Neil, this Tricky Little B…oy!

Marius — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:20:20 +0000

For some time now I was searching for documentation on the internet about how to open my LaCie “Neil Poulton Design” hard drive, but I could not find anything. As it seems, this drive will be bought only by Apple users with probably two left hands and too much money for constantly spending it on a new one, when TimeMachine strewn it with its backups. Today then I thought, “Eh, come on, I finally want to have this thing open!” – and so I did.

First of all, let’s have a look at the drive itself. It’s plain. Really plain. No holes, no screws, nothing. How the f*ck shall we open this thing. Let’s take a look under its gum-feet. Nah, not even there. What he hack? So, as it seems, this drive can’t be opened. Wrong! Yes we can!

What do we need therefor?

A cloth, for not scratching the gloss

A strong thread

A modified paperclip

Okay, now we’re all set up. First of all, take the hard drive and turn it upside-down. Place it on the cloth to not scratch its lickable, glossy exterior.

Place it on the cloth

Next, take the thread and try to run it through the holes on the case’s bottom, so that you have something to pull the hard disk out of the case. Now try to bend the sides of the plastic-case out carefully and pull drive out piece for piece. You could also use some credit card or other thin piece of plastic (not metal, it will kill the plastic-borders!) for doing this. Warning, this could cause serious damage to your credit card!

Do the credit card-thing on the front-side, the left- and right-side. When pulled it out some millimeters on each of those side, take all the pieces of your thread and try to pull out the drive to the back (e.g. rotation of 90 degrees around the drive’s back-side). On the back, there’s the button for turning it on and off, so you won’t be able to pull it out vertically. If you’ve successfully managed to pull out the drive, the whole scenario should look similar to this:

Pulled out the drive

Now, you can see the actual hard drive which is mounted to the bottom-part of the whole case. After inspecting the construction you can see that there were to glueing-points or any hooks we broke while opening the drive. This means, that if you’ve done it right, you won’t see that anything ever changed on that drive.

Now, I can finally get myself a 750GB (or even 1TB?) hard-drive and build that in.

Happy trying!

//btw: As you notice, LaCie builds in Hitachi Deskstars on these drives. These drives cost something around 50 bucks nowadays. The complete case is around 90 bucks.

marius » Hitachi

Neil, this Tricky Little B…oy!