Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our trusted gaming gear partner is corsair vengeance and our trusted retail partner is NCIX calm all right guys we're kicking off our day 1 coverage of computex 2013 in our home base and the WD booth don't forget we are giving away a ton of cool stuff courtesy of Western Digital after the show the more you watch our WD coverage of the show the more prizes were going to be giving away everything from hard drives to full gaming systems all that kind of cool stuff check out the link to the forum under in the video description to get all of the details now behind me you're going to see the main attraction here in the WD booth this is a 14-foot 250 pound racing car made out of what is essentially a high-density foam that is molded into the shape of actual hard drive components with a steel frame it has a racing seat inside so you can actually sit in it and get your picture taken as part of the booths attraction and we are going to be getting a sneak peek of the reveal that's actually going to happen in a little while but you'll see at first on Linus tech tips this is it this is the big reveal I have my lovely assistants from WD revealing this car go ahead guys which is actually made so they took CAD drawings of components of a hard drive some of the highest performance hard drives that you could possibly feasibly imagine with technology today and they blew it up huge scale so some of the things are blown up more or less than others this right here is a hard drive platter and it's actually not that much bigger than what you'd find in a three and a half inch drive however this guy here it's significantly larger than what you'd see in real life this is a dual stage actuator assembly here that is what actually reads and writes the data off of the platters and the cool thing about this is well it looks pretty big here and you can probably fit that platter I showed you before in between the actual distance between these and the platters in real life is a hundred angstrom so to put that in perspective a human hair is a million angstroms a bacteria is five thousand angstroms and a virus is about a hundred angstroms so these things are flying many many miles an hour over the top of the and they're the tolerances are are not very big so we're going to make our way towards the back of the car these are the coils that actually drive the head assembly over the platters themselves they have to be extremely precise in order to read any data off of it at all we've got more dual-stage actuators more coils all of this is made of a high-density foam with a steel skeleton so the whole thing actually only weighs 250 pounds making it very portable but it's solid enough that you can actually sit in the thing now the amount at the craftsmanship that went into this is his hand dope so if you were to get really really close you'd be able to see every sandpaper mark on the thing because they spent countless hours building this thing to show off their technology so down here we've actually got a PCB trace that's been blown up to car size as well as a pivot bearing right here so these high technology bearings actually have to be smooth enough and precise enough for that well that those those tiny tiny data tolerances now we're going to sort of cheat and we're going to be the first ones to sit in the car here I'm just going to lift up the side door we're going to go ahead and see if I can maneuver this thing so while it is durable enough to sit in I also wouldn't recommend jumping right into it because it is made of a foam it doesn't have quite the same structural strength as an actual western digital hard drive here we go and of course I can't promise that any hard drive you buy will make you this cool but if there's even a chance I think I'll go for it guys stay tuned don't miss any of our computex coverage and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips