Hey guys, I want to mod my HDD's so that the spinning drives are visible behind glass, or plastic

Hey guys, I want to mod my HDD's so that the spinning drives are visible behind glass, or plastic.
How would I go about opening them so that I don't lose any data.
I already have a made a 3D printer shell.

Most of em you need special drivers to get into, usually torx or some variant. Your enemy is dust. One spec of dist on the platters and you can get a head crash, drive's gone.

That said I have seen this mod done before. The guy who did it said to open the drives in the bathroom after running the shower hot, said that humidity forced dust out of the air. No idea if that's true or bro science. However you plan to house the drives, it should be airtight except for a little heavily-filtered hole for pressure equalization, like the drives themselves normally are.

But you should assume that once you've opened the drives, they are completely untrustworthy and may die catastrophically at any time. Make backups.

>That said I have seen this mod done before. The guy who did it said to open the drives in the bathroom after running the shower hot, said that humidity forced dust out of the air. No idea if that's true or bro science.
Just to comment on this. I've done this for screen protectors, and while it helps it's definitely not a guaranteed dust-free environment then. It really depends on your house and how clean the bathroom is and stuff.
When you're doing it it would also still be relatively humid, I don't know if that would fuck up drives.

just go to a hospital toilet that's near one of the wards (not the main entrence)

>torx
>special
kek

They should (should, not will) be fine so long as you don't power them up while there's any condensation anywhere. keep them in a dry area for quite a while if there is.

and lets emphasize again, "opening up a hard drive" and "not losing data" are fundamentally incompatible operations. there is a good chance you'll kill the drives no matter what precautions you take. If you can't deal with that then don't do it.

he could just leave one of those anti-condensation/humidity bags inside the drive when closes it

good idea.

just OC your hard drives m8

Useless high risk mod that has a high chance of destroying your HDD. Why not just flush your money down the toilet?

Also keep in mind that on some drives the top plate keeps the disk and the heads aligned. Screwing those drives can already cause a crash.

What a waste.
I don't understand why anyone would want to do this.

This is a bad idea.

If you have the itch to mod a drive then why not just do this to a SSD?

Probably because watching heads moving and platters spinning has an interesting wow factor, but the inside of an SSD is just some flash chips that looks pretty much like any other PCB.

Don't do this unless you have a clean-air enclosure, both when you open them, and where you place them.

In fact, if you're asking questions like this on Sup Forums, I'd recommend not even trying.

What? Sacrificing some cheap disks for a neat piece of technology? Even if they wont work it would still look cool spinning.

>Even if they wont work
OP clearly wants them to work, however. It's not just so it looks pretty.

This won't work unless you got a cleanroom

HDDs have to operate at a specific air pressure. They will just die if the pressure isn't right. And even a small spec of dust will kill it.

tl;dr: you will kill the drive. guaranteed.

OP, look at old(ancient) drives. Those are pretty basic, don't require much care and would work pretty well. The older the better.

Of all the things killing drives i don't think air pressure will do it.

>Of all the things killing drives i don't think air pressure will do it.
That's actually the most important thing. HDDs work because there's a small layer of air atoms between heads. You must provide properly sized breather hole. You will never get this right.

They have holes for pressure equalization you know, the pressure inside a drive isn't constant

Are you blind or stupid? Look above.

The size of the "breather hole" wouldn't change the pressure lol.

I didn't say the ones in the pic were a good idea, fuckface

If the hole is bigger there will be less pressure, if the hole is smaller there will be more pressure.

some drives won't have the room for that

retard confirmed. thanks for clarifying it.

Literally no. It equalizes no matter how big or small it is. l2 physics.

not worth it, too risky of dust other other debris as others have said
disk repair takes a lot of equipment to keeps safe, you're gonna take a lot of risks without that

Protip: your picture is a hard drive speaker set, not functioning storage disks. But hey, who am I to tell you not to fuck up perfectly good hard drives.

It takes more force to force more stuff through a hole at once.

Take a syringe and make the hole smaller, gets fucking harder to push in doesn't it?

That would only be true if the drive is always spinning, if the drive is starting and stoping then the pressure that the drive is exposed to would be wrong.

not when you have moving air. Mechanical drives push and pull air as they actuate, changing the size of the hole would change the throughput of air and add resistance to the drive's motion.

I often open dead drives up, but never when I want to keep the data. Backup your data.

Make sure the new enclosure is air-tight, and dustless. Do this in a clean of a clean-room environment as you can.

Since this is purely for aesthetic purposes, why don't you garbage pick some PCs, pull their drives, and use those instead? Make sure there's no good porn/personal info on them before modding, of course. That way you get drives you don't care about for your display, and dont' risk your real data.

>One spec of dist on the platters and you can get a head crash, drive's gone.

I opened several working HDDs and you wouldn't believe the amount of dust that was inside and on the platters. I was really surprised that drives even worked.

yeah i have opened those also, you can stop baiting

Or deconstruct + rebuild the HDD in a vacuum chamber

>Put hard drives in metal case in plastic
>Data retention forever crippled because of exposure to interference

Consider the data lost when you start unscrewing the first bolt. You must backup your whole disk on a reliable (ideally redundant) storage medium.

Also you'll need a clean room

Also you must tighten the bolts to the required torque (which you have to find out about first) with some kind of torque wrench or your HDD won't work.

It's very difficult and chances of success are low. Also, even though if you actually get it done you should expect the disk to fail anytime. Dust could be trapped in the case somewhere and crash your disk at a random time.