hard drive

93 Articles

90 TB Drive Array For Home Storage Needs

October 21, 2010 by 53 Comments

Why store it in the cloud when you could have a 90 Terabyte hard drive (translated) array in your house? The drives are mostly Western Digital Caviar Green EARS 2TB models which are known for energy efficiency and quiet operation. It’s a little unclear as to whether this is using one or two motherboards, but the drives are connected using PCI RAID5 and RAID5+0 controller cards. There’s a total of 40 cooling fans built into the case, half on the bottom and the rest on the top. They move air up through the case, with plans to add a dust filter in the future. Heck, with that type of air movement you could throw on a standard furnace filter. Apparently it is quiet enough to talk in “almost a whisper” while next to the plywood monolith. But we’re a bit skeptical of that claim.

It’s not quite as fancy looking as the 67 TB storage from last year… but it does look pretty easy to build at home.

[Thanks Henrique via EnglishRussia]

Modchip Hacks PS3 Via USB Port

August 19, 2010 by 74 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jOEbZEkp9A]

It’s been a long time coming, but the video above shows a modchip circumventing the PlayStation 3 security by running a game from a hard drive. The sites Ozmodchips.com which sells the modchip, and psx-scene.com which has confirmed them as working are both unstable right now due to heavy traffic. But here’s what we know. The device is called the PS Jailbreak and can be used to dump PS3 games to the hard drive of a PlayStation3 running the most current firmware (3.41). Dumped games can then be played from the hard drive by selecting them from a menu that the modchip spawns. It’ll cost you though. The current preorder price is $169.99 AUD or $147.47 US dollars with a projected delivery date of August 27th.

[Thanks Charlie via Slashdot]

Xbox 360 Hard Drive Adapter (redux)

July 19, 2010 by 24 Comments

[Chlazza] let us know about their Xbox hard drive to SATA adapter, allowing the use of an Xbox 360 (original) hard drive on a PC without voiding the drive’s warranty. Looking for a fun and enriching experience read: really bored and inspired by a previous adapter we featured, [Chlazza] set out to make their own and ended up succeeding with a board that costs less than $1 in parts. Of course the drive uses its own Fat32 based file system so there is still some hacking to do if you intended to read the data, but this is a step in the right direction.

HDD Power Tools: The Sander

April 3, 2010 by 29 Comments

At first we thought this looked hastily thrown together and quite possible useless. Then we watched the video, embedded after the break, and realized it is quite a handy bench sander. [Mhkabir] opened up an older hard drive, removed the read head, and added a piece of carefully cut sand paper. When you hook it up to your bench supply you’ve got a small sander ready to use.  We can’t wait to try it on some small PCB edges. Now that we’ve seen a sander and a chop saw, we wonder what’s next?

Continue reading “HDD Power Tools: The Sander” →

Your Hard Drive Needs A Diamond Blade

April 2, 2010 by 17 Comments

If you find yourself in need of a precision chop saw don’t overlook the value of adding a diamond blade to a spinning HDD platter. [Tony’s] four-part writeup of this build springs out of some very special design considerations for a ham radio that operates in the 47 GHz band. That frequency pretty much rules out using normal components in the circuit and in his case it even makes connecting the components together difficult. He’s using this chop saw to cut small pieces of a ceramic substrate with gold traces on them that will be used to route the signals on the circuit.

We’ve seen hard drives used in a couple of different clocks, and even as a set of speakers. This one makes for a nice addition as a way to reuse those defunct devices that litter your junk box.

[Thanks Thomas]

Fix 0LBA And BSY HDD Errors

February 28, 2010 by 21 Comments

One of the worst moments almost every hacker has experienced is a hard drive inexplicably dieing. And of course, its at the most inopportune time and you’ve had no chance to backup!

Recently there has been an influx of Seagate hard drives (specifically the 2700.11s) kicking the bucket with firmware errors 0LBA and BSY. The good news is [Gradius2] has made guides to unbrick your drive without having to match serials.

The procedure is lengthy, complicated, can easily become expensive, and there is the possibility of losing your data so it’s not recommended if you’re only getting those pictures of Mr.Fluffykins back. In such a case, Thermite might be a bit better solution.

[Thanks Calvin]