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First post, by Jed118

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So I came across this square display case for something or other. After examining it, I decided to put these (nonworking) hard disks into it:

1fI73ZGl.jpg

There's a Seagate Barracuda 10K SCSI, a 6.4Gb Bigfoot, a Miniscribe 20 Mb MFM, and a Conner drive out of a 425LTE. I've opened them all up, they will all spin up.

Here's a peek of what I'm on about:

BnIOx3El.jpg

First attempts at powering it:

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Now, I opened up the power supply to trim all the extra leads I will not be needing right at the PCB (basically all the ATX motherboard connectors) and I must have dropped a wire or some other conductive material because when I fired the power supply back on, it exploded and smoke came out. I could not find out where it was shorted, but I had already pre-drilled the holes for mounting it.

I found these though:

CkcK23kl.jpg

After taking a hammer to the casing, and removing them with the utmost precision, I soldered the grounds together and had myself +5v and +12v. The 12v power adapter is rated at 4A, and the 5v at 2.6A. I tested three drives (all but the small laptop Conner) and they all powered on without hesitation.

x5maqxEl.jpg

Sorry about the blurriness, I am working on this during 15 minute breaks and taking pics on an older smartphone.

Here they are both mounted on a piece of the plexiglass I cut out of the bottom of the display case. I drilled partial holes where the raised nut was for the old power supply's PCB and glued the assembly to that.

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I then ran an external (120v) switch and an internal white LED for the hell of it.

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Here it is so far:

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The switch is mounted on the top panel of the display case:

lz9VNmel.jpg

What's left:

-Mount the hard disks
-Power the hard disks, RGB LED and wire up individual switches
-Figure out how to punch a hole in the wooden base (not shown) so as to not damage the lazy Susan in the process.

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 2 of 5, by Jed118

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An update:

xMA1U2Hl.jpg

I got a real AT power supply and stuck it in the base (not yet shown). The one I made was unable to provide enough current to have all the drives spinning at once.

The hard drives all spin up and LEDs work. I have to do some cable management and it'll be ready to... make a lot of noise!

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 3 of 5, by Jed118

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Got it almost done:

https://youtu.be/lTxyFkq1r9k

What remains to be done:

-Align heads on the MFM drive enough so that it doesn't sound like a wet saw cutting ceramic tile (someone touched my display case)
-Label each drive's capacity, year of production, and interface type
-Clean up the wires a little more
-Attach a rubber foot for the base (it's uneven)

*edit if anyone wants to donate a Bigfoot that spins under its own power...

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 4 of 5, by Kerr Avon

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If you want to be really ambitious, try to make it look like Orac, the portable computer from Blake's 7*.

OracTV.jpg

orac.jpg

And here's Orac in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmjPk4hzRXM

(BTW, don't be fooled by the video's short length, each episode of B7 is around forty-eight minutes long, but despite having the program's opening sequence, that video is of the last few minutes of the last episode of the first season of the show).

* To my mind Blake's 7 is still the best television science-fiction program ever, despite it's slow start, it's almost non-existent budget, it's mostly terrible special effects, and some bad episodes. But at it's best it's superb, with great characters, dialogue and stories. How many other science fiction shows can you name that start with the hero being framed for child-abuse to discredit him with his followers, or where the main characters can and do die (and in Blake's 7, death is permanent, no pseudo-scientific bringing back a dead character, and there's no time travel in the program so the heroes can't be brought back via changing of the time-line)?