HDD case material?

Jamie^ · 29 Jul 2011 at 02:30

Is there any reason that all HDD's are in some form of metalic? and why you are not able to buy plexisglass box's to replace the metalic standard ones?

Thanks if you know.

Surveyor · 29 Jul 2011 at 08:03

Metal will be thinner/stronger and better heat dissipation come to mind.

You couldn't replace the outer casing of a HDD with anything. As soon as you opened a HDD it's almost certainly ruined. They're assembled in a clean room for good reason.

There was a VelociRaptor model made with a clear panel so you could see the internal workings.

Jamie^ · 29 Jul 2011 at 08:37

Didn't realise they was constructed under such conditions. Would running it, in your opinion, with the top half of the encasing off, destroy the HDD? Kinda tempted to but one for a display case i was going to attempt but if it's just to die on me, no point.

rpstewart · 29 Jul 2011 at 08:46

Jamie^ said:
Didn't realise they was constructed under such conditions. Would running it, in your opinion, with the top half of the encasing off, destroy the HDD? Kinda tempted to but one for a display case i was going to attempt but if it's just to die on me, no point.

In a word, yes.

I remember talking to one of our hardware development guys here a while back. He was demonstrating laptop "airbag" technology (the trick that auto parks an HDD if you drop the lappy) at a trade fair and to make it obvious that the drive was actually parking they had it outside the case on a long cable with the casing open. He managed to do four or five demos on each disk before it died and had to be replaced.

Justintime · 29 Jul 2011 at 14:04

Jamie^ said:
Didn't realise they was constructed under such conditions. Would running it, in your opinion, with the top half of the encasing off, destroy the HDD? Kinda tempted to but one for a display case i was going to attempt but if it's just to die on me, no point.

It'll die in minutes.

Corasik · 30 Jul 2011 at 13:43

A smoke particle is bigger than the air gap between the disk and the read/write heads, a grain of dust would be like dropping a freight train infront of a hovercraft....

Hard drives heads literally float on a cusion of air generated by the spinning disks. If the heads hit something they can "crash" into the disk, and scratch the surface, almost certainly causing a whole bunch of bad sectors.

Once you open a hard disk its toast.

I believe that western digital do/did make a window version of the velociraptor with a perspex window in the top plate. No other drive is made like that.

Akagi · 30 Jul 2011 at 13:52

because of dust getting between the platters etc?

PhillyDee · 30 Jul 2011 at 18:40

Corasik said:
A smoke particle is bigger than the air gap between the disk and the read/write heads, a grain of dust would be like dropping a freight train infront of a hovercraft....

Hard drives heads literally float on a cusion of air generated by the spinning disks. If the heads hit something they can "crash" into the disk, and scratch the surface, almost certainly causing a whole bunch of bad sectors.

Once you open a hard disk its toast.

I believe that western digital do/did make a window version of the velociraptor with a perspex window in the top plate. No other drive is made like that.

It was the original Rapot 150gb ones, not the newer ones. Was the RaptorX. It had a lower MTBF than the old one, a higher price, but looked awesome.
There was even a gamers case which had a clear viewing window to fit the raptoX in.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd1500ad-raptor-xtends-performance-lead,1215.html

I had one of these, was cool to watch.