Working Window Hard Drive

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DeathWarman

DeathWarman

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May 31, 2014
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So, a few months back on my winter break, I had taken the risk to have a working hard drive with a clear window. It was an 80GB hard drive, SATA, Western Digital. Please note however: what I am asking is simply FOR FUN. I am not going to use the hard drive for genuine data storage. But anyway, I was quick with it. Go to cement floor basement, no dust. In about 30 seconds, I got glued the plastic cover on the back, with a little hump so the mother could turn without grinding on the plastic. It was air tight, except 2 acres where the back cover would go. I sealed one, and the other, I reused the air filter. Don't ask how I got it, but I worked. I copied some Steam games onto it, small. SW: KOTOR did great. Hard drive arm was perfect. This worked for 2 days, and then performance degraded. No S.M.A.R.T. errors even after a full DOS check, and no bad clusters with CHKDSK. On day 4, the drive officially failed. Upon reopening the clear cover to get a closer look with a X16 magnifying glass, I saw not scratches, but 'dirt' smears on the platter (I confirmed this by gently moving the arm and the head just smears, but a dry-cloth removed the grime without damage surprisingly, I thought it would scratch it.) I soon realized how close the head was to the platter to begin with. I have heard people say that very old 3.5 inch drives operate fine when opened, since the head-platter distance is very large. So, I want to do the project again, but without failure. Does anyone know of a 3.5 inch hard drive with a large gap between the head and platter? I presume a small storage one would be in order.
 
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There really is no guaranteed safe way to do this. And you are misinformed - "old hard drives" do NOT have a huge gap between head and platter surface.

Second point first. A VERY long time ago - 60's and 70's - hard drive units had a very different design with heads mounted firmly on a support arm and held by that structure at a fixed spacing above the platter surface. The gap was quite big by today's standards because of the limits of precision manufacturing. That gap was one of many factors that limited the performance and capacity of hard drives.

The path forward to much better hard drive performance and capacity included a complete change in the design which began to show up by the late 1970's. The new system was called a...
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Eximo

Eximo

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May 27, 2010
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Nothing contemporary. 80GB is about the smallest size still manufactured (that might not be true any longer) To get the old read/write heads where you could see the gap you would be looking at some quite old IDE or SCSI drives.

Really the only way to do what you are talking about properly is some sort of inert gas like Nitrogen or Argon in a sealed container in which you work. Basically make yourself a tiny clean room so there is no possibility of dust contamination.

Though I suspect your problem wasn't dust, but the glue vapors settling on the drive.

Buy two identical drives. Remove the lid from one and add your window to it, then install it with the original mounting screws on the other drive. Should prevent that little problem.
 
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Paperdoc

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There really is no guaranteed safe way to do this. And you are misinformed - "old hard drives" do NOT have a huge gap between head and platter surface.

Second point first. A VERY long time ago - 60's and 70's - hard drive units had a very different design with heads mounted firmly on a support arm and held by that structure at a fixed spacing above the platter surface. The gap was quite big by today's standards because of the limits of precision manufacturing. That gap was one of many factors that limited the performance and capacity of hard drives.

The path forward to much better hard drive performance and capacity included a complete change in the design which began to show up by the late 1970's. The new system was called a Winchester drive design, and now ALL HDD's are done this way. Regarding head clearance, the mechanism now puts the heads in actual contact with the platter surface when the drive is not running. But the suspension arm for each head is slightly flexible, and so as the platters start turning on power-up, the air right next to the platter surface is forced to flow along with the surface and under the head, lifting it off the surface by a very tiny gap. This extremely small gap means the magnetic flux at the platter surface is stronger, yielding better performance and the ability to design the heads with a smaller gap in the magnet, producing a smaller size of magnetic "footprint" in the "track" on the platter surface. BUT it also means that the system can NEVER have any particles inside it in its air large enough to get caught under the floating head and gouge out the magnetic surface. That gap size (and hence dirt particle max size limit) is less than the diameter of a hair. That means that you CANNOT see such fine particles. Hence, if you open the case even in your cleanest room in the house, you will never see the particles that contaminate the interior of your HDD and result in its destruction.

Hard drives are manufactured in specially constructed and sealed chambers with fantastic air cleaner systems so that the air inside is super clean, and then they are sealed for a very good reason. Opening them is almost guaranteed to cause failure.
 
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