This Limited-Edition “Skeleton” HDD Shows You How It Writes Bytes

Digital retention shaper Buffalo is celebrating its 50th day with the limited-edition HD-SKL Skeleton HDD. It's an charismatic small showpiece—an outer hard thrust with a "window" that lets you spot the spinning platter and R/W head—but it appears to beryllium a Japan-exclusive item.

The HD-SKL Skeleton Disk Drive's enclosure is highly flashy, featuring achromatic machined aluminum lodging with golden accents, the aforementioned HDD "window," positive a mates of exposed wires the tally betwixt the thrust and its USB interface. This instrumentality sits successful an upright, tilted position, meaning that you tin spot the thrust rotation and twitch arsenic it reads and writes data. It'd beryllium a beauteous neat summation to immoderate desk.

And though its specs are honestly benignant of irrelevant, the HD-SKL sports a 4TB capableness and a USB 3.2 (Gen 1) Type-C interface. It and requires an AC adapter. Bufflo hasn't specified the transportation rate, though real-world velocity astir apt falls somewhere beneath 150MBps. This is simply a hard drive, aft all. Buffalo says that the thrust volition enactment with immoderate computer, beryllium it a PC oregon a Mac, though the company's SeekWizard bundle lone works connected Windows.

Interestingly, the HD-SKL is simply a nonstop descendent of Buffalo's 1998 Skeleton Hard Disk—a luxury instrumentality that was sold successful a constricted tally of 500 units, according to an aged Yahoo Japan auctions listing (I couldn't find a much authoritative source). The aged Skeleton Hard Disk was constricted to 4.3GB of retention and had a wide acrylic case, alternatively than a machined aluminum housing. Buffalo besides cites its 1978 Melco 3533 turntable arsenic a root of inspiration; I neglect to spot the resemblance, though the Melco 3533's open-air plan could beryllium loosely interpreted arsenic a precursor to the see-thru Skeleton HDD.

While I'm a large instrumentality of the HD-SKL, I honestly similar Buffalo's archetypal Skeleton Hard Disk. The fully-translucent plan of the 1998 exemplary is conscionable a ton of fun. The HD-SKL seems to person mislaid immoderate of its amusive origin successful favour of coolness, stylishness, luxury vibes—you get what I'm saying, right?

I'd besides emotion to cognize what's going connected nether the HD-SKL's aluminum frame. If you unscrew this thing, is determination a transparent thrust hiding inside, oregon does the aluminum lodging service arsenic the drive's chassis? And if idiosyncratic wants to reuse this thrust enclosure successful the future, volition they beryllium capable to swap successful a caller HDD? I conjecture it depends connected respective factors, similar whether the USB interface is soldered to the thrust oregon not. Of course, you'd besides request to teardrop isolated a perfectly bully HDD to implicit specified a transplant.

Unfortunately, Buffalo hasn't shown immoderate denotation that this HDD volition beryllium sold successful the United States, oregon anyplace extracurricular Japan, for that matter. And due to the fact that the HD-SKL is constricted to 50 units, it's taxable to a raffle system—each victor gets the accidental to stroke ¥100,000 (approximately $695 USD) connected the HD-SKL, and I presume that scalpers volition propulsion aftermarket prices acold higher. If you hap to beryllium successful Japan, you tin sign up for the raffle astatine the Buffalo website.

Source: Buffalo via Tom's Hardware