cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40679506
So for Friday night, myself and my friends got rather board. And as the resident "Things collector" i got 2 Maxtor touch sense 2 external hardrives. However those who were alive in 2000's know Maxtor went bankrupt and haven't made hardrives for a very long time. One of these drive i got BRAND NEW, in box at a flea market. sadly time got to the platters first, i spent a few hours trying to reformat or partition them and all i got was write errors. I tried different utility's with no avail and decided to cut my losses, so i asked the boys what we should do with them? Immediately my friend had an idea, to bring out his 9mm and see how a hardrive would fair! We all took turns and they were pretty hard to hit (we made the mistake of drink soda before hand). We eventually landed some shots on the center of the drives and MAN it actually stopped 2 bullets!!!
going into this we all expected the disk to be unreadable after the fact, but didnt think the hardrives would stop a 9mm bullet!!
We then took the hdd's apart after are volley of bullets, and alot of the chips were damaged and all the platters were bent. But when we took off the top case, it looked so freakin cool i had to keep it
Those old school drives were built like tanks.
I still have a few ~100MB drives in my things and you can feel the difference in quality compared to today.
I always wondered what would happen if you shot them lol. Thanks for satisfying an age old curiosity.
I have a 250MB in aluminum container HD from 2005ish. Still works AFAIK.
Might be fun to stress test it, but I expect the discs inside would shatter from shocks before the case ever showed signs of wear.
There's an old school program called spinrite that is designed to stress test them and gives you a little report at the end.