I decided to put the assembly inside a small case I have for portability. Using the sound amplifier out of an old set of pc speakers, I am able to have a stereo setup with two harddrives. The right channel hdd speaker has a single platter and the left channel has 3. It was interesting to watch how the different sized r/w heads responded to different frequencies and volume levels.

It is a lot easier to make this work than you are probably thinking. It is as easy as hooking up the speaker or headphone cables from your computer straight to the two wires that move the read/write head back and fourth. With the read/write arms having coiled wire between two strong magnets (opposite side of the read/write heads), they act just like speakers do. Just less efficient. Sound is created by the arm moving back and fourth, thats it, no movement of the platter at all. After looking at one of my harddrives I easily traced the two wires that controlled the arm. They are pin’s 5 and 6 in this picture.

Those pins continue on through the hard drive case to the circuitry underneath. I pulled off the original circuit board and cut down a floppy drive connector to easily connect to the hard drive. Cutting off all of the wires except for pins 5 and 6 was my last step in preparing the hard drive, those wires went to the positive and negative from the pc speaker amp.

The triple platter drive produces quite a bit more sound but is less responsive. Since it is getting the same power as the other arm but weighs more that does make sense. The tricky part was to get the arm out from the platers so that I could bend the heads to prevent vibrations.

The single platter arm moves more through songs and other tone tests. However, it produces maybe 65% the amount of sound that the larger arm does. Neither arm preform well with deep sounds. High tones or what I call 8-bit tunes sound great, I’d dare say better than regular speakers.

The single platter drive is on the left and the triple platter is on the right. It is amazing to me how fingerprints seem to magically appear on open hard drives.

Here is the tripple platter hard drive playing a RadioHead Nude hardware remix (original video after mine)

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Now that the summer months are approaching, I started monitoring the temperatures more closely. I am not happy at all with the temps that the hard drives are reporting back but they really do not surprise me. A change is in order and I have decided to move them out from the top of the attic to down next to the central heating and air unit.

Ok. I might have been able to take pictures of the building process but just didn’t. Here is the completed unit in place. Each 2×4 will suport a shelf that will have a pc on it. One shelf per pc, I went ahead and made 4 shelves for future expansion but for now the extra shelf with hold the batter backup and network switch. You might recognize the black 6 fan holder from the Water Cabinet project, probably because that is where I got it from. I took the 12v inverter you see sitting on the bottom shelf and cut the end off of it to power the fans, it works very well and provides plenty of ventilation for the case.

I went ahead and added the first shelf, On it I have screwed down the motherboard, power supply, floppy drive, and hard drive of the web server. It is a 600mhz 382mb 40gig Pentium III system.

Inside the webserver before.

The second shelf is the 1ghz 256mb 750gig Pentium III File Server. I use it to backup my music, dvd and data disks.

Inside the fileserver before the case upgrade.

This case is extremely heavy duty, I really do not remember where I got it but it has held no less than 5 different pc’s since I’ve owned it.

Using some cardboard and more duct tape I made a nice little duct for the air to flow directly onto the processor.

My goal was to try and get as much airflow over the hard drives and processor as I could. The side duct handled the processor but I still needed to work on the airflow for the harddrives. By adding additional slots in the front I could get greater air flow.

Behind the slits I cut a hole in front of the harddrives. Also I put some duct tape over the existing holes so that all air is directed over the harddrives. This lowered temperatures by about 8deg F.

The rack so far. Notice the duct tape for an extra air-tight seal.

Finally on the top shelf is the Firewall. It is a 300mhz 128mb 10gig Pentium II. I installed Smoothwall on it and have had no problems. Not long ago I “upgraded” it to the 10 gig hard drive for more cache space, which noticeably improves webbrowsing. The floppy drive is used for setting backups and worked great when I decided to change hard drive size. Smoothwall can be installed on a 1 gig drive and I would recommend installing it on a Compact Flash drive or SSD because of the reduced power consumption. I will probably end up going that route later on.

Inside the firewall before the case change.

Notice how I zip-tied two Pentium II heat sinks together to try and keep the processor as cool as possible.

Other side.

The back of the firewall had a spot for a 90mm fan but I put some duct tape over it to redirect the air flow as best I could. Same with the PCI slots.

I went ahead and set the switch in the bottom shelf and still need to attach the back and top before I can slide the filter in.

The final product. I used a 20″x30″x1″ Filter to keep dust and other particles out, It should be easy to clean and this system is a prototype of sorts for me to try this idea out. You can see one cable coming out of the front in this picture but it is soon to be moved to the small hole I

have in the bottom shelf for cables.