"blue light special"... yeah... they are blue. I know some peeps think that blue has been way overdone, but I think that blue just has been way overdone poorly. When I'm done with this, blue will be the new white! -TZ
i believe they are blue LED's... it would be nice to see the inside of a hdd working... i hope urs stays working for longer that a few months... just make sure u totally seal it up and just to be safe dont put any vital data on the disk that u dont want to lose... you could put a copy of ur OS on there and make it the main one... then you can make it light up when its being used...
OK, it's done. These two images are before I hooked up the LEDs, but you can see the red & black wires hanging down. To keep them from looking stupid and hanging out of the case... I wraped them as tightly as possible. I decided to pull power directly from the molex connector... the two OUTER connectors are +5V and +12V, and when the +5V is used as the ground, it provides 7V. In the second image you can see the soldering job... much better than I did on the LEDs themselves... but then again the LEDs were MUCH MUCH smaller! Now installed with the Blue LEDs running. I'm very dissapointed in the intensity of the LEDs... they are extremely bright, but I think my mounting location is bad. There is a built in bracket inside the drive, where the silica bag was stored... and with just a TINY bit of trimming, the LED circuit board slipped right in! However, this means that most of the LED light is being trapped between the two disks. So I'm not sure what to do to brighten it up. I could re-locate them to the area near the reading arm that is unused, but I'm not sure it would do much better there. Should I change it or leave it? -TZ
Oh, and I forgot the best part... All the data is still on the drive. I'm running a scandisk now, but I don't see any problems with the drive so far. I'm a little bugged because the acrylic seems to show fingerprints very It allways looks dirty, but it's all outside of the drive. edit: ha ha... yup. Scandisk reports no erros! -TZ
cool... the only thing i could suggest about the LED's is either put a couple more in or reposition them
I guess if it survives for a few months... I'll re-position the LEDs... I'm just terrified to open it again after getting it successfully closed. -TZ
instead of openig it up again and possibly destroying it.. why no just call it "the mark 1" and possibly do another one some time in the future and make it look better... a lot of people do this with their mods every now and then...
You loser TranZam! You do a hard drive window and don't invite me to come up! I've always wanted to do a window, have like 10 old hard drives, and you don't invite me. Loser! Looks really cool though. I agree with what others said, that can be a dry run. Like I said I've got plenty of "donor" drives available for #2 with more LED's (or at least better placed). Only on the condition you invite me to join in! BTW I should get you to host pics of my green machine so I can show it here.
Email me your greenmachine pics and I'll host 'em for ya... Dont' feel too bad about missing out on that drive... I think it died tonight... a record 2 days of psudo-use (it was hooked up but not really read/writing much)... I'll plug it back in later to see if perhaps it just overheated, but I think it's dead. Call me sometime and we'll hack a few of your drives for fun. I've got plenty of acrylic left over too. I've got a few good ideas on how to make the lights glow better, but i've only got 2 left, so we may need to buy some more. Also, if you have a couple of 2 position hdd cables we can hack up, I have a killer idea on how to hook up the LEDs so they flash like an activity light. -TZ
I'll throw them on a CD for next time I see you... That sucks the drive died. What do you think went wrong with your mod? And lets definitely hit my drives. They are just sitting there waiting to be modded! I also have some clear and neon green 1/8" acrylic for us to use. Unless you want to help me mod my empeg? I'm thinking replace the metalwork with plexi. Not permanent, but just for some pics.
I think the LEDs were causing too much heat inside the drive... I'm going to plug it in again today and see if it's working again... I usually leave my system running, and the drive was heating up pretty good just sitting there. Also, the Plexi works like an insulator, where the steel cover helped disapate the heat... I may have to pop a resistor in there to decrease the voltage a bit... but 5V was too little and 7 seems like too much... what to do. -TZ
