Need hdd activity generator!

Got your attention?

Anyway, I was bored and started digging in my "pile of computer rubbish". There I found an old Connor HD, the old full height kind. The weird part is that it has no cover! Instead there is some sort of thing on the side with some small screws. So after some digging for the right tool, I found the right screwdriver and got the "thing" removed.

What did I find?

The perfect HDD for a plexi case! The thing is, the platters and motor is all assembled on two "rods" sticking out from drive head control. Think of the letter "P" where the top "o" is the platters and the bottom "i" is the rod and drive heads. So if you turn this thing on the side, you can see all the platters side by side with the heads.

Confusing? Probably, but I don't have a scanner/digicam available.

So I'm gonna do a mod, but the thing I'm asking for, is something that I can hook up to the IDE connector and make the heads move over the platters. Thay do spin up nicely, and the heads move a sweep over the surface, but I want more! Something that tells the drive to do some searching, or move around a little

Could I hook it up to my mb? Sure, but that's the easy solution shuffeling my driveletters and taking an IDE channel. There must be a better solution out there..

my first question for you is how often do you want the drive to "seek" information? I assume that you don't want to actually store anything on this drive. My solution would be to take another old drive and pull the hdd controller off of it, hook that up to a power supply and see what happens, I think that it would do a boot seek and that would be it. after that the drive would just sit there, but then I also assum that you want the drive to look busy, so then you would need some one to build you a controller that would tell the motors to turn on and move, that is all I think you would need for something like that. Cuz when the motors wheel up then the platters would move and the head would look busy... anyway, I hope that I helped, or at least sparked an idea somewhere.

Luck be with you on your mod.

What you want to do is to figure out the pin configuration of the harddrive(sorry I have no idea). Which ones are address and data and so forth. When you have that figured out is only a matter of supplying some power to the appropriate connectors and voila you have a moving, seeking harddrive to watch.

Either that or figure out which leads control the little motors and then you can just activate them manually.

hey there dartor,

just wanted to say welcome to the forum and that I love your sig! Also, I think that in a roundabout way I said something pretty similar... LoL.

Anyway, Laterz all!

if you could set up a prog that would "fragment" your drive then use a defragmenter on it,
that would go nuts

Thanks, and to answer some of the questions:

The controller still works. I had the whole thing open and connected to the PCB. When I connected some power to it, the platters started spinning (really fast, actually) and the head did a short trip over the platters.

I do not want to connect it to a MB and use a IDE channel for that. Also since it has been lying in my pile of rubbish for quite some time, something might be wrong somewhere.

I've found a lot of sites showing the pin configuration, but nothing about signal levels and such. Also not what the diffrent pins DO when the receive a signal.

As for directly controlling the motors, this is just as difficult. The spindle motor has got lot of wires and the head "motor" is some electromagnetic thing. All is controlled by a special chip connected to the drive head "base"


So, what do I know so far?

Seems that the IDA signaling is at TTL level, so something like either tying pins to ground or to +5V. Anybody know if your supposed to use a resistor as well when pulling up/down?

What pins to use? Well, the only simple thing, is that there is a pin (pin 1 I think) that is called "-RESET". I'm thinking that doing something with that maybe should make the head do another litte tour of the platter...

*bump*?


There is a similar thred here somewhere...

You could rig up some sort of circuit that triggers the reset signal at regular intervals.

Veland said:

Thanks, and to answer some of the questions:

The controller still works. I had the whole thing open and connected to the PCB. When I connected some power to it, the platters started spinning (really fast, actually) and the head did a short trip over the platters.

I do not want to connect it to a MB and use a IDE channel for that. Also since it has been lying in my pile of rubbish for quite some time, something might be wrong somewhere.

Click to expand...

First, now that you have exposed the platters, I would assume that there is quite a bit wrong with the drive. the dust in the air would probably render it useless.

But seriously, I would not bother with the ide connector. You would need to trigger those connectors with something that at least has the appearance of data. Probably more trouble than it is worth.

Since the platters spin, you are halfway there just by giving the drive power. The next thing I would do is find the pin diagram for the chip that actually controls the motors. if you can get to those pins, find the ones that control the heads and feed an oscilating voltage right to the head motor. You will have to do some experimenting but if you start with a very low voltage and work your way up, you should not kill the thing too soon.