The Buffalo Skeleton Hard Disk puts the inner workings of a 4TB hard drive on display. | Image: Buffalo
To help celebrate the 50 years its parent company has been in business, Japan’s Buffalo has announced a limited edition external hard drive with a window that lets you see its inner workings. Don’t whip out your credit card just yet, though; the Buffalo Skeleton Hard Disk is limited to just 50 units priced at 100,000 yen each (around $695) and is only available for purchase starting in June via a lottery.
The Skeleton Hard Disk mounts a 4TB drive inside a machined aluminum housing with a small window attached to a display base weighing about 3.3 pounds. Its gold and anodized black finish is an homage to a retro Melco (Buffalo’s parent company) record player, which was first released in 1978.
Try as you might, you’re probably not going to be able to squeeze the HD-SKL into a gaming PC without reaching for an angle grinder. It’s designed to be a display piece, and features a power connector on the back as well as one of those USB 3.2 Micro-B ports that’s wider and flatter than a standard USB-A port.
If you’d rather not wait for the drive to come to life while moving data to or from it, Buffalo has an accompanying piece of software called SeekWizard (for Windows users only, although the HD-SKL works with both PCs and Macs) that will make its read arm move in various patterns. These include modes simulating regular movements while the drive is accessing data, or making it function like a ticking metronome or a timer. It’s fun, but making the drive perform for you at will may be one of the reasons Buffalo only lists a one-month warranty.
The Buffalo HD-SKL isn’t the first hard drive to reveal what’s going on inside while it’s operating. It’s actually a follow-up to the 4.3GB Skeleton Hard Disk Buffalo first released in 1998, which had a fully transparent housing that put all of its electronic components on display. At CES 2006, Western Digital launched a 150GB serial ATA drive called the Raptor X with a similar design to the new HD-SKL that used a small window to reveal a portion of its interior.
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Instead of defragmenting my drive, I’d want to fragment it, just to watch that thing dance
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I don’t like the window on my computer case because it makes me face the fact that I’ve let a fuck ton of dust build up inside. I don’t want to see it inside the moving parts too. NEXT!
Is this something people are interested in?
I love retro scifi stuff and cyberpunk, and this is basically the useful version of that. It’s stupidly expensive, but also extremely awesome.
Unironically, yes. I’d buy this for the price tag listed and enjoy seeing it do stuff on my desk.
You’re not satisfied with the little disk activity LED?
Nah, I wanna see what it’s doing. The page OP linked had a video and I think it looks awesome. I wouldn’t get the app to make it do tricks, but I’d wanna watch it throughout the day.
I mean, it is a nice looking little piece to decorate your desk, plus some utility with it, but $700? Meh, maybe if it was just premium product, rather than a 1 of 50 collectable, and like $100 more expensive than a normal drive for the fancy adds.
