Our editors have compiled a list of five things you can do with old hard drives. If we happened to miss any, please leave us a comment. “Continue reading” for the entire list.

Hard Drive Speaker System

That’s right, a French-modder by the name of furrtek has created a functional “Hard Drive Speaker” system. To make your own, you’ll need cutting pliers, a soldering iron (30E), tin drop, flat screwdriver, lots of wiring, dead hard disk, and a pair of enclosures with buit-in amplifier (5W preferred). Full instructions here.

An old Compaq harddrive I moded to play music from an amplified output. The sound you hear is only coming from it, the speakers you’ll see in the back are off

15,000rpm Tesla Turbine

Here’s an interesting project: a tesla turbine built from old hard drives that’s capable of spinning at up to 15,000rpm. To build your own, you’ll need a few broken hard drives, stock material (aluminum/acrylic), milling machine w/rotary table, and a lathe w/4 jaw chuck.

A regular blade turbine operates by transferring kinetic energy from the moving fluid to the turbine fan blades. In the Tesla Turbine, the kinetic energy transfer to the edges of the thin platters is very small. Instead, it uses the boundary layer effect, i.e. adhesion between the moving fluid and the rigid disk

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Hard Drive Dominoes

This followup to our original “Hard Drive Dominoes” post, builds upon that creation and takes it a step furthur to say the least. A total of 22-terabytes ($18,400) worth of drives were used in the creation of this video.

Hard Drive Grinder

Metku presents their latest creation, a fully functional “HDD Grinder”.

HDDs have only tiny stepper motors, so this thing doesn’t have much torque. Nevertheless it runs fast enought to slit fingertips open and cause nasty cuts

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Hard Drive Computer Case

Have old hard drives laying around? Why not make a PC case out of them — aside from the heating issues. Here’s what the creator had to say:

While waiting for parts to arrive and new ideas to sprout up on my CLOWNED project, I’ve started another. I’m building a custom case made of Hard Drives. All of the HD’s are DEAD. Many are 2GB and below, 1 is the 120GB HD I had in Air Force One that died. My teachers were happy to unload the mounting piles of dead HD’s they had and I was happy to take ‘em. To start, see the 2 boxes worth of dead HD’s I’ve gotten.

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