Inside The RLL Hard Drive Protocol

If you are younger than a certain age, RLL probably doesn’t mean much to you. Old consumer-grade hard drives used MFM (modified frequency modulation like a floppy disk uses) and soon went to …

Reviving An 8-Inch Hard Drive From The 1980s

As part of the eternal quest within the realm of retrocomputing, storage devices can be one of the most challenging, especially when it comes to firmly obsolete hard drives, such as the CDC Finch d…

“Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs

Drives automatically get a "warning" flag if powered on for 3 years.

Report: Most HDDs Die After Almost 3 Years,... | ExtremeTech

The study found that drives made before 2015 were more reliable than newer drives.

Western Digital starts selling 44TB of external HDD storage for $1,500

The 44TB offerings ship in RAID 0, but you can opt for a RAID 1 configuration.

A Look Back At The Xbox 360’s Hard Drive Security

Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are  becoming increasingly like set-top computers  —  equipped with USB ports, Blue…

Tiny Dongle Brings The Hard Drive’s Song Back To Updated Retrocomputers

Back in the “beige box” days of computing, it was pretty easy to tell what your machine was doing just by listening to it, because the hard drive was constantly thrashing the heads back…

3D Printer Upcycles Computer Case To DAS

Storage technologies are a bit of an alphabet soup, with NAS, SAN, and DAS systems being offered. That’s Network Attached Storage, Storage Area Network, and Direct Attached Storage. The DAS i…

Building A Serial Bus To Save An Old Hard Drive

Universal Serial Bus has been the de facto standard for sending information to and from computer peripherals for almost two decades, but despite the word “universal” in the name this wa…

HDD Centrifuge Puts COVID-19 Testing Lab In A Backpack

Throughout this two-year global COVID-19 nightmare, one thing that has been sorely lacking is access to testing. “Flu-like symptoms” covers a lot of ground, and knowing if a sore throat…

Controller Swaps Can Save An HDD If You Do It Right

Hard drives are fragile and reliable all at once. It’s entirely possible to have a hard drive fail, even if your data is still in perfect condition on the magnetic platters inside. [Keith She…

Transparent Hard Drive Gives Peek At The Platters

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are all the rage these days, and for good reason. But that doesn’t mean the era of the spinning disk is over, as traditional mechanical hard drives still offer a com…

Hackaday Links: May 16, 2021

With the successful arrival of China’s first Mars lander and rover this week, and the relatively recent addition of NASA’s Perseverance rover and its little helicopter sidekick Ingenuit…