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Hard Drive Art!

I

imaketouchtheme

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 5, 2007
1,097
4
Check out the post on my blog!

Unconventional Hacker

Well, I was at my friend's house the other day and we had a client's computer to repair. He complained that the computer BSOD'd on startup, so I figured a quick format and reinstall would fix it. Well, we pinpointed the problem to being a corrupted hard drive as not even the Setup for Windows XP/Vista would load. We tried the hard drive in multiple computers and we had the same error. So, we put in another hard drive from a computer we had laying around and it was good to go. Well, now what do you do with a hard drive that spins up but is corrupted? Take it apart of course!

We took apart the top casing of the hard drive to expose the spinning disk and read/write head. We plugged it up to an extra power supply we had and watched it spin at 7200RPM. I then decided to take a screwdriver and place it on there while it was spinning, it made some crazy noises and made a cool looking effect on the disk. Then I thought of a magnificent idea.

Now to the good stuff!

I went and got four bottles of paint (black, white, red, and yellow) and decided to squirt it on there as it was spinning. It made some extremely cool looking patterns and was really neat while spinning. We unplugged the hard drive to see the prettiest art you will ever see on a hard drive.

Here's a picture!

3669265176_aa9d4746f1_b.jpg


A bunch more pictures can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35789582@N00/sets/72157620686380332/show/with/3669265176/

We also took a video, but that didn't turn out too well. :p

Tell me how you think it looks or if you have any comments, post away!
 
Thanks again guys! It was actually pretty simple to do as well. Also, I tried to take the pictures with as high as quality as possible to make them wallpaper sized. ;)
 
Pretty damn cool. :) Hard drives are pretty cool to look at in general...I saw a really great photo of one in an exhibit a few weeks ago, the metal skin had been gouged open and then peeled back to reveal the shiny disk inside. The paint was probably more fun though!
 
I was just telling someone at work about these pictures I took and I forgot how awesome these are.
 
I haven't seen carnival booth style spin art in a couple decades kind of a cool way of modernizing the medium.

When I was a little kid we used to go to the carnival and do these I worked for a couple days at one of those booths when I was 9 too:

Blotter_explosion-spin_art.jpg
 
Nice enough, but totally pointless as you can't see it once it's gone back into the machine.
I like "Damien Hirst's" version of this, where he spins very large pieces of canvas and drops dollops of paint on it.
 
Keniff said:
Nice enough, but totally pointless as you can't see it once it's gone back into the machine.
I like "Damien Hirst's" version of this, where he spins very large pieces of canvas and drops dollops of paint on it.
Click to expand...
Why would you put a hard disk with a painted platter back in the computer? What good would that do you?
 
That reminds me of an old toy I had. I believe it was called wizard art. You would put a sheet of paper in what looked like a salad dryer and spin, adding paint as you desired and it would make neat designs.
 
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