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Hardware Hacking Data Storage

OEM Hard Drive With Window 411

Posted by CmdrTaco from the making-it-just-to-easy dept.
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."
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OEM Hard Drive With Window More

OEM Hard Drive With Window

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  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Just because you don't understand it, does not mean it is pointless. I think it fits nicely on the Raptors, because they are the 'premium' of S-ATA drives. As long as the window part does not make it cost 100$ more, though.
      Raptors are about the fastest you get without going SCSI.

    • Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RickPartin ( 892479 ) * on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:30PM (#14404647) Homepage
      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.
    • It's just you. Every gamer/case-modder under the sun will now only purchase the Raptor.

    • Re:Is it just me? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by crandall ( 472654 )
      Actually, this would make discovering harddrive problems much easier.

    • Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by javaxman ( 705658 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:46PM (#14404841) Journal
      Or is this idea just silly?

      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?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:59PM (#14404970)
        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.
        Except this is no low-end Honda Civic hard drive. 150 GB, 10K RPM, NCQ. Nobody makes fun of Apple for going out of their way to make iPods look good, because they are good. The same may apply here.

      • Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pete6677 ( 681676 )
        In true Ricer style, all case mods would be purely for appearance, while the processor is a 300MHz PII with 100MB RAM. This seems to be what they do with modded cars; putting racing stripes, spoilers and neon on a Civic while keeping the stock engine.
      • There's a difference between a PC case mod, a necktie, and a rice rocket: the former two have (arguable) aesthetic values of their own and people buy them only for that, while the latter is a pathetic attempt by under-monied folks to deceive onlookers into thinking their econoboxes are race cars.

      • Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Funny)

        by ozbird ( 127571 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @06:40PM (#14405299)
        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 think it would be awesome if you could fit an aquarium in there.
    • Is which idea silly? Transparent or not, the performance and capacity specs for the drive sound very kick-butt. I'd be much more inclined to point and laugh if they'd just wrapped up a piece of turd to make it look cool.

    • NOT GOOD ENOUGH (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Stoutlimb ( 143245 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:58PM (#14404962)
      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!

    • Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 )
      It's kind of cool but I'd rather see effort spent on more reliable drives. I cool mine and everything and still have a couple die a year. They're under load but not unreasonable load. Just make the darn things last at least a couple years each.

    • Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )
      No, it's not silly.

      There are plenty of people who will tell you I'm weird, but I would find such a drive to be a help in diagnosing disk performance problems or failures. Being able to peer inside the drive would afford a good first-order approximation as to what's wrong.

      Your drive starts returning bad or no data. What's wrong with it? With the black box you have now, your options are pretty much limited to the SMART diagnostics (if any) and some blind stabbing with ATA commands. With a clear cover,

    • Well, the site is /.'d to all hell and back, soooo... maybe not.

  • up next... (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:23PM (#14404560) Homepage
    And coming soon, the first OEM Hard drive where you can literally see your data go bad.
    • And coming soon, the first OEM Hard drive where you can literally see your data go bad.

      No, this would be far from the first OEM hard drive where you could literally see your data go bad. I watched, through a glass window, an IBM 2314 disk with a crashed head scrap the surface when the heads retracted. These disks had nice glass windows that you could *open* and remove the disk pack and replace it with another disk pack. Once the glass window was closed, the 2314 would blow air across the heads to clean

  • Hey look ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by bushboy ( 112290 ) <lttc@lefthandedmonkeys.org> on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:24PM (#14404578) Homepage
    ... 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 .. ?

  • Well that's no fun :( (Score:5, Funny)

    by reverendG ( 602408 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:24PM (#14404579) Homepage
    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?!

    • Re:Well that's no fun :( (Score:5, Funny)

      by RavenDarkholme ( 27245 ) * on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:31PM (#14404668)
      What's the point of modding your case if it doesn't involve power tools and the risk of damage to expensive components?!
      Oh come now. What about all the poor unfortunates with no access to nor knowledge of power tools? What of the non-geek guys trying to impress the geek grrrls? The poor fools that everyone laughs at during lan parties with their Micron Windows ME PC's from Costco?

      The poseurs. Will no one think of the poseurs?

