Well it’s time to add my Clear Hard Drive mod to the site, this mod has been featured on many sites all over the internet. I went through a lot of work for this mod. I didn’t just slap a piece of plexi onto a hard drive, I examined the hard drive and went about it logically and found that layers of plexi would work best.  Some of you may have seen this before, but to others it is new. To those that have seen it before, I have added a bunch of new pictures that I took recently, they are much better quality than the first set. The movies are still there of course…

(What follows is the original worklog, after that is the original pictures on the following pages)

Well I have decided to attempt to replace the cover of a hard drive with plexi glas, to show the spinning and movements etc.

Oh and you can click the pics to see a BIG picture!!

The victim is an old Western Digital Caviar hdd 1281.9 MB (or 1.2gig)

Ok course it has Torx screws in it, No big deal!

We don’t want the drive platters to get dusty do we?

So I went and bought two pieces of 8×10 plexi, 1/8 inch thick

Well it turns out I did not really need two pieces, I got three pieces out of one

The idea I came up with was layers of plexi, because if you look at the inside cover it is cut out, for the various parts of the drive…

I am re-using the original screws, so I am using layer 1 as the bottom layer, which will hold the cover on,when all layers are glued together….

Here are pics of layer one after an hour of so of fiddling around with it..

Ok, that fits fine on the drive (tested it of course)..

On to layer 2…cut for platter and arm

Next will be gluing them together, with of COURSE WELDBOND!!!!!

Next comes actually gluing them together, used a cheapy paint brush to apply, the glue has the consistency of Elmer’s School Glue… here are pics with clamps in place, I put the screws in, to make sure the holes lined up, takes approx 1 hour to dry…

I realize now, I need to buy more Spring clamps…

Now layer 3, top layer… I did a little Creative etching also.

Ok, now I made a mistake… sort of my fault, I guess I should have been paying better attention, I was supposed to buy CLEAR silicon caulk, but someone stuck a WHITE tube in with the clear stuff, and OF COURSE I grabbed the white !!!!And this fact I didn’t realize until I opened the tube!!!!!!!!!!

So I used it anyway, it doesn’t look that bad, when it fully dries I will shave the bumps/ridges down a little bit….. Normally on hdd’s the blow hole/breather hole is on the top, but this was in the side, so I put the hole in the same place this time also….. You really can’t see the hole, if you look close you can…

But here are pics assembled,and caulked…let it dry for a while and then POWER it up and see.

AHAHAHAHA I did it!!

Here is POST shot, recognizing drive

And here is Windows Disk MGMT shot, with drive reading as HEALTHY!!

OK.. MOVIE TIME… Ignore the commentary, and the noise in background is case fans, I have side cover off…

The movies are large, used mpg1 format, the first one is 21mb and the second is 10mb, if you are on dial up still, sorry for you…

Movie1     Movie2

Sorry for so small, it lets me pick the size dimensions, but it doesn’t work!

Ok, I promised new pictures and here they are, these were taken just a few days ago, and yep the hard drive still works fine

not that I have much use for a 1gig hard drive and all… but here they are, lots of them… I also colored in the white caulk a bit to make it not so white, used a black sharpie, good for everything! This was a fun and interesting mod to do!