Working hard drive innards recorded at 1000fps, a thing of beauty

[Julio Franco]

Hard drives are more often than not taken for granted, and to be completely honest, we'll be the first ones to tell you upgrading to a much faster solid state drive is the perfect upgrade for any PC still relying on a standark disk drive. Having that said, it's easy to forget mechanical disk drives are pretty impressive technology.

A popular YouTube channel called The Slow Mo guys recently posted a video of a hard drive cracked open and then shot at 1000fps. Check out the video and judge for yourself.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/49023-working-hard-drive-innards-recorded-at-1000fps-a-thing-of-beauty.html

 

[Zoltan Head]

I think you would need faster than 1000fps to clock the electrons in a SSD!

 

[treeski]

Way cool, thanks for sharing.

 

[Kibaruk]

I only thought it would be cooler =(

 

[Guest]

The beauty of a relic in motion. lol

 

[SNGX1275]

I was going to say, I wonder how long that thing continued to work with its cover off. Then they dumped water on it and I had my answer. Still curious how long it would work without the cover on, I know the answer would likely be 'not very, unless it was in a clean room', but how long is 'not very'.

 

[Guest]

It would last a long time, the ****ing thing is hollow!

 

[Guest]

He should be using vodka and light it up to get nicer effects, maybe next time \m/

 

[p51d007]

Had they used deionized water, the mechanical nature probably would have continued. Being not sealed up, dust probably would destroy it first.
But, they are "correct" in as much as saying water (pure H2O) wouldn't bother it.
It is the impurities in water that would bother it. Haven't you seen those commercials where
they dunk a live operating television in a fish tank? (the older ones with a vacuum tube CRT). The TV continues to operate, because they use pure water, not tap water. Deionized water most likely won't bother electronics because at its purest form, it is non conductive.

 

[Camikazi]

I was going to say, I wonder how long that thing continued to work with its cover off. Then they dumped water on it and I had my answer. Still curious how long it would work without the cover on, I know the answer would likely be 'not very, unless it was in a clean room', but how long is 'not very'.

It will keep working as long as there is power, the question you want to ask is how long before it starts getting errors and is no longer usable to store information. My guess is quiet a while since I'm not sure dust will stick with the heads spinning at that speed but once they slow down or go idle then it's all over. Just an FYI but they fibbed in the video, that is not a 500GB HDD, the drive is a Quantum Fireball Plus LM 30GB.

 

[Guest]

Just for arguments sake, there is no such think as deionized water since when water is at equilibrium it still contains 1x10^-14 ions. Not a lot but still they're there...

 

[Guest]

[FONT=Helvetica]Zoltan Head[/FONT][FONT=Helvetica] electrons actually move very slowly, I could run faster than an electron moving round an SSD, in fact I could walk faster,.[/FONT]

 

[PC nerd]

It's beautiful.

 

[NightAngel79]

Awesome!

 

[Guest]

"Zoltan Head electrons actually move very slowly, I could run faster than an electron moving round an SSD, in fact I could walk faster," This is total baloney! Where did you get this garbage, did you just make it up? If you must contradict sensible posts, at least include a few facts, guest!

 

[Zoltan Head]

Yes, although I might use more circumspect language, that's right - where did you get this from? I accept that electrons are not all uniformly zipping around at half the speed of light, like the sportiest of their brethren, but they are pretty nippy you know!

 

[PC nerd]

Electrons... Slow?

Did your back-country school allow you to learn science? Or was it all creationism?

 

[cliffordcooley]

Electrons... Slow?

Did your back-country school allow you to learn science? Or was it all creationism?

You might want to retract that statement.

I personally don't know how fast a single electron can travel. What I do know is the speed of electricity and the speed of a single electron is two different things. Electricity is not the product of one electron but all the electrons within a conductive material. Electrons don't have to move fast to produce an electron flow of all electrons within the material. A magnetically charged field from the starting point to the finish point is what drives the flow of electrons. Once again, I don't know how fast this flow is but it allows for a simultaneous swap of electrons at the starting point and finish point.

 

[Doctor John]

I seem to recall from my uni Physics that they can go from effectively almost stationary (in a carefully applied magnetic field), to 99.999etc.% of the speed of light! So probably someone can walk faster than some electrons but not generally!

 

[Guest]

a relic? do you know what relic means? A HDD is far from a relic

 

[Guest]

an irrelevance? do you know what an irrelevance is?

 

[Zeromus]

Never get's old watching actuators.

 

[Guest]

The combined life of my 4 hard drives that are running 24/7 is according to S.M.A.R.T. data 16.6 years old. Eat that SSD, you got the speed, we got the reliability.

 

[PC nerd]

Yet my Samsung F3 only lasted 11 months

 

[Guest]

Stop beating up the guest!

Electrons in an electric field flowing along a copper wire can move incredibly slowly. Please see here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity

In this example the electrons move about 1m an hour - I can certianly walk that fast.