Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive | Hacker News Reader

Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive

willwhang.dev

97 pointsvoctor31 comments

Still a great story, great page and impressive reverse engineering. Isn't OpenClaw vs. he did it "himself" a bit analogue to the critique "oh, he wrote the firmware in C++ and let the compiler figure out the assembly code".

Maybe you wanted to see the assembly code, and that's fine. But he took a potentially difficult problem, found tools to solve it and documented (to some degree) the process?

I remember my Nokia N91 which had a 4GB version of one of these tiny HDDs, blew my mind at the time.

Man do I miss the N-series, I had so many good phones in that era.

First time hearing about this. I just looked up that drive. That's genuinely amazing, and kind of adorable.

Worked on that phone. I diagnosed if music player cache was working by putting back of phone to my ear and listening for seeking clicks from hdd

Nice! I loved that phone, was one of my favourites. One of the only, if not the only phone I ever owned that had a metal shell that I an recall.

I had most of the N range, and was particularly interested in music ones, N95 was love/hate because the music button/reverse slide was so slow sometimes, and generally it just wasn't as good as N91 for music listening with its proper headphone jack placement, and always accessible controls.

What kind of magic did that HDD have that it could be thrown around like a phone typically is without the issues we would see if we'd handled a laptop with HDD the same way?

Had an accelerometer that turned off hard drive when motion detected. High end ibm thinkpads had that too. Turns out if seek head is parked properly, its fairly robust

N91 also had a ridiculously high quality DAC that beat pants off iPods of that gen.

I think I remember reading something about that at the time, the accelerometer thing, maybe it was in the manual.

Sounds quality was great and I loved the dock too.

yeah all phones were supposed to survive 2m drop test on concrete and still be able to make a call

Is there a video somewhere of the one inch microdrive with acrylic display shown in the article?

https://x.com/will_whang/status/2014960768249372845

Cool!

I found the old drive that worked with my Canon camera. It's a Hitachi 2GB Microdrive from 2003. It says CF+ Type-II. So larger, with a CompactFlash interface, boring in comparison.

More history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

I'm trying to remember the camera... Canon Powershot S1 IS maybe? It used a lot more battery running the microdrive.

Damn, now I want one just to de-lid one and put it on a shelf. Looks like eBay has plenty of these.

Tempting.

I wonder what material they used for the platter. I once took apart a 1.8" drive, and got a big surprise when the platter suddenly shattered. I was expecting aluminum, not glass/ceramic substrate.

Yes, glass was the typical substrate used in small HDDs, even in many of the 2.5" HDDs, e.g. in all the 2.5" HDDs that I had.

It is easier to ensure that glass substrates are perfectly plane and without any surface defects than for substrates made of aluminum alloy.

In 3.5" disks the risk of shattering becomes too great, so aluminum alloy is preferred.

I discovered that one day when I accidentally stepped on a removed 2.5" platter in bare feet :)

One of my most delightful discoveries of the early 2000s was that iPod Minis used Microdrives that were pin-compatible with CompactFlash cards. I had a little cottage industry in the back of my office upgrading my coworkers’ old iPods to use bigger, solid state disks. I still have my 256GB iPod Mini. Aside from battery life, it still runs fine, and it is by far my favorite music player form factor.

> ... "and it is by far my favorite music player form factor."

I really liked the old original iPod Nano myself. Had one for years that I was triple-booting RockBox (for extended media formats support and fancier interface), iPodLinux (for playing Doom and other toys), and the original iPod OS (just in case). Still haven't yet owned another device in that size / form factor that can do as much as that little thing did. Apple really did make some sweet devices back in the day... :)

Pretty sure I've got one of these in a 4GB USB package[0].

[0] I'm 99.9% sure it's not SSD/SRAM/Flash because I'm 99.9% sure it predates cheap [those] by years. But I'll have to dig it out and get the full USB/HDD info later to check.

"Coded by OpenClaw" written on PCB

was this necessary? could've said "Code written by LLM" or something

Sent from my BlackBerry Storm

I read that in Excel on my Nokia 9210

Lost me at the first OpenClaw mention.

Surprised me too. In the end, I guess it's a time-saving tool for a tedious task. But reduces the old-school grittiness of the adventure. Still an enjoyable read.

Why? It seems foolish to have a knee jerk reaction to someone using a tool that got them where they needed to be.

I suppose its a bit like winning a first person shooter game with aim assist on

It is not an authentic display of pure skill

That’s a good question, and I can’t speak for the parent, but for me, I like reading about a person’s journey of discovery. There were many insights this person did not have because he turned the task over to a power tool. People can use whatever tools they want. I also can spend my attention however I like. Reading about someone using AI is just boring to me.

Almost every commenter in this thread explained this better than I could.

It's a bit like watching a 2 hour movie about a knight who'd been preparing to save his beloved princess from a dragon for 1h 59s, and then the screen fades to black, the narrator proclaims that the dragon is done, the knight marries the princess and they live happily ever after. Closing credits!

I was not evicting expecting to see OpenClaw here either. It's out of keeping with the rest of the article...

At least there's acknowledgement of limitations and it's not just hype. Overall a useful data point in terms of what's possible.

I am not necessarily against AI, but in this case, I also lost interest at that point. I love reading about reverse engineering, and to me the first part of the article felt like it was leading up to that. But then it ended with what to me feels like "and then I asked AI to finish the project for me, which it did". That's not a criticism by the way, there's nothing wrong with the author using AI to reach a certain goal. I just don't find that interesting personally.

Felt this way too.

I may not have felt this way if the article had discussed this step in as much detail as the first steps - describing what was done by the agent rather than just that an agent was used and the results. It all felt a bit “then it drew the rest of the goddamn owl”.

I’m not sure though - part of the appeal of this kind of article for me is the description of the human emotions - the highs and lows of doing the task - and that would possibly still have felt missing.

Edit: Actually, now that I say that, there was a lot missing. How was the circuit designed, for example? How were components selected?

I did finish the article, but for me, it was missing a discussion and review, probably manual improvement, of the code that came out of the LLM. Reverse-engineering means understanding a system that you didn't previously understand, which is still (with some degradation) possible while using an LLM.

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