To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its parent company, Japan's Buffalo has announced a limited edition external hard drive with a window that lets you see the inner workings. But don't pull out your credit card just yet. The Buffalo Skeleton Hard Drive is limited to 50 units, priced at 100,000 yen (about $695) each, and will only be available by lottery starting in June.
The Skeleton Hard Drive houses a 4