If it’s that important to anyone, get an old 100 megabyte drive, it might cost you a dollar, two tops, cut a hole in the disk drive case and watch it run. It will keep running longer than you will find it interesting to watch.
I’m sure there are people who would pay more for such a feature, but like any product development effort there needs to be enough people who would pay more to make it worth the investment. Especially when you have products like hard drives, or- say- cars, where any change requires validation testing which can be very expensive. For example, it might seem relatively simple to have a cover with a plastic window in it, but now they have to go through temperature/humidity testing, probably shock/drop testing, and any number of other tests to make sure the windowed cover is robust enough. This type of testing can run thousands of dollars, and more if it fails one or more tests and has to be redesigned and retested.
Any new feature has to command a big enough market (and/or price premium) to pay for its development.
Because I’m not certain of course. Where in this thread did I express certainty?
Let’s put it this way: if there were a substantial market for this, odds are pretty high that someone would have already tried to exploit it.
So, there’s probably one of four good reasons why you don’t see these in large numbers in the market:
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There aren’t nearly as many people out there who really want a transparent hard-drive cover as you think there may be (as is often pointed out on the RPG forums I frequent, “all of my friends and I would buy this!” isn’t a good indicator of overall market size).
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There’s a theoretical market for this, but it’d be more expensive, and not enough people who think it’d be cool would be willing to pay the upcharge for it.
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There’s a theoretical market for this, but there are engineering reasons why it’s not feasible, or that such a product is less reliable than a “normal” version.
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There’s a market for this, but no manufacturer has picked up on this, and the idea is out there, waiting for someone to capitalize on it.
My personal guess is that the most likely reason is either (1) or (2), and the least likely reason is (4).
Seriously Mangetout, you had no problem disassembling and LED bulb, I think you could put a window in a disk drive to watch it work. And you could also find a floppy disk drive and watch it do the same thing at a visual macro scale and time rate slow enough to observe. I kind of think you must have missed the experience of watching archaic technology working, because disk drives are nowhere near as fascinating as watching the vacuum auto-load on a 9 track tape drive.
There’s another factor: pretty much all computer cases, even the windowed/easily-moddable ones, are generally designed such that hard drives are hidden away and not in a position to show themselves off.
Here’s a typical tower. You can see in the side view with the side panel removed that the drive bay is completely hidden by the metal wall.
Even the most showy cases, like this one made completely of clear acrylic, has set up the drive bays so that multiple hard drives and DVD drives stack atop each other, which basically hides any hard drive modification. I suppose you could put a hard drive in the very top bay, but even then that would only work for the acrylic cases.
So not only would there have to be a reasonable market for windowed hard drives, there would also have to be a reasonable market for cases designed to show off the hard drive. Given that 90% of the aesthetics of a modded case are designed to be seen from the side, quite a lot of effort would have to be put into redesign.
As it is, hard drives are generally considered essential but not showy. Performance is paramount, aesthetics aren’t considered. It would be like a car modder trying to figure out how to best show off his front axle.
TLDR: yeah, just not much market for it.
Maybe I’m reading the wrong tone into this, or maybe those smiley faces at the ends of posts aren’t pulling their weight like they used to.
I may yet fit a transparent lid on a hard drive - it’s a question of finding clean facilities though, as I want the drive for installation in a working system.
I think you have to send some seek commands or something to keep the heads moving, otherwise there won’t be anything to see.
I cut one open that had the click of death. They were flying back and forth pretty fast. At they very least it was fun to watch and I’m glad I have first hand experience with what exactly is going on in there. (I’ve taken apart just about everything I can get my hands on at some point or another, it’s a bit of a hobby…it’s paid for itself many times over since I’ve pretty good at fixing stuff now too.)
I think he knows it has to be connected to a computer to do anything. But he may want to pick a drive that can be accessed with low level commands for head movement to control it. Back in the olden days the manufacturers would provide engineering notes and diagnostic software that could be used to to do that. But for most internal drives there should be ways to directly access tracks through the OS. There’s probably open source drivers available that would be a good starting point for that.
Oh good grief, now he’s got me thinking about this seriously. Damn you Mangetout!
If you’re making one, would it be better to use a 3.5" or 2.5" drive? I’ve heard the heads can move at up to 50 times a second. That would be nice to watch.
Well obviously the larger the drive the easier it will be to modify it. But if you can get the right lens you would just need to cut two holes in the side of the case. One to attach a small digital camera, and another for an LED. Unless the head can change direction 50 times a second you won’t see much that doesn’t look like smooth motion. But even direction changes are pretty fast. That’s why being able to control the head movement is nice to have. You can see what happens sending the head back and forth between the extreme tracks at high speed. Anybody know where to get a camera with a close up lens like that?
Somewhere in my piles of computer junk, I’ve got a pair of identical 3.5 inch 200gb IDE drives - I think I’ll take one apart and be prepared to destroy/contaminate it while I manufacture a clear lid, then try to find a suitably clean facility where I can open the other drive to fit the lid.
Sorry - SDMB smilies are blocked on a couple of the machines I use, so I didn’t see it (and didn’t notice it in textual form in the quote), so I misread your comment as sarcastic.
Drilling holes in the casing of a drive is probably harder than just replacing a whole seal plate (because when the drill breaks through, it’ll create swarf and metal filings, which will probably reduce the timespan of continued operation to minutes).
3.5 inch hard drives seem to come in two basic designs:
[ol]
[li]Drive mechanism mounted on a more or less flat metal base, covered with a deeply-pressed (like a jelly mould) metal casing[/li][li]Drive mechanism mounted into recessed cavities in a diecast body, covered with a more or less flat piece of thin metal.[/li][/ol]
Type 2 would just need some sort of flat transparent cover to replace the metal lid (and this was the type I had in mind when starting the thread).
However, for type 2, removing the cover exposes better views of the inside (should be possible to view from all sides as well as the top) - a drive of this type could probably just be mounted inside a sealed, clear plastic box.
A simple glove box would be ideal - a clean aquarium with a perspex lid, a couple of arm-sized holes with vinyl gloves, and a couple of air ports with dust filters - some positive pressure. You need to run it for a while to sweep the dust.
All tools inside, a silica gel desiccator to keep things dry. Do everything inverted if possible, so anything that falls off falls away from the platters. If you open your initial drive to get the lid (for a template) and bag it, you probably won’t kill it anyway.
Don’t forget to video it 
Si
I think you mean Type 1 here. The problem would be finding the right sized box, or porting the cables (IDE, Power) into the sealed box without leakage.
Si
How best can I cleanly pressurise it? Canned air maybe?
Will it help if I install some patches of double-sided adhesive (i.e. exposed and sticky) to trap any floating dust?
You’re right.
The power cables are pretty easy, as ATX molex connectors can be extended and daisy-chained easily. I think the same is true of IDE, although I’d have to make sure my connections didn’t end up reversing the order of all the pins.
You need to maintain the positive pressure, and the problem is the filter - you need sufficient pressure to get through that. I’d say a vacuum cleaner on blow, but that is probably way too dusty. Maybe a hair dryer (on cool). It just has to push air through the filter into the box, and maintain airflow out. I would worry about the sticky-trap - outgassing from the adhesives and the risk of accidental contact contaminating surfaces.
Straight through extensions are ok for IDE cables, it is just sealing round them as they pass through into the clear plastic box that could be tricky. I guess if you use a soft, thick gasket on the lid, the cables could be sealed by that.
Si