using just a cd case, you can make a clear hard drive, well, actually it’s a window to see in to a hard drive. the cool thing about this is–if you have a case mod that lets you see in to the pc, you can do this hack up, light it up and get a cool view of the hard drive heads writing.
Nice – I’ll be looking to try that.
I’ll try the 4G drive before the 40G drive though. q:o)
– on another topic –
I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to boost the signal the network card uses to drive its LEDs and duplicate those LEDs on the front? Any hacks come to mind?
Posted at 4:21 am on Nov 8th, 2004 by Phil Boardman
you dont really need to. you can just solder the leads in paralell to the existing ones, and put them in the front. no trouble at all. this is a realatively sape mod, if you stuff it up, all it will do is not work. at most it may kill a $AUD10 network card, so no real loss.
Ive seen this mod done before, but they have also put in a handfull of blue LED’s in it, wired up to the molex connector. looks schaweet.
Posted at 4:48 am on Nov 8th, 2004 by arjo
This reminds me of the “Y2K Case Mod” discussed on /. some time back. While opening a smaller HD for such a mod MAY work, it’s a certain recipe for failure in larger drives.
Here’s a thread in the /. discussion that specifically addresses this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=85888&cid=7473837
You can further explore to see the mod in question and other details.
I did not see Yoshi’s mod, so I’m not sure what he means by using Tupperware, but I seem to recall that the guy who did the Y2K Bug mod used a large clear plastic bag into which he inserted both his arms and the drives.
Be careful out there!
i remember seeing this done years ago and the clean room they used was a bathroom after running the shower really hot, the condensation would collect all the dust and it would settle to the ground/surfaces. You went in after a few moments and did the swap of the covers. I never tried it back then, don’t know if it was that good of an idea. just food for thought.
Posted at 5:38 pm on Nov 8th, 2004 by thelip
this is a good use for that raid 0 that comes with so many motherboards nowadays. then you get the cool looking hard drive and the reliable data storage
Posted at 7:34 pm on Nov 8th, 2004 by brickballs
Yoshi from the ScreenSavers did this and he highly recommended a clean room. You can mess up many a hard drive if you don’t.
Posted at 1:49 am on Nov 9th, 2004 by Zahncol
READ FIRST BEFORE ANY ATTEMPT AT THIS MOD IS MADE!
There is one problem with this idea, It HAS been stated already but I feel that it is severly important for people to know this INLCUDING NOOB MODERS AND TECHS.
The processes of creating a hard drive is very important of course, and the most important is the fact that from beggining to end the hardrive and hard drive parts MUST be in a clean inviroment, (10% more so then the cleanest Surgical Operating Room (somewhere around thoughs figures)). When the harddrive is cealed it is Vaccumed Cealed to prevent any particles from getting inside the hard drive, and I am talking about Microscopic particals not dust or hair. Imagin the harddrive like a Vinal record. 60s CD if you wish to call them. Where the needle is on the Vinal it would be called the Head on a HDD, the record on a vinal is the Plater on the HDD. When You listen to music on a vinal you rest the needle in the pits of the vinal, NOT true for HDD, the HDD head moves sideways by a motor that goes back and forth VERY FAST while the Platers are SPINNING (need I say very fast?)while the head of the HDD is reading or writing the head flys on thin air made by the rotating platers, the space beetween the head and the platers is microscopic. The Platers are made of eaither Mettel or Glass (or simular) the platers are coated with a material that all the information will be placed on, and the coating is very easy to scratch, Aspecially if the microscopic partical(s) get inbeetween the moving platers and heads, from there the coating on the plater flakes and the spreads. THIS is why you should NOT do it unless you have a bum drive that you want to use for downloading for temperary use. Even then I wouldint want to use the mod HDD for even that. The most I would like the use it for is for displaying while on, but not actually writing or reading from it. I think it would be awsome to see the heads move back and forth and insain speeds while at a LAN party or something. Maybe even moding it to the front of the case with a neon light and button attached to it.
So be carefull before you choose an expensive HDD or one with valuable data on it. The risk is to high to choose eaither.
-Kenneth
Posted at 3:40 am on Nov 9th, 2004 by Tallon
READ FIRST BEFORE ANY ATTEMPT AT THIS MOD IS MADE!
There is one problem with this idea, It HAS been stated already but I feel that it is severly important for people to know this INLCUDING NOOB MODERS AND TECHS.
The processes of creating a hard drive is very important of course, and the most important is the fact that from beggining to end the hardrive and hard drive parts MUST be in a clean inviroment, (10% more so then the cleanest Surgical Operating Room (somewhere around thoughs figures)). When the harddrive is cealed it is Vaccumed Cealed to prevent any particles from getting inside the hard drive, and I am talking about Microscopic particals not dust or hair. Imagin the harddrive like a Vinal record. 60s CD if you wish to call them. Where the needle is on the Vinal it would be called the Head on a HDD, the record on a vinal is the Plater on the HDD. When You listen to music on a vinal you rest the needle in the pits of the vinal, NOT true for HDD, the HDD head moves sideways by a motor that goes back and forth VERY FAST while the Platers are SPINNING (need I say very fast?)while the head of the HDD is reading or writing the head flys on thin air made by the rotating platers, the space beetween the head and the platers is microscopic. The Platers are made of eaither Mettel or Glass (or simular) the platers are coated with a material that all the information will be placed on, and the coating is very easy to scratch, Aspecially if the microscopic partical(s) get inbeetween the moving platers and heads, from there the coating on the plater flakes and the spreads. THIS is why you should NOT do it unless you have a bum drive that you want to use for downloading for temperary use. Even then I wouldint want to use the mod HDD for even that. The most I would like the use it for is for displaying while on, but not actually writing or reading from it. I think it would be awsome to see the heads move back and forth and insain speeds while at a LAN party or something. Maybe even moding it to the front of the case with a neon light and button attached to it.
