Nobel prize hard drive hacking roundup

Posted Oct 11th 2007 10:58PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks, news

Ironically, high end gear is moving toward solid state hard drives, but I think it's time for a hard drive hacking roundup in honor of the Nobel prize for physics being awarded for the technology behind todays magnetic hard drives.
We recently saw this awesome hard drive clock - which uses the actual drive hardware to show the time. Then there's the now classic hard drive window - the trick is to create a clean room/box so you can swap out the cover. Let's not forget the hard drive oscilloscope - made from a laser mounted on the oscillating drive arm. Sometimes drives die, so a bit of resurrection may be in order. Locked out? Maybe you should built a lock-picking gun from a junk drive. Some people just like to hide the things.

Reader Comments

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1. Anyone know how to hack the drive arm into a sensitive (~120dB) headphone like the old sound-powered type?

Posted at 3:26AM on Oct 12th 2007 by waggy

2. Didn't Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg do research for governments in the field of data recovery afterwards?

Could you image how efficient and balanced the human race would be if all the money and resources put into 'weaponizable' research was put into economical research and manufacturing technology's?

I don't think there's a institution in the world that doesn't have a intelligence agency with pipelines into all it's research departments, even ancient linguistics.

Reminds me of the story of the hippy professor who invented a fictional technology the government used to dictate, and after work one day he went out into the streets to protest it.

Posted at 4:42AM on Oct 12th 2007 by TJhooker

3. Yay! Hack A Day now has 100 pages of hacks, sweet job guys!

Posted at 5:22PM on Oct 14th 2007 by Dids

4. Well how about this for low-tech hack for hard drives. I used 3 dead hard drives to make a windchime. Using an old IDE cable for the string, a body of one hd to attach the chimes to, use 6 discs as chimes, the reader head as the hammer, then a old memory card as the rudder, and motor and shim as the weight on the bottom. It sounds perfect and looks cool

Posted at 8:06PM on Oct 14th 2007 by Bajasoobnut

5. http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm

Posted at 8:35PM on Oct 17th 2007 by jimmy

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