      Truly, this is a fine day for wannabes everywhere.
    • They did the same thing to case windows, neon lights, and everything else. Now it's hard to buy a case without a damn window. This pre-modded hard drive is just makes modders go out and try out more wild and crazy stunts.
    • Ok, i suppose that is a point :)

      I ran our minicomputer's HD (13" platter) with the drive open a couple times. Incredible to watch the magnetic shaft the size of my wrist bounce back and forth. One of the computer experiences i'll always remember :) Also got to see the results of it turning itself into a lathe once hehe. Surely these little ones will be nowhere near as entertaining to watch but since i cant get the 13" platters into my clear desktop i'll be interested :)

      But we can be lazy too and building a
    • Don't worry. Installing the curtains is still pretty risky.

  • They are just now making these? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RickPartin ( 892479 ) * on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:25PM (#14404585) Homepage
    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.

  • Marketing Mistake (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ohreally_factor ( 593551 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:26PM (#14404593) Journal
    This product shouldn't be called "Raptor". It should be called "Schrodinger".
    • This product shouldn't be called "Raptor". It should be called "Schrodinger".

      I dunno about that... Every time I looked inside my hard drive, my data would always die.

  • case modder....GROUPIES??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by tupshin ( 5777 ) <tupshin@tupshin.com> on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:26PM (#14404597) Homepage
    wow...this is one twisted universe we live in. :)

    -Tupshin

  • No WAY! (Score:5, Funny)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:26PM (#14404607)
    ...And just let some flunky with a laser pointer come by and screw up all my data? You must be shrooming!

    • Re:No WAY! (Score:4, Funny)

      by guitaristx ( 791223 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:29PM (#14404640) Journal
      If you think that a laser pointer is going to mess up the magnetic encoding of your data on the disk, you must be "shrooming"!

  • a dream come true (Score:4, Funny)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:27PM (#14404609)
    Ooooooohhhh! Spinny AND shiny!
  • Well, just like last year if you didn't have an SLI setup at E3 your display was a joke, I think this year if you don't have a RAID setup of these (do a RAID-1, so the heads move in a synchronized fashion), you'll get laughed out of the Staples center.

  • For $350 ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:27PM (#14404617)

    I will take an external 400Gb drive.

    Is the window worth paying more than $1/gig of storage? Let alone over $2?

    • Re:For $350 ... (Score:2, Informative)

      by poopdeville ( 841677 )
      The window isn't what makes it expensive. What makes it expensive is the fact that it's the fastest non-SCSI drive available.
    • You're mostly paying for speed and reliability - Raptors come with a 3 year warranty, rather than the standard 1 year (although I'm sure they used to come with 5 year - hmmm)...

  • Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Poromenos1 ( 830658 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:28PM (#14404626) Homepage
    a clear window so you can see what's going on inside.

    What, the spinning?

  • in other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by shitzu ( 931108 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:28PM (#14404627)
    Kingston is planning to release ram modules with a window by Q2 2006

  • LED? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:31PM (#14404661) Journal
    Well, the site is running about as fast as a two-legged dog, so all I'm getting is a verrrrry slow loading flashvertisement. Does anyone know if the drive comes with an LED behind the window. As LED's inside the case would likely reflect off the clear cover (and no LED's in the case = too dark to see), the best visibility would be gained by a LED behind the window. Perhaps they could make it an "activity LED," so that it would change colours or flash brightly when the drive is accessing. At $350 already (which seems a bit steep to me, but then I haven't bought have any 10000RPM SATA drives to compare to) they could probably tack on a few extra bucks just by putting some little LED's in there to add to the "oooooo look at me" factor
    • The non-clear cover Western Digital 150GB SATA drive is being sold for $295 at Newegg. Also, the price quoted is direct from WD, so I imagine that the $350 is a bit higher than what you could get it for if you shop around.

  • How long .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by malraid ( 592373 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:31PM (#14404663)
    ... before some case modders opens one of these to replace the clear window with some opaque material?
  • And soon after, customers will call into complain that they don't see anything being written onto the platters.

  • The Title (Score:5, Funny)

    by McGiraf ( 196030 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:35PM (#14404707)
    The title scared me , buy a OEM drive and it has Windows on it!

  • hardware windows? (Score:3, Funny)

    by legalize.ganja.now. ( 923280 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:36PM (#14404726) Homepage
    does this guy [slashdot.org] 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!