So be carefull before you choose an expensive HDD or one with valuable data on it. The risk is to high to choose eaither.
-Kenneth
Posted at 3:47 am on Nov 9th, 2004 by Tallon
READ FIRST BEFORE ANY ATTEMPT AT THIS MOD IS MADE!
There is one problem with this idea, It HAS been stated already but I feel that it is severly important for people to know this INLCUDING NOOB MODERS AND TECHS.
The processes of creating a hard drive is very important of course, and the most important is the fact that from beggining to end the hardrive and hard drive parts MUST be in a clean inviroment, (10% more so then the cleanest Surgical Operating Room (somewhere around thoughs figures)). When the harddrive is cealed it is Vaccumed Cealed to prevent any particles from getting inside the hard drive, and I am talking about Microscopic particals not dust or hair. Imagin the harddrive like a Vinal record. 60s CD if you wish to call them. Where the needle is on the Vinal it would be called the Head on a HDD, the record on a vinal is the Plater on the HDD. When You listen to music on a vinal you rest the needle in the pits of the vinal, NOT true for HDD, the HDD head moves sideways by a motor that goes back and forth VERY FAST while the Platers are SPINNING (need I say very fast?)while the head of the HDD is reading or writing the head flys on thin air made by the rotating platers, the space beetween the head and the platers is microscopic. The Platers are made of eaither Mettel or Glass (or simular) the platers are coated with a material that all the information will be placed on, and the coating is very easy to scratch, Aspecially if the microscopic partical(s) get inbeetween the moving platers and heads, from there the coating on the plater flakes and the spreads. THIS is why you should NOT do it unless you have a bum drive that you want to use for downloading for temperary use. Even then I wouldint want to use the mod HDD for even that. The most I would like the use it for is for displaying while on, but not actually writing or reading from it. I think it would be awsome to see the heads move back and forth and insain speeds while at a LAN party or something. Maybe even moding it to the front of the case with a neon light and button attached to it.
So be carefull before you choose an expensive HDD or one with valuable data on it. The risk is to high to choose eaither.
-Kenneth
Posted at 3:48 am on Nov 9th, 2004 by Tallon
This was done first (way back in 2002) by those crazy people over at bit-tech.net
http://bit-tech.net/article/66/
:)
I remember the article about faking a cleanroom using the shower in the bathroom. The problem I could see with this technique is that the air will still be super humid when you do the cover swap, meaning that the hard drive will have very humid air trapped in it. I think condensation could be an issue in that case, when the computer is not in use and gets a chance to cool down.
I read on a web site that opening a hard drive will ruin it is that true email me and tell me please graytape2000@gmail.com
P.S here is the web site that said i read it on
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk4.htm
Loking for a USB flash memory (64 meg or larger),that will be recognized as a hardrive; not as a removable storage device.
tks
Posted at 6:24 pm on Jun 18th, 2005 by Peter
Hard drives are not vacuum sealed. They actually have a hole in them that is protected by a micro filter. That allows air pressure to be equalised.
Posted at 8:26 pm on May 5th, 2006 by Edward
“”"I’m not sure how long that’s going to last unless he built it in a clean room (and I doubt many of us have those).”"”
what if we buy a pack of cellophane suran rap put up some sticks around a table and wrap use and the sticks up until we are sealed within the room.
We then turn on the air purifyer air ionizer (which can be picked up now a days) let it run for a few minutes then attempt to get everything done before we run out of air??? . If you have an old HD sitting around it might be an educational experience… but trusting it with any important data may be a questionable task.
i’m looking for a nonneedle HD I’d like to find a HD that doesn’t break if it gets jostled… like maybe something that has an array overtop the platter then it just reads from anywhere in the array that is no moving parts…
Posted at 1:53 am on Jun 9th, 2006 by William Ashley
you can now buy western digital hard drives with clear sides on them… might buy one myself but there a lot more, it will go in my next case mod, coz if i mod a hard drive, ill prob break it (with my record of breaking things) lol
Posted at 9:16 am on Jun 9th, 2006 by ashley
Actually, dust only falls down. You could create a fairly reliable “clean box” by simply making a box with a window on top and gloves to reach in with.
That’d be a fun experiment that I might like to try…
Posted at 7:18 am on Oct 12th, 2007 by srilyk
I’d like to add that even IF you had access to a suitable cleanroom (say .. a class 10 or 100 if you wort for semiconductor company) they wouldn’t let you take the hard drive in easily. ;-)
So you’d basically be back to a DIY-cleanroom — most likely a box, a vacuum cleaner and the best micro filter you can get. ;-)
I did this many many years ago, although I found some plastic that was about the right shape and taped it to the drive, from memory it was a 200meg drive. I did the “mod” to show kids how hard drives worked, did something similar with a inkjet printer, removed the outer case ( and other bits ) and replaced with clear plastic or open air.. Was hoping to do the same with other gear as some kids were very interested to see how things work but after a few years the “pokemon” generation didn’t seem to give a….. So my “inside computer” project got shelved…
Posted at 9:47 pm on Oct 14th, 2007 by bezel6
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I’m not sure how long that’s going to last unless he built it in a clean room (and I doubt many of us have those).
Posted at 2:58 am on Nov 8th, 2004 by IAN fIRTH