Hard Drive Speakers Crank Out Classic Demo

June 29, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

Second Reality is a legendary demoscene release by Future Crew, which won Assembly 1993 with its technical and artistic mastery. [Niv Singer] decided to give the classic demo a spin on a rather unconventional sound system with a particuarly techy twist.

Hard drives are great for storing data. They’re designed for this purpose. What they’re not designed for is acting as speakers, but you can hack them into acting that way if you’re so inclined. For this project, [Niv] pulled apart a whole stack of drives, so they could be repurposed in this way. The principle is simple enough—just feed audio to the coil driving the head, and it will vibrate and wiggle around, creating soundwaves in the air. It’s not particularly effective, and you get limited volume with a terrible frequency response, but that’s half the fun. [Niv] actually took some of this into account, too. Four Western Digital Caviar 500GB drives were chosen for this build, two for the left channel, and two for the right. Each channel had a crossover, allowing one drive to handle low frequencies while the other handled higher ones. For a further nice touch, the platters spin with the beat as well, with [Niv] providing a great explanation on how this was achieved with the use of some nifty PWM tricks.

Files are on Github for the curious. We’ve featured plenty of hard drive speakers before, too. Video after the break.

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Hacking Hard Drive Firmware

May 15, 2026 by Al Williams 18 Comments

You probably flash new firmware on a variety of devices regularly, even though that’s rare for non-technical types. But what about your hard drive firmware? Most of us don’t want to touch our operating drives, so unless you are dealing with surplus drives or have a special project in mind, you may not think much about the firmware running your spinning rust storage. [I Code 4 Coffee] uses hard drives in an unusual way to exploit Xbox 360s, and wound up reverse engineering some drive firmware with an eye to making changes.

The analysis started with three hard drives and an SSD. Looking for people who’ve done similar work wasn’t as productive as you might think. There isn’t much call for modifying hard drive firmware, and what data there is can be outdated.

One thing that was available was firmware dumps taken with a PC-3000 data recovery tool. What follows is a deep dive down the hard drive rabbit hole. There are backdoor vendor commands and connections to the diagnostic RS-232 port on some drives. You can find the technical artifacts on GitHub.

We learned a few things, and we bet you will too. Another way to get into the hard drive’s firmware is via JTAG.

One Laptop Manufacturer Had To Stop Janet Jackson Crashing Laptops

July 1, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 34 Comments

There are all manner of musical myths, covering tones and melodies that have effects ranging from the profound to the supernatural. The Pied Piper, for example, or the infamous “brown note.”

But what about a song that could crash your laptop just by playing it? Even better, a song that could crash nearby laptops in the vicinity, too? It’s not magic, and it’s not a trick—it was just a punchy pop song that Janet Jackson wrote back in 1989.

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Inside The RLL Hard Drive Protocol

October 19, 2024 by Al Williams 19 Comments

If you are younger than a certain age, RLL probably doesn’t mean much to you. Old consumer-grade hard drives used MFM (modified frequency modulation like a floppy disk uses) and soon went to IDE (integrated drive electronics). There was a brief period when RLL (run length limited) drives were the way to get a little more life out of the MFM technology. [W1ngsfly] has an RLL drive on his bench and uses his scope and some other gear to put it through its paces. You can watch over his shoulder in the video below.

The hardware interface and drive are the same for an MFM and an RLL drive. However, an RLL-aware controller can pack more bits on the same platter by using the newer modulation scheme. Some older disks were good enough for MFM but too sloppy to successfully take an RLL format, but — in theory — any MFM drive could be an RLL drive and vice versa.

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Reviving An 8-Inch Hard Drive From The 1980s

August 8, 2023 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

As part of the eternal quest within the realm of retrocomputing, storage devices can be one of the most challenging, especially when it comes to firmly obsolete hard drives, such as the CDC Finch drive. This compact 8″ HDD replaced the previous 14″ models with a form factor that was decidedly more portable. These Finch drives being 1980s technology that got run pretty hard before their retirement, it’s little wonder that they’d end up on the repair bench over at [Usagi Electric]

A CDC Finch hard disk drive, available in 8 to 32 MB for all your data storage needs. (Credit: Usage Electric)

Introduced in the early 1980s, the CDC Model 9410 Finch drive was unlike its 14″ predecessors in that it is a sealed unit, with maintenance-free air filtration. With the 14″ models you’d have both fixed and swappable platters, with far less consideration for dust exposure. This makes these Finch drives more touchy to work on, not unlike HDDs today, and adds to the excitement when repairing one of these old drives.

In this video, two differently broken Finch drives are discussed. Both appear to have an issue on the controller board, with one not responding to communications on the interface, while the other featuring a dead short on the interface pins. The first drive was brought back to life by replacing a dead SN75110 line driver IC, as well as a dead 7818 voltage regulator that was only outputting a sad 0.3 V.

Unfortunately, after half an hour of uptime and in the process of dumping data the drive errored out with a Not Ready, indicating that there are further issues on the controller board to fix. The good news here is that the platters appear to be pretty robust, but the controller boards on these old drives tend to develop issues over the years, something which will be further explored in upcoming videos.

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Laser Projector Built From An Old Hard Drive

May 12, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 41 Comments

Spinning hard drives are being phased out of most consumer-grade computers in favor of faster technology like solid-state drives and their various interfaces. But there’s still millions of them in circulation that will eventually get pulled from service — so what do we do with them? If you’ve got one that would otherwise be going in the garbage, they can be turned into some other interesting devices like this laser text projector.

Even the slowest drives spin at around 5000 RPM, which is perfect for this type of application. The device works by mounting twelve mirrors, each at a slightly different angle, on a drum which is spun by the drive’s motor. Bouncing a laser off of the spinning drum results in a projection of twelve horizontal lines. By rapidly switching the laser on and off depending on which mirror it’s pointing at, the length of each line can be controlled.

Thanks to persistence of vision, that allows you to show text on the surface that the laser is projected on. At speeds this high, it took [Ben] of Ben Makes Everything quite a few iterations to get it to a usable space. From sensors that were too slow to lasers not bright enough to 3D prints that were not accurate enough, he goes through the design of his build and the process in excellent detail.

After solving all of the problems including building his own constant-current laser power supply, and burning up a few laser diodes in the process, [Ben] has a laser projector capable of displaying readable text at a great distance which is also portable, running on a 12 V power supply. There are some possible areas of improvement that he notes as well, such as an unbalanced 3D printed part causing a bit of a wobble and the Arduino controller not being fast enough for more text. But it’s an impressive project nonetheless, similar to a two-mirror version we saw some time ago but with the ability to display text as well.

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A Look Back At The Xbox 360’s Hard Drive Security

February 11, 2023 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are becoming increasingly like set-top computers — equipped with USB ports, Bluetooth, removable hard drives, and their own online software repositories. But while this overlap theoretically offers considerable benefits, such as the ability to use your own USB controller rather than being stuck with the system’s default, the manufacturers haven’t always been so accommodating.

Take for example the removable hard drive of the Xbox 360. It was a bog standard 2.5″ SATA drive inside a fancy enclosure, but as explained by [Eaton], Microsoft went to considerable lengths to prevent the user from upgrading it themselves. Which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if the Redmond giant wasn’t putting a huge markup on the things; even in 2005, $99 USD for 20 GBs was highway robbery. Continue reading “A Look Back At The Xbox 360’s Hard Drive Security” →