Disk Drive Windows... Important Info for you!

[oRIDDLERo]

Last night I spent 5 hours a-dremelin on my west-digi 80gb/8mb cache only to power it on for a failure... Its toast! I thought I did everything right, the spacing on the gasket was perfect etc. my only hypothesis was that the additional 2 screws that attach to the center of the platter and at the base of the control arm are absolutely necessary on newer model drives (all the HD-window Mods out there I have seen have been low performance drives with low capacities… these new drives appear to be far more sensitive! After much testing on the dead model I have found this to be true. After reattaching the plate with the additional 2 fasteners the drive literally came back to life after the previous head crash. Using spin rite (this is most certainly one on the best HD diagnostic tools for thoroughly locating defective areas of drives http://grc.com/spinrite.htm ) i concluded the drive is not healthy enough to be integrated in my system. I have however decided to try again, this time I have built what I think is the perfect cover plate for my disk. As you can see in the pics I have re-attached the original gas valve, as well as fixed the perfect size washers to the plexi at all mount points to mimic the OEM plate spacing to the screws perfectly. If you are still reading this I would like to make you aware of my final concern with this mod… The Plexiglass. After reading this blurb (A good read on HD Window Mods) http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke/teaching/cs410/hd.html
I wish i could have found sheet glass at home depot, would have been a bitch to drill though! I sit here waiting for my silicone gasket on drive 2 to dry, this mod has already cost me $109, I hope it does not double or I will have to call it quits! Any thoughts on this subject are welcomed. Later I will attach pick of the original and the new 2.0 if you would like.

[64Thunderbolt]

where are the pic's?

[oRIDDLERo]

alright alright, ill ae some pics in a minute. just so you all know i have installed round two of the 80GB and it works fine! Spin right will conclude a level 3 test of all sectors in 30 hours. Pics are coming

[CrystalMethod]

Here's the deal. All the HDD's comming out lately are the pits. Regardless of manufacturer. They're spinning too fast, to keep up with the new technology, and have way too small a tolerence for error than they used to. That's why HDD mods are risky. At this point in time I wouldn't suggest even trying the mod unless you're doing it to an older drive.

[oRIDDLERo]

Well after spin-rite concludes i will let you know the results. This drive is part of a RAID 0 array (oooh scary, we all know the RAID 0 is history if one drive fails). Not to worry though the array is backed up twice a week to another 120GB WD Disk in case of a failure. If this drive fails in the next few years i will not attempt this again. It sure does look cool though!

Oh yes, I forgot to mention heat was another issue, because after you remove that block of a cover plate you loose around 50% of your surface area to dissipate heat. Good thing the lian lee sat the drive right in front of the intake fans (One is a 80mm tornado). Or one could add teie windowed drive to their water cooling setup with This: http://www.highspeedpc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=HSPC&Product_Code=InnovaHDD&Category_Code=Blocks

[oRIDDLERo]

Here is a quick pic.

Note the gas relif valve, and the screws attached to the platter and control arm. On the inside surface of the plexi there are different size washers (it was a bitch to find the sizes to mimic the original spacing of the manufactures plate almost exactly.

[Crash893]

why not just mod a super old one instead

buy a gig hdd and put your swap file on it or something

[oRIDDLERo]

LOL, when i post pics of my system here you will see no cheezeball drives in my box. I do have a few lame old drives around but they are far to slow for me to display in my rig or to have any use in a high performance box. The disk configeratoin i am using is the same as the one explained in this excellent article: http://www.hardwaretech.info/guides/configure_bench_raid.php

Two WD 80gb/8mb cache +one 120gb/8mb with a 2gb low seek time partition for the OS, with the remainder reserved for backups of the RAID array.

[Crash893]

yea but why risk it on a new drive

its mostly for astetics anyway

why not just have a 3rd drive thats not on raid to do the window mod

that way it moves around every one says way cool
and if it blows out your out like 10 bucks

[oRIDDLERo]

with 3 drives in the front of lian lee pc-60 there is still sufficent space between them for optimum intake airflow, i fear if the bay were maxed out with 4 the flow would be restricted to the point where i would not me comfortable.

[oRIDDLERo]

Just an update i had to split the drive into two 40gb fat32 partitions for extensive testing b4 setting up my array again. The first "read all sectors test completed in 4 hours reporting that 100% of the sectors are ok! the second level 4 phase "read and write" is almost done with the fist 40gb partition after 30hours so far not 1 bad sector! The software has written over 1 terabyte 1,000,000,000,000 bytes in testing so far, lol I thought this blurb was interesting: SpinRite then reads and writes specially crafted data patterns that it has designed to be the most difficult for the drive to read and write. These patterns employ sophisticated magnetodynamic physics models to write the weakest possible magnetic signals on the storage surfaces. If the drive can read these artificial signals back, it can read anything ... including your data.

http://grc.com/srphysics.htm

[oRIDDLERo]

Here is the conclusion to this saga:

DO NOT TRY THIS MOD ON HIGH PERFORMANCE DRIVES!

Although it is embarrassing I must tell the truth so that other do not make this mistake!
B4 you feel to sorry for me, know this I can replace the security labels of this drives with no evidence of tamper so I was able to RMA each of the attempts!

The Victim Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM 8MB cache

Drive 1 First try cover was rushed and measurements were perfect used improvised bathroom clean room and humidity to bring down dust particles. Did not use control arm and platter screws, as I was not advised to byb any of the walk through I read. Upon starting drive made an unarguable noise. Drive developed multiple dead sectors with in 50% of test completion. DEAD and RMAed

Drive 2 New theory: High performance drives need these screws for proper alignment. Created new “Perfect Plexi cover” This cover plate was perfect in all measurements. Used screws to mount to arm and platter with rubber washers for stability. Aslo removed filter part from the original drive and replaed it on the new plexi cover. Drive developed multiple dead sectors with in 55% of test completion. DEAD and RMAed

Drive 3 New theory: Rubber washers limited amount of torque that could be applied to arm and platter. Drive developed multiple dead sectors with in 70% of test completion. DEAD and RMAed

Final conclusion: The Last Three variables here are:

A: Ultra sensitivity to particles, a bathroom clean room will not suffice

B: Moisture particles do to increased humidity in the improvised clean room (even after waiting 30 minutes for the moisture to settle.

C: (This is what I think it is) The fumes from the silicone sealant I had been using to seal the drive interfered and possibility got between the heads and the platters causing access the same issues every time. Perhaps hot glue as a gasket would work?

In any case I am done screwing with high capacity/performance drives. should one wish to continue this work use the above data to help you. Just for fun I windowed an old junk drive as suggested earlier just to satisfy my self, and it is 100% tested and functional… Now if there was only a good use for this Piece Of Crap 4.3Gb 5400 WD drive. Someone had mentioned use it as a page file drive but then It would hardly ever access and would not look cool(I have 512MB and tweaked the registry to only access the File when there is no more physical memory… great performance booster)!

[Gerst240]

thats kinda messed up that your gonna rma that drive i kinda feel that since you messed with it you should pay if you screw it up ....well maybe you learned that you sould never rush a mod job and plan it out before you even think about doin it

[eh?]

Originally posted by gofastman
Here is the conclusion to this saga:

DO NOT TRY THIS MOD ON HIGH PERFORMANCE DRIVES!
Final conclusion: The Last Three variables here are:

A: Ultra sensitivity to particles, a bathroom clean room will not suffice

B: Moisture particles do to increased humidity in the improvised clean room (even after waiting 30 minutes for the moisture to settle.

C: (This is what I think it is) The fumes from the silicone sealant I had been using to seal the drive interfered and possibility got between the heads and the platters causing access the same issues every time. Perhaps hot glue as a gasket would work?
i thought everyove knew that all harddrives are senstive to anything even a single dust particale.... also you shouldn't rma the drive if you broke it, its not there fault you didn't research a little before you tried the mod..

[oRIDDLERo]

Originally posted by Gerst240
thats kinda messed up that your gonna rma that drive i kinda feel that since you messed with it you should pay if you screw it up ....well maybe you learned that you sould never rush a mod job and plan it out before you even think about doin it

How can you perfectly plan for something that has never been done before. You must do the best you can then follow the simple rules of "trial and error" (While hoping to not miss anything) And as you can tell this mod was in no way "rushed" I never "rush" mods

As for the RMA im sure western digital can take a .000000001% loss from little old me!

[oRIDDLERo]

OK if you all are going to start telling me "i did not research" "And i rushed" You can take that crap somewhere else! I spent an immense amount of time on this project and on the research.

The highest capacity drive i have ever seen completed was a 20Gb.
I only posted this info to help others! If you do not want it i will delete it!

as for Originally posted by drdingo21
i thought everyone knew that all hard drives are sensitive to anything even a single dust particle:rolleyes: But i though t i would take only 2 particles to scew up a drive??? Read the above posts, do I sound uneducated to you? Please do not assume.

[Gerst240]

Originally posted by gofastman
OK if you all are going to start telling me "i did not research" "And i rushed" You can take that crap somewhere else! I spent an immense amount of time on this project and on the research.

just tell me one thing did it work? then ask yourself this if you would of spent more time researching would it of helped? im sure this mod has been done many times and worked the hard drive window has been out for a while now and im sure people have done it on every drive possible...


How can you perfectly plan for something that has never been done before. You must do the best you can then follow the simple rules of "trial and error" (While hoping to not miss anything) And as you can tell this mod was in no way "rushed" I never "rush" mods

and responce to your reply to me
here are your exact words "Drive 1 First try cover was rushed " did that just say rushed? but i thought this mod was in no way rushed ....

well im done with this little ****ing match you messed up and made wd pay for it that is wrong let the computer gods have vengance!

[oRIDDLERo]

Originally posted by Gerst240

people have done it on every drive possible...



If you show me a place where i can see this this done on a drive of this capasity and speed or better i will paypal you $10 right now.

and responce to your reply to me
here are your exact words "Drive 1 First try cover was rushed " did that just say rushed? but i thought this mod was in no way rushed ....
vengance!

so I did say that, but it was not in any way affected to the point where it would hurt the ability of the drive to function. the window could have used a little extra sanding on the edges where the external part met the metal that’s all. only the looks were rushed not the functionality.

Originally posted by Gerst240


then ask yourself this if you would of spent more time researching would it of helped?

And no it would not have helped one bit! That is why i made this post, to give information to people that was not available to me! I really did not think anyone had done it on a drive of this speed/capacity I know i did not see any here or on [H]... so go find one if you can maybe an x15 even??? You’ll make a quick $10

[RyanRichard]

well ok good effort and all, and yes would of been a nice mod.
But YOU bonked the drives, not WD. I don't see why they should have to pay the price for your experimenting. Kinda wrong dude.

[Codeman05]

I don't really agree with RMAing the drives, but its not much worse (as far as ripping some1 off) then downloading mp3's and movies online and not actually paying for them (and I'm sure everyone here has done one of those atleast once)
I think this is one mod I'll never try lol, with my luck I know I'd ruin em hehe