Obvious Diversion

Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital has created a hard drive with a transparent case so you can see the drive hard at work while it’s doing it’s job. It’s cool stuff and they brag like mad about it.

How We Did It
An engineering feat unrivaled in the annals of the hard drive industry. Discover how a select group of dedicated engineers gave you a view into the unknown.

Please. This sort of copy makes my eyes roll on their own accord. The true stories of geek lore that will go down in the annals of geek history will be the stories we pass from person to person that eventually become something so romantic as to seem like myth.

Back in 1998, when I was at Microsoft, I worked on the second floor of building 9. The cool part about this was that Microsoft Research, at the time, was on the first floor just below me and as a budding geek it was like living next to a candy store. It gave me the opportunity to occasionally head downstairs to enjoy a lecture from a random yet famous guest speaker. The other advantage is you would be walking back from lunch and find yourself pulled into a random office with a simple “Hey, you gotta check this out.”

On one occasion, one of the engineers had taken apart his drive, encased it in a clear material (lucite? I’m not sure.) and was unquestionably crowned the geek god of the week. It was one of a thousand moments that makes me happy I spent the time at Microsoft that I did. It was very much my initiation and that random geek in Research along with so many other people made that initiation incredibly worthwhile.

Back to the point though, I witnessed my first transparent drive in 1998, seven years ago. I think it’s laudable that Western Digital is smart enough to mass manufacture transparent drives for this niche market, but let’s be serious here. Western Digital isn’t breaking any new ground. They’re just taking something uber-geeks have been doing for years and putting some marketing around it.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that geek history and folklore belongs to the geeks and not to Western Digital’s marketing department.