Grentz

Well, I am by no means a pc "modder" but i do like working with tools on other around the house projects.

I found a cool picture of a hard drive that had been decked out with a small window on the front and as I have tons of old HDD around i thought i would take a stab at it.

Now before you read any more i must say DONT TRY THIS AT HOME UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.



Now, I started with an old 10gb WD drive that i knew worked.

First I removed the cover and then put the drive in a sealed tupperware. Next i cut a hole in the aluminum plate that is the cover. Finally I cut a piece of hard plastic and used hot glue to set it over the hole in the cover. Then i reassembled. I did this all in about 1.5 hours and didnt really take my time as i dont have the proper tools to do some of the cutting, but hey, it looks cool now :approve:

PICTURE

And amazingly i loaded win 2k and it worked perfectly :approve:

It is cool but my plastic was not big enough to be able to make a hole that can show the moving arm in the drive (you can still see it if you look at an angle).

Also one thing to note if you do have an old drive you want to try this on, any spec of dust on the disk inside will corrupt it, very easy to do (i have done it before in past HDD encounters). Also, some drives use the cover to hold the top of the disk axel in place, the one i used did not, but some do which would make replacing it with plastic a no no

schrags11

Looks pretty good, you just need to clean up the glue with a razor or something.

Grentz

ya, but for now its good :), at least i can see the shiney plater

Xanlexian

That's actually pretty neat!! Throw in some EL lighting and hey, tricked out hard drive!

I use EL lighting under my lip of my desk. So I can see my keyboard. Nice, soft even light.

Xanlexian

Oh, also to note -- WDC had acrylic covers for their hard drives (don't know if they still do). When I had a computer store years ago, they sent me a piece of marketing propoganda that had some hard drive mounted in some frame with an acrylic cover. I took the cover off of the display drive, and put it on one of my new, fast, top-of-the-line 1 gig drives so I can see the arms move and such. Plus, customers liked it.

Maybe they have more?

ultimate_pda

Looks cool!

star882

http://zapwizard.com/Mods/RealHD-IDE/index.html
An alternative to modding your new drive.

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Originally Posted by A friend of mine who has a Linux kernel named after his girlfriend.

If I was VirtualBox, I could load my virtualization module into Hannah and boot up another kernel in the same address space.

jpmarth

Nice job Grentz!

What did you use to cut the hole in the drive cover? Would have been perfect Dremel conditions. :)

Frenchy

I call this thinking out of the Hard drive

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Frenchy

Grentz

Originally Posted by jpmarth

Nice job Grentz! What did you use to cut the hole in the drive cover? Would have been perfect Dremel conditions. :)

Dont have a dremel so i was stuck with a band saw :)

Cuts through like butter, but i had drilled holes as a first way of cutting out the case (didnt work) so that made the line a bit uneven