  • Also insanely fast (benchmark links below) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by larsoncc ( 461660 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:38PM (#14404754) Homepage
    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) [storagereview.com]

    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!

  • Dude, if it doesn't have a little blue LED light, all you've done is saved some case modder a little time with a Dremel tool. They really need to get on the ball an offer these with your choice of lighting styles and colors if they want to spark real interest.
  • I just spent forever trying to get Windows out of my hard drive, and now they want to sell me more? Yeah, right.
  • Great, so am I to believe that case modders now have psycho chicks stalking them?

  • How timely... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:47PM (#14404857)

        Yesterday, we took an old drive out of a server as a preemptive measure, and for fun, we popped it in another machine, booted it up, and pulled the top off of the drive. Today, we got tired of watching it run, so we did various destructive things to it as it ran.

        The point is that once things are in your disk cache, it's rather boring - it's a spinning disk and an arm that's stationary, or doesn't move much. To make things really exciting, you've got to get some really good random seeks happening. "updatedb" does a good job, but only the first time - after that, it's all coming out of disk cache.

        Sure, some guy loading his favorite game will hit the disk a bit, but unless he's gone out of his way to fragment his drive really badly, I don't think that it's going to be all that fun to watch. Of course, if he's short enough on memory to cause the thing to thrash to the page file, that might be kind of fun... but that sort of defeats the point of having a Raptor, doesn't it?

    steve

  • Not only.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by erik umenhofer ( 782 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:47PM (#14404861) Homepage
    Can I HEAR the click of death, now I can SEE it.

    Great....I wonder what 200 gigs of Tara Patrick videos being lost looks like...
    • Great....I wonder what 200 gigs of Tara Patrick videos being lost looks like...

      They're not lost, they're just correctly spelled as 'Tera Patrick'. :)

      I really miss the Tera Show. *sniff* Wish I could find an archive of that somewhere.
  • If the drive spindle blows out, sound of the window shattering and smoke pouring out should make it obvious that there's a problem. Gotta love Western Digital for their exploding hard drives.

  • Just a *window*? Feh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:56PM (#14404946) Journal
    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...

  • Think positive (Score:3, Funny)

    by nsayer ( 86181 ) <nsayer@MENCKENkfu.com minus author> on Thursday January 05, 2006 @05:59PM (#14404968) Homepage
    Better a hard disk with a window in it than a hard disk with Windows on it.
  • Just by using WD drives is sacrificing data integrity in my opinion....
    (and I just lost another WD drive to the mysterious disappearing partition table and hence ppl around here call it "Whore Digital").

    Plus I question the safety of the data especially since many of the newer drives do tend to get hot which causes metals to expand and warp which might put more strain on the polycarbonate as I'm sure that the heat expansion rate/ratio of the clear pc window is different than the metal that surrounds it.
    And h

  • Sweet Irony (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ZoneGray ( 168419 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @06:11PM (#14405061) Homepage
    I'll be darned, NewEgg has this RAID-Optimized hard drive in stock. Limit one to a customer.

    What's that called, RAID -1?

  • Video mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by vidnet ( 580068 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @06:14PM (#14405081) Homepage
    Heavily slashdotted, but here's [stud.ntnu.no] a mirror of the video (more as it downloads).

  • Semi-related: Darth Vader's helmet (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sdo1 ( 213835 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @06:16PM (#14405098) Journal
    A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Star Wars exhibit [mos.org] at the Museum of Science in Boston. They've got all kinds of props that were used in the movies, including Darth Vader's helmet from Revenge of the Sith (the one you can see the inside of while they're putting it over his cripsy burnt face).

    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 [storagereview.com]. 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

  • filesystem research (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 0xABADC0DA ( 867955 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @06:22PM (#14405158)
    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.
    • No serious file system developer would monitor drive activity by peering through its window. They would most likely perform logging at the device driver level on events like head movement and read or write operations. These logs can then be subject to statistical analysis that would actually tell them about improvements or regressions.

  • So the next step is... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @06:25PM (#14405183) Homepage
    Now that seeing the spinning disk is easy, how long before they start putting visible (but magnetically transparent) images like this [mindmotivations.com] on them?

  • Having had end users crack into closed hard drives on their own, I'm thinking that having a window in the blasted thing will just encourage them to "open the window".

    2 cents,

    Queen B

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