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Can you OC/mod your harddrive for better rpm?

troyrae360

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Was wondering if you can overclock or mod the harddrive to increase speed?
 

r9

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I don`t think so. But if it was possible it would be awesome. hdd 320 GB 7200@9000 rpm :D
 

troyrae360

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yea, it would save a few hundred dollars on raptors, lol
there must be a way!!!! some sort of vold mod to the motor or sumthing
 

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All I can think of is a couple higher density-per-platter disks (i.e. wd6400aaks, or 3200aaks and the seagate variants) in Raid0, though seek times will still be around the 12-14ms range, reads and writes will be pretty damn good. But as-far-as overclocking an HDD, better get on that tech engineering degree! It would be cool to see though.

:toast:
 
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Problem being that the board you see on the back of the HDD takes the same volts. You'd be overvolting everything, and HDD's are one of the first things to die during a power surge...
 

Sonido

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There's a way, technically... You could increase the voltage going to the motor, but the read/write speeds would suffer massive faults.
 
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The only thing I think you could do is increase the rpms, which is exactly what you can't do. Not that it'd be worth it anyways, raptors are often beaten or tied with newer 7200 rpm drives.
 
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if it were possible, it would already be done by someone but yeah, it would be funny.

now i see a use for watercooled hdd :D
 
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It wouldn't work to just speed up the platter. The heads would have to move faster, and there's no guarantee that the circuitry on the board would be able to keep up without burning out. Until they start making multi-phase regulated HDD's, it simply won't be a possibility.

I'd be interested though in a 4 platter 2TB drive with 4+1 phase power regulation though. :D
Throw a waterblock on there, and you'd be all set. Imagine some of the crazy OC'ers with their LN2 HDD pots!
 

Charper2013

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Was wondering if you can overclock or mod the harddrive to increase speed?

Yes you can do that at easy ..... study hard .. become specialist .. get a work at hard drive makers , and them you will able to mod hard drives in general , and make money too .

But there is no time , mechanical drives will get out of business , in the next decade or so.
 
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There's a way, technically... You could increase the voltage going to the motor, but the read/write speeds would suffer massive faults.
Absolutely not. These are very delicate motors. Voltage doesnt affect the speed. Think of your skool physics lesson: AC motors. Its the AC frequency, and how the motor is wound (number of magnets, coils, etc) that determines the speed. Not voltage.

Same principle applies here, even though the spindle motors in a HDD are DC motors. They are servo-controlled. It would be the servo-control mechanism that would require modification; not forcing additional volts at the motors.
 
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You can up your speed with HD Tune Pro...But its not compatible with a lot of harddrives!!
 

imperialreign

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it might be possible to adjust some settings if you could tweak the firmware for the HDD . . .
 

Sonido

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Absolutely not. These are very delicate motors. Voltage doesnt affect the speed. Think of your skool physics lesson: AC motors. Its the AC frequency, and how the motor is wound (number of magnets, coils, etc) that determines the speed. Not voltage.

Same principle applies here, even though the spindle motors in a HDD are DC motors. They are servo-controlled. It would be the servo-control mechanism that would require modification; not forcing additional volts at the motors.

How are you going to increase the freq' without raising the voltages?
 

imperialreign

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How are you going to increase the freq' without raising the voltages?

If I remember my basic electronics correctly (forgive any mistakes, I haven't had to actually *think* about electronics operation in a long while) . . . with AC, typically if you increase the frequency, it ends up lowering the voltage carried by the current.

But, he's trying to explain how HDD motors operate by equating their operation to AC current . . . which is indeed similar. Sure, a HDD itself relies on DC current provided via the PSU, but the internal servo that operates the motor "pluses" the motor up to speed. Most dynamic electronic components (such as most brush and spindle motors) produce a massive electronic load at spin-up, pulling many more amps than they actually need to operate. By pulsing a motor up to it's idle RPM, you lower the amount of amps it want's to pull, and the amount of load it places on it's circuit - and here's where you get to the analogy. The servo "plusing" the motor is directly similar to the frequency of AC current. Increasing the voltage to the servo will not change the frequency at which it pulses the motor up to speed - you would need to change the operation of the servo itself . . . sometimes this can be done at the firmware level, but it depends on manufacturer design as well.
 
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