WD ships 300MBps SATA II drive

Kilamon · Rated XXX Joined: 22 Mar 2005 Posts: 811

Western Digital has begun shipping desktop hard drives supporting the Serial ATA II standard, the hard drive specialist said yesterday. It also launched a pair of external drives pitched at case-modders and consumers, respectively. Western Digital NetCenter and Extreme Lighted externalThe 250GB Caviar SE16 drive provides a burst data transfer rate of 300MBps - three times faster than IDE drives, WD claimed. The unit also features 16MB of cache memory and spins at 7200rpm. - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/19/wd_drive_trio/

You know, this got me to thinking... we all have hard drives in our cases and most of us have a window or something. PSUs are coming out in mirror finishes and we've got UV reactive cables but hard drives are mostly the same as they have been for years. Has anyone considered making their hard drives as cool looking as the rest of the case?

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

I've seen some mods people have done to them, but you're right and that's something I always wondered.

Why not do a HD that the faster it spins the brighter the LED gets, or flashes faster, etc.

Or hell, even a CLEAR HD would be REALLY awesome!

IceNine · Posted: Thu, 19 May 2005 12:06:46 Post Subject:

Clear would be cool to look at, but isn't the metal case useful as a magnetic shield?

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 19 May 2005 12:15:03 Post Subject:

There are a few mod write ups out there of windowed hard drives. Its not worth it to me, as just the tiniest spec of dust or warped metal getting in there will have your drives grind to a halt as soon as you fire up your system.

Enforcer · Posted: Thu, 19 May 2005 12:55:28 Post Subject:

I've seen mods where they apply some chemicals and basically buff the metal casing to a mirror like finish. Other than that unless its built in at the manufacturer, like BB said, any speck of dust and its over.

IceNine · Posted: Thu, 19 May 2005 12:57:39 Post Subject:

God I love these pics: http://iceteks.com/articles.php/hddmaint/2