[Andrew] was left wanting by the slow hard drive in his 2011 Mac Mini. He set out to add a 10,000 RPM drive and we think he did a great job of pulling it off. Luckily he also took the time to document the process so you can try it yourself. As with a lot [...]

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If you’d like a pseudo-mechanical way of producing a droning synthesizer sound, [gijs] is your man. He made a small synthesizer out of nothing but an old hard drive and a few components. Whenever a disk platter is spun manually, the spindle motor inside the drive produces a few out of phase sine waves on its [...]

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We’re no strangers to POV time pieces around here, but something about them never gets old. Whether they use a ring of LEDs to draw clock hands, or an intricately cut HDD platter to replicate LCD segments, we love seeing them. [David] sent in this hard drive POV clock built by a fellow named [Kly], [...]

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The problem of persistent and reliable storage plagues us all. There are a myriad of solutions, some more expensive than others, but a dedicated and redundant network attached storage solution is hands down the best choice for all problems except natural disaster (ie: fire, flood, locusts) and physical theft. That being said, the issue of price-tag rears [...]

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Hackaday reader [svofski] sent in a fantastic looking hard drive-based POV clock (Google Translation) created by a maker in the Sichuan province of China. The clock, like the one [svofski] built, relies on LEDs placed behind the spinning platter to create the POV effect. Quite a few carefully placed cuts have been made to the platter, [...]

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So we know you’ve got a lot of porn on your computer, but just how much is a lot? This concept mouse and hard drive combo aims to show you just how much digital junk you have acquired through physical feedback. The DataBot mouse looks like a typical run of the mill scroll mouse that [...]

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Do you know how a modern hard drive works? If you don’t you should have a pretty good idea after watching this video. In only five minutes [Bill Hammack] manages to describe a hard drive in awesome detail without using any unnecessary scientific jargon. The video teardown explains how the flying head “flies” how voice [...]

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[Ken] visited our site looking for case modding stuff a little while back, but more importantly he came back to show off his latest project. Using a jewelry box found at our favorite place, the thrift store, he converted it into a 2.5 inch USB drive enclosure. Almost instantly he found that this particular jewelry [...]

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It’s a few years old, but [Brian360's] method of unlocking the hard drive on his Mitsubishi Multi-Communication System is quite interesting. Mitsubishi describes their MMCS as a human-vehicle communication tool. It’s basically an in-dash screen and controls to display navigation maps and play music. [Brian] found that the hard drive for the MMCS in his [...]

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shackspace member [@dop3j0e] found himself in a real bind when trying to recover some data after his ThinkPad’s fingerprint scanner died. You see, he stored his hard drive password in the scanner, and over time completely forgot what it was. Once the scanner stopped working, he had no way to get at his data. He [...]

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Why store it in the cloud when you could have a 90 Terabyte hard drive (translated) array in your house? The drives are mostly Western Digital Caviar Green EARS 2TB models which are known for energy efficiency and quiet operation. It’s a little unclear as to whether this is using one or two motherboards, but the drives [...]

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It’s been a long time coming, but the video above shows a modchip circumventing the PlayStation 3 security by running a game from a hard drive. The sites Ozmodchips.com which sells the modchip, and psx-scene.com which has confirmed them as working are both unstable right now due to heavy traffic. But here’s what we know. [...]

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[Chlazza] let us know about their Xbox hard drive to SATA adapter, allowing the use of an Xbox 360 (original) hard drive on a PC without voiding the drive’s warranty. Looking for a fun and enriching experience read: really bored and inspired by a previous adapter we featured, [Chlazza] set out to make their own [...]

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At first we thought this looked hastily thrown together and quite possible useless. Then we watched the video, embedded after the break, and realized it is quite a handy bench sander. [Mhkabir] opened up an older hard drive, removed the read head, and added a piece of carefully cut sand paper. When you hook it [...]

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If you find yourself in need of a precision chop saw don’t overlook the value of adding a diamond blade to a spinning HDD platter. [Tony's] four-part writeup of this build springs out of some very special design considerations for a ham radio that operates in the 47 GHz band. That frequency pretty much rules [...]

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Strobeshnik is a somewhat different twist on the hard drive clocks we’ve seen in the past. Though still technically using a POV effect, the Strobeshnik displays the numerals instead of a line. By altering strobe timing of an LED behind a platter with the numbers cut into it, he can display whichever number he wants. [...]

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One of the worst moments almost every hacker has experienced is a hard drive inexplicably dieing. And of course, its at the most inopportune time and you’ve had no chance to backup!
Recently there has been an influx of Seagate hard drives (specifically the 2700.11s) kicking the bucket with firmware errors 0LBA and BSY. The good [...]

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This is the multichord, a one-string musical instrument built by [Christopher Mitchell]. The string is a 20 pound mono-filament thread stretched between a wooden bridge and the read/write head of a hard drive. The idea is that the vibrations of the string are picked up and amplified acoustically by the sounding box that serves as [...]

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Hard drive speakers aren’t anything new, but they have yet to be done very professionally. Most hard drive speaker hacks are awesome, but aren’t meant to be a showpiece. [Oliver] took the opportunity to put together a set of 20GB drives and a custom-built acrylic case with a horizontal VU meter up front. The project [...]

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Last week we showed you the ingenious hard drive enclosure made from a broken Game Boy. We caught up with [_n3o_], the person responsible for this mod, and he was nice enough to share some pictures of the inside of the project. Let’s get down to business and take a look.

[_n3o_] opened this project back [...]

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We’ve brought you an HDD clock in the past, but [mb1988] tried to bring his project to another level by fully documenting it (in Polish). Inspired by [dzgdzzh]’s version of the same invention, [mb1988] decided to reverse engineer it (as well as make a few changes) and base it on the powerful ATmega128. Since this [...]

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Want 67 Terabytes of local storage? That’ll be $7,867 but only if you build it yourself. Blackblaze sells online storage, but when setting up their company they found the only economical way was to build their own storage pods. Lucky for us they followed the lead of other companies and decided to share how they [...]

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[_n30_] put together a nice external storage mod by fitting a 2.5″ drive into a broken Game Boy. This mod fooled quite a few people because it appears that the device still plays games with the drive stuffed inside of it. Sadly, this is not the case. The reflective backing has been removed from the [...]

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