The ultimate backup device: HD with removable platters?

[FishTankX]

I think that would be the ultimate backup device. With most of the cost of a harddrive coming from the drive mechanisms, removable platters would probably cost 20$ each and hold 80GB a piece.

Would it be difficult to rig up a safe storage for a platter outside a HD, like.. say.. a minidisc/DVD-RAM-esque cartridge? Then have a 5 1/2 drive that could accept these cartridges and view them as giant removable storage?

 

[Shooters]

Think of all the idiots out there that have already figured out a way to break just about every component in a computer and then try to determine the likelihood of them opening a drive, removing a platter, replacing the platter, and then sealing the drive back up again without a trace of fingerprints or a speck of dust.

 

[hjo3]

How ever it was stored, the whole head assembly would have to be there inside the case with it (at which point, the thing is basically just a HD without a controller).

In my comp hardware class, they told us a head moving above a platter is like having the empire state building turned on its side and flown 5 feet above the ground at 500 miles per hour. So even the tiniest dust speck could scratch up the platter and make parts of it unreadable.

Removable platters... doesn't sound like such a good idea to me. Might as well stick with removable hard drives.

 

[FishTankX]

Hmm.. well, the key would be the casing. What would happen is that you would have a DVD-RAMish casing that would only be opened when inserted into the drive, via shutter. Then you would have a read-head decend onto the medium. Sure, it wouldn't be able to seek as quickly as a real harddrive, but the only thing such a thing would be useful for is mass storage and/or backup, in which it would thoroughly best DVD-writers in speed and capacity.

 

[FishTankX]

Just think ZIP with harddrive platters and less data density.

 

[ChefJoe]

Patent it, then claim that you invented it after someone else does all the R&D.

 

[dunkster]

An obvious and common solution is to buy an enclosure (Vantech, etc) that allows you to insert/extract separate hard drives. Several choices are offered by NewEgg, under hard drive accessories.

I almost did this myself, since I have a complete 98SE system installed on a 20GB HD and a complete XP system installed on an 80GB HD. Each HD is essentially a virtual machine.

Just power down, swap drives, power up.

Hope this helps!

 

[hjo3]

Hey, and if you do it w/ serial ATA drives, they'd be hot-swappable like real mass-storage media.

But the shutter idea? You're bound to end up with some kind of matter inside the drive if you do it that way. I think, in the end, you'd just have a removal hard drive (enclosure-style) with no controller circuitry and plastic casing (instead of metal). It might save some cash, but not much. And it'd have to be mass-produced to save on it at all -- it's not the kind of thing a modder with a soldering iron could build effectively. I mean, you'd prolly need at least a "clean room."

 

[sharkeeper]

This was already done. Syquest and Iomega had/have products like this. The Jaz and Syjet disks were indeed hard platters that had tremendous capacity at the time. The drives and disks were rather fragile and very susceptible to damage discounting real backup status.

-DAK-

 

[dkozloski]

CDC made drives like this 30 years ago but the platters were about 12" in diameter and weighed 5 lbs. There were about 4 or 5 disks in the stack and the capacity was about 40 MB. The housing incorporated 1u filters and the reliability was a great leap forward from the older PerTec drives they replaced. Even at that, the head crashes and data loss were too frequent for comfort. Syquest made 3.5" drives with removable platters but the failure rate was sufficient to drive them out of business. Enclosures for removable drives is about as close as you are going to get to the removable platter idea and still have any data integrity.