SSDs might be super-fast, small, and convenient, but, let's face it, a little PCB with some NAND on it is nowhere near as cool as watching a spinning hard drive in action - it's like comparing a USB thumb drive to a record. As such, I'm a bit in love with this new windowed hard drive from Buffalo, which gives you a rare peek into the workings of a mechanical hard drive - a sight that hasn't been seen in an official product since the WD Raptor X nearly 20 years ago.
It's not going to rival any of the best gaming SSD designs for speed, or even capacity in some cases, but the new Buffalo HD-SKL "Skeleton" hard disk beats them all when it comes to wow factor. Rather than being an internal 3.5-inch drive like the WD Raptor X, it's instead an external USB drive, and it's mounted in a classy machined-aluminium chassis that tilts the platters so you can see them in action as well.
Not only that, but in its knowledge that you really want to see it working, Buffalo's SeekWizard software also has several special modes to show the drive in action, including random and sequential seeks, as well as "wave" and "metronome" modes, which lineup data transfers to make the arm move across the platter in specific ways.
Commemorating Buffalo's 50 years in the business, the new 4TB drive follows on from the firm's original 4.3GB Skeleton 3.5-inch IDE hard drive from 1998 (on the left in the image below). Hard drives have become massively denser and more intricate since then, though, and Buffalo says that "initially, the development team believed it would be impossible to create today's ultra-high precision hard disks using a skeleton, but after much trial and error, they finally succeeded."
It's even supplied in a fancy red gift box, but supply is severely limited, and it's expensive too. Buffalo says it's going to run a lottery in Japan where it will sell 50 of them at a price of ¥100,000 (around $692) each. That counts me out, but I'm still in awe of the design - hard drives might be old tech, but that's a seriously classy storage device.
You can check out our guide to the best external SSD if you're looking for a speedy solid state USB drive that's more readily available, even if it doesn't look as cool.
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