trvl2.com

trvl2.com is the travel website of Véronique and Thomas Lauer.

We're a UK-based French-German couple, slightly older than we'd like to be but still serviceable. These days we are spending a lot of time on the road … to do what we like most:

Go travelling!

Other Things

Thinking of our next destination: Italy and Portugal come to mind, or maybe the time has finally come for a US road trip…

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What's this?
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Other Stuff

Not much here yet.

But there's a video showing the innards of an old hard disk, cover removed, while it is working. I bought this disk, an ancient 512MB (yes, MEGABYTE) Maxtor drive, some time in 1995 and it has worked flawlessly ever since. However, in this age of multi-GB USB sticks, who needs a clunky 512MB drive?

So I did what I always do with my obsolete old drives: I opened it, violating the warranty in the process, and had a closer look. It's a 3.5 inch, two platter design with four read/write heads. Then I thought that, even opened, the drive might still work.

So I connected the hard disk to my PC, with the help of an old IDE/USB interface. And lo and behold! this drive DID still work! In fact, it worked for quite a while, more than 20 minutes, while I watched the heads doing their dance and shot a few videos. The whole thing felt a little like open heart surgery… :-)

I've now removed the drive but I am sure it still works. Trusty old Maxtor!

The video is below, you'll need an HTML5-compatible browser to watch it. You can also download it in its full 1920x1020 glory (MP4, around 15MB).

Have fun!

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