can someone make a HDD with a window mod for me?

C

chronic9

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 18, 2004
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I am willing to pay, offcorse.

The HDD doesnt have to be working - transfer data to it.
as long as it spins up and stuff and the arm moves ill be happy.
a blue LED would be a plus.
 
I currently have a working 2GB one that I don't want, I'll probably sell it in a few weeks if there is a buyer - I don't want it since there are cosmetic imperfections (a 1" scratch on the window, stuff like that). It also has a blue and a red LED set inside the drive behind the window, that alternate as the drive acesses infomation, swapping the colour of the interior or blending them into a purple depending on the drive activity.

I'm working my way up to attempting a window mod on a 60Gb that I want to work very reliably long-term, so there will probably be a few more low-spec "practise" drives created as along that path that I won't need, so some more might be coming. Or my attention span might be too short and I end up too excited about doing something else to finish :)

I want to keep the 2GB drive for a bit longer to get a better idea of whether it's really ok or actually on the verge of dying, and there are a few more experiments I want to try on it first before it has outlived it's usefulness to me. But I'll post when I'm ready to get rid of it. Hopefully it will still be running, but since it was always a practise drive to me, it's undergone more procedures than the average HDD window mod, with associated higher risk :)
 
can ya post a pic of it? Like i said, i dont care if i can store data on it, just want it for the cool factor. how much for it? when you decide to sell it?
 
There is a lot that can wrong between now and then, so don't assume anything will come of this :) Anyway, I'd probably sell it via ebay, so not sure what the price would be. I'd be hoping for around $60.

Here's an animated gif of it I just made:
window-hdd.gif


If you look at the sweeper arm to the left of the reading arm/head, (the one against the left side of the case), you can see a thin white line across it, that's the scratch on the window.
There are other imperfections, such as the edges being cut roughly in places, and specks of adhesive residue stuck to the inside of the window in places, but at a viewing distance of greater than two feet, that kind of stuff isn't noticable.
Also, it's a bit more pronounced than what you see in the gif, but the red LED is a lot brighter than the blue LED. (I just grabbed what I had lying around, and they don't match in brightness as well as I'd like)
 
wow thats a neat hard drive.. makes me want to hack one apart :D
Is there a guide to the alternating colors? I recall reading about windows for hdds in the faq but dont recall lights.
 
You use IDE pin 39 for lights, but I'm still working on getting the alternating effect working to my satisfaction (I'm starting to suspect that the LEDs are not mismatched, but that the problem is the in the way I implemented it), so that part is still a work in progress :)
 
i would SOOOO buy that hard drive from you, it looks pretty dam cool.
i checked ebay, no1 sells moded drives there.

Harlequin said:
There is a lot that can wrong between now and then, so don't assume anything will come of this :) Anyway, I'd probably sell it via ebay, so not sure what the price would be. I'd be hoping for around $60.

Here's an animated gif of it I just made:
window-hdd.gif


If you look at the sweeper arm to the left of the reading arm/head, (the one against the left side of the case), you can see a thin white line across it, that's the scratch on the window.
There are other imperfections, such as the edges being cut roughly in places, and specks of adhesive residue stuck to the inside of the window in places, but at a viewing distance of greater than two feet, that kind of stuff isn't noticable.
Also, it's a bit more pronounced than what you see in the gif, but the red LED is a lot brighter than the blue LED. (I just grabbed what I had lying around, and they don't match in brightness as well as I'd like)
Click to expand...
 
I have found that some drives rely on the higher pressure they create inside the drive. I had an old 4 gig drive I took the top off and it still ran fine, but when I did it to a 20gig drive, it immedietly sped way up past 7200rpms and then the heads flopped around banging into the sides of the case. Put the top back on, worked fine.. I would think that a properly sealed plexi cover (with a breather hole) would work but..
 
i guess it never worked for me, since i did my mods on 5 Gig HDDs, thats why.
 
I'm thinking heat is another factor that limits how big a drive you can mod. I imagine almost all of the heat normally vents through the thin metal top-plate, but when you replace that wide thin metal plate with a thick plastic insulator, any modern high-capacity drive is going to overheat. So to successfully mod a larger drive, I'm looking into detaching the circuitry from the underside and moving it so that a CPU cooler can be attached to the now-exposed metal underside. So far I've got drives where it is easy enough to move the circuitry, but the shape of the metal underside is molded to accomodate the circuit board, meaning limited flat surface area to attach a cooler.
 
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