The mechanical workings of computer hard drives are cool (people take them apart just to have a look), and whilst there have been a few drives marketed with transparent windows in the top cover, the majority of drives have the generic pressed metal lid.
I’d imagine there to be not-insignificant demand for transparent hard drives for various parts of the geek market, and maybe education too.
So is there a practical reason why it would be a bad idea to make a mechanical hard drive with a clear top? Are the platters light-sensitive? Or is it that just that the metal casing provides magnetic shielding?
The drives with plastic lids were often used at trade shows, particularly if there was some unusual innovation the manufacturer wanted to tout as a benefit. For example, 5.25" Atasi drives had a linear voice coil actuator, which was very unusual (drives of that era generally used stepper motors or rotary voice coils).
However, the drives with plastic lids weren’t as robust as normal ones. Besides people poking them and cracking the plastic, the metal housing expanded at a different rate than the plastic lid, eventually leading to loose covers. So the drives with plastic lids were limited to trade shows.
The only one I’ve heard of is the WD Raptor. WD wrote that they had to make the window conductive, to avoid static electricity. Perhaps they were too unreliable. People still prefer their data over looks. (I’m thinking of adding a dummy hard drive with a window to my computer one day)
Really - development costs are pretty much a one-off for a whole line of drives - for most manufacturers, the same design would work on any drive in the product line - and I’d have thought the case-modding market would be eager enough (and have deep enough pockets) to make it worthwhile.
But for all the cases with windows in the side, I’m sure people would happily pay ten, twenty or even thirty or forty dollars more to be able to watch the heads fly back and forth. Hell, I’d bet they’d pay another ten or twenty on top of that if the inside was lit up.
The top plate of most drives is a fairly thin piece of pressed metal (thin enough that you can bend it back like a sardine can lid if you only unbolt one end) - usually bedded down on a spongy adhesive gasket.
The main problem, as far as I can see, is that the pressed pattern in the metal is often necessary to accommodate the drive mechanism - that is, if you replaced the top with a flat plate of glass, it might interfere with internal parts of the drive.
An additional (rigid) gasket would probably solve that.
A drive with a quarter inch thick glass top would probably be quieter than a conventional one. The extra thickness would mean it would not fit in a standard drive bay, but that’s kinda the point anyway.
You may still be able to find some disk drives with glass lids. They weighed a few hundred pounds, were the size of a small refrigerator, and the cover would open so you could remove the 14 - 16 inch diameter disk pack. Would you like to know where to find buggy whips also?
I think you grossly overestimate the market for these. With a tiny number of people willing to buy them the overhead per unit would be much higher, raising the cost and further reducing the number of people who would buy them. Combined with the reduced reliability of the drives would effectively kill the product.
I’m willing to bet that individual buyers of custom high-end hard drives are vanishingly insignificant compared to the mass buyers like Dell, HP, etc., and it is those buyers who subsidize the price of what drives do get built for high-end individuals.
That being said, Mangetout, if you’re so certain there’s money to be made in this market, why aren’t you courting investors?
Agreed. It’s the kind of question that comes up here on the board fairly frequently (“Why doesn’t anybody make X? I think there’d be a big demand for it!”) While there’s a small chance that, indeed, it’s a unrecognized, untapped market, in the vast majority of these cases, either (a) there really isn’t a significant market for the item in question, or (b) making such a product is much more complicated or expensive than the poster realizes.
