Hard drive in slow motion

The Slo-Mo Guys -- a YouTube channel filled with fast things in slow motion -- have a go at a hard drive. It's pretty amazing on its own -- seeing that blurred, too-fast-to-follow arm slowed down is like kung-fu bullet-time for electronics. But once they start splashing water on the mechanism? Woah.

How a Hard Drive works in Slow Motion - The Slow Mo Guys (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Gary61

smoked it …..
and bogarted it, too.
dr

I just happen to have looked at this yesterday, and now here they are on BB. What a coincidence! Or not. Yesterday I’d searched on “HD”, looking for material with which to test a new video system. The video was pushed on my because of some ranking algorithm within the search engine. Likewise I assume Cory discovered the video because it appeared early in some search, either his own or one by someone who then sent the link to him. The video is cool, but the “coincidence” reminds me of how powerfully search engines concentrate the range of choices and effectively shrink the information ecosystem.
hughstimson

Every few days it occurs to me that, here in 2012, so much of my electronically mediated life still depends on little spinning disks being read and written at insane speeds by what amount to incredibly accurate record player needles.

In my laptop, in my portable harddrive, even in the ipod I’ve been dropping and tossing around for 5 years. Crazy.

This is an excellent reveal of that weirdness.
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  This thought has occurred to me ever sine I found out how a hard disk drive worked, and it has always, always bugged me.
http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe

Did it occur to them that they could fry whatever it was attached to, since there’s some voltage on the USB cable?

Oh, that’s right. People who do this sort of thing have money to burn. And, I guess, insurance to cover that sort of stupidity.
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  Idiots!
- Spezz
  
  They probably used distilled water.
dutchs

If you were totally knowledgeable about the technology and were on an island or planet with adequate resources and a cooperative populace, you might be able to build a crude car or a primitive airplane in your lifetime.

We are now dependent on technology that we cannot rebuild from scratch if we lose the capability. It will take us as long as it did to develop the technology in the first place.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=513319213 Matt Cooper

That’s not a 500GB hard drive. It was manufacturered by (and sounds exactly like) a Quantum hard drive. Quantum is from the 90′s and was sold to Maxtor in 2001.

Why even say what size it is? That was dumb. And you’re showing the ‘slow mo’ of the drive just performing an initialization, not actually reading or writing any data whatsoever.