon filled with air.

                    What matters is force/mass. So double both force and mass, and you get the same acceleration.

                    Do

            • Indy cars crumple and have that crumple zone to deccelerate. Hard drives don't crumple; they just stop. So the instantaneous acceleration is much greater, even if the mass and speed isn't as high.
            • By my calculations, a race car going a little over 200 mph hitting a solid wall and stopping in a distance of 4 feet would experience an acceleration (deceleration) very close to 400 g.
    • Note to self:

      Do not use Lego shaped drive to host web site.

    • Re:Not lego sized, just lego shaped (Score:4, Interesting)

      by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:36AM (#14101114)
      Stackable hard drives is a fine idea but I'd like to take one apart to see how ventilation is. I've had a much higher failure rate in external drives than internal drives (almost 3:1) over the past 6 years. I still wonder if it is heat or just bad power supplies in these things.

      Sometimes it's the drive itself. Sometimes it's the fan, a friend of mine had two of a specific model where the fan went bad, then I checked one of mine and its fan was dead too. Sometimes it's the power supply; I think that's the real reason they're all using external power bricks these days, more so than the safety issue of having semi-exposed AC wiring with a built-in power supply. And sometimes it could be the controller card; I have one with a dead Firewire port, good thing they come in pairs.

      All that being said, I wouldn't want one of these without a Firewire port. It's kind of sad that a long-time seller of external drives for the Macintosh now sells a model of external case with only USB support.

      • All that being said, I wouldn't want one of these without a Firewire port. It's kind of sad that a long-time seller of external drives for the Macintosh now sells a model of external case with only USB support.

        While I completely agree with you, Gen5/nano iPods are USB only too. The travesty spreads.

    • Re:Not lego sized, just lego shaped (Score:5, Informative)

      by InvalidError ( 771317 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:41AM (#14101148)
      If my experience with external enclosures is any indication, I would bet on the power supplies.

      Most cheap/small PSUs use flyback topology and decoupling capacitors that have AC ripple ratings well below what they should be. Ordinary 1000-2200uF capacitors have AC ripple ratings under 1A and a service life of 2000-5000h at that rating. On 2-3A 5-12V rails with flyback PSU, this 1A(rms) rating is easily exceeded. This is why I have made it a standard practice to replace bulk decoupling capacitors in my storage boxes and PC PSUs by 2700uF caps rated for 7000+h at 3.6A ripple supplemented with surface-mounted 10uF MLCC caps to relieve the electrolytic caps from harmonics in the 100kHz-10MHz range wherever possible.

      When output capacitors age in a flyback PSU, their impedance increase and the capacitors becomes unable to absorb high-frequency energy. This causes spikes in the output voltage and if the PSU does not have a proper shunt regulator or over-voltage crowbar circuitry, those spikes can definitely kill electronics - I have seen/measured microsecond-scale spikes go as high as 15V on a 5V rail and 20V on a 12V rail.

  • This would be better... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mattyohe ( 517995 ) <matt.yoheNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:03AM (#14100841)
    if the surface of the enclosure was made from actual lego rivets so that you could build on top of it.

  • Lego Hard Drive Sex (Score:4, Funny)

    by staticsage ( 889437 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:04AM (#14100850)
    While we're linking boingboing... Why not stack the hard drives and have some crazy lego sex:
    http://www.boingboing.net/2002/11/13/lego_sex.html [boingboing.net]

  • Destroyer, yes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:05AM (#14100861)
    But can you build a Star Destroyer out of them?

    Maybe I can't build a Star Destroyer out of them, but I could certainly build a big enough block of P2P storage to destroy the Enemies of the Empire -- the **AA's.

  • I developed a hard-drive-shaped Lego brick (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:06AM (#14100868)
    But it was a total failure. I totally underestimated the entrenchment of the IDE bus standard in the Lego world. My hard-drive-shaped Lego brick only supported SATA.

  • In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by __aaxwdb6741 ( 884633 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:09AM (#14100891) Journal
    Google has just built a LEGO castle.

  • Why build a Star Destroyer when there's Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)

    by gasmonso ( 929871 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:10AM (#14100899) Homepage

    Why build one when you have Slashdot at your disposal. Just aim it at any site, and KABLAM, they're gone. Nice job taking out lacie. Slashdot strikes once again and shows no mercy (queue evil empire music).

    gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
  • Perfect for data collecting lego mindstorm robots then.

    More practically, i hope they properly lock together like lego blocks, so you can get a nice solid stack of them. Even better would be built in docking so you can just stack another disk on top when you need more storage space.

  • That would be pretty funny. Or a full house built with these things...suddenly you measure your rooms in tera- or petabytes instead of square feet. Think of all the pr0n in the walls...

  • Bah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:15AM (#14100950) Homepage Journal
    You young 'uns and your fancy-schmancy "lego shaped hard drives". Back in my day, we had none of these uppity "LaCie hard drives" in rainbow colors to lighten up our day.

    We used to lug our trusty, stacks of punch cards on our backs each time we wanted to transfer data. Nothing builds character (and balls) like having to restack a pile of 1K+ punch cards that have fallen over on a Friday evening.

    No sirree, we didn't play these childish games in the computer room in my day, and that's how we liked it.

    • Re:Bah! (Score:2, Funny)

      by AntiDragon ( 930097 )
      Punch cards? Punch cards?!? Young 'un, you don't know how lucky you were! In my day we had to memorise the blinking lights and then toggle the sequence back in after driving for 8 hours to reach the other computer! If we wanted fancy colours we had to wear coloured lenses while looking at the lights.

      Of course, the epilepsy didn't help much...
      • In the snow, uphill, both ways. You know the drill.

      • Re:Bah! (Score:3, Funny)

        by ch-chuck ( 9622 )
        That's odd, because punch cards predate the use of toggle in software and binary address/data lights.

        • No no no...You're not supposed to pick at the huge inconsistency in my historically inaccurate and nonsensical post. You were supposed to post something like...ur...

          "Snow? Snow? Back in the metazoic era we had to wade through 20 miles of tar and swampland just to reallign the other stone circles! Now that's proper data transport!"

          See? It's total bollocks but that's OK! You low IDs are always lording it over us latecomers like were ignorant kids or the like. I'm telling my [Insert parental figure here] on yo
      • In *my* time, we had to program with only zeroes and ones. And sometimes we ran out of zeroes, and we had to make do with the ones.
        Apologies to Scott. :-)

    • Re:Bah! (Score:1)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      "No sirree, we didn't play these childish games in the computer room in my day, and that's how we liked it."

      May I show you my collection of LEGO shaped, stackable UNIVACs?

      KFG
    • "...in rainbow colors to lighten up our day... our trusty, stacks of punch cards"

      Yeah right! I got your rainbow punch cards right here [uiowa.edu].

      incase of /., there's blue from Bell Labs, pink from Carnegie Tech, orange from Princeton, and several shades of off-white. Each of them have pretty logos even.

  • ...my server's a total brick

  • It's Lego, not Legos! (Score:3, Funny)

    by muftak ( 636261 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:16AM (#14100956)
    I used to like Legos, but now I only like sheeps.

  • more duplo than lego (Score:5, Informative)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:21AM (#14100996)
    It should be noted that these drives are more Duplo than Lego.

    (Yes, I am aware that Duplo is in fact a line of Legos).

  • Optical interconnects and stackables (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:24AM (#14101016)
    If high speed optical interconnects become common, they could make brick-based PCs with stackable components. Unlike current stackable HDs, the HD brick would need no cables or external power brick as top and bottom surface of each brick would carry power and data.

    Different Lego-like knoblets on top and bottom of each brick would correspond to different interconnect functions (one or more knoblets each for +5 VDC, +3.3 VDC, Optical-PCI, Optical-ATA, etc.). Aligned vent holes throughout the stack would allow the base PSU brick to pull cooling air from the other bricks. Adding a new video card or HD would be as simple as snapping the card to the top of the PC.

  • The Evolution of Leggo (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ted Holmes ( 827243 ) <simply.ted@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:30AM (#14101069) Homepage
    I hope Leggo's vision is to eventually embedded each brick with intelligence. They'll have an awesome product which would allow users an object-oriented way to assemble cool stuff at home. An example would be Leggo-style self replicating cubes [blogspot.com].

    It would compliment the emerging desktop fabricators [blogspot.com] quite nicely.

    Imagine the new "Do It Yourself opportunities.

  • I can't RTFA but (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:37AM (#14101122)
    I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted but I've been a fan of LACIE hard drives for a while. My currebt 80Gb drive is supposed to be Porshe designed. That's as maybe, I just know that I get a very good bytes/bucks ratio and pretty fair performance.

  • USB 2 for substantial jobs? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:47AM (#14101204)
    With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs

    Someone's an idiot. If you have a 'substantial' job for an external HD, you'd best be using at _least_ IEEE1394a (or better yet, b). External SATA would be quite lovely.

  • Nice ad... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:55AM (#14101263)
    Am I the only one to find that this submission reads exactly like an avert?

    With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder.
    I mean, come on!

  • Another slashdotting (Score:5, Funny)

    by steveo777 ( 183629 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:57AM (#14101284) Homepage Journal
    I actually feel sorry for Lacie. In this case, somebody might have been watching the network activity and thinking, "Hey, things are looking up!"
    Just then the server starts shaking.
    The coffee pot mysterously drains into nowhere.
    Smoke rises from the PSU's, the redundent power supplies buzz and spurt, with every attempt at survival.
    The netadmin's smile turns to a look of horror, "No, this can't be. NOOOOOOOO!!! DAMN YOU SLASHDOT!"

  • Ok, who else was misled by the title? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hal2814 ( 725639 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @11:59AM (#14101296)
    I thought there was a fully functional hard drive made of LEGO! Instead it's just a hard drive that looks like a LEGO piece. What a bummer.
  • The page was timing out when I tried to load it. Here's [nyud.net] a coral link:

  • Why stop at the hard drive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chris6502 ( 857915 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2005 @12:25PM (#14101480)
    This guy built his whole machine from lego: http://home.hawaii.rr.com/chowfamily/lego/ [rr.com]
  • It seems that lego blocks with builtin components - resistors, capacitors,...,555 timers, quad nand, ... etc. and conductive connectors on each of the studs/receptors of the brick would be a really convenient way to prototype circuitry. The only drawback would be burning out a component but if the lego brick had replaceable components you could even work around that.

    LEGO hardrives could be memory for your circuit/robot/whatever and ... and ...

    Does anyone else think that would be reall spiffy?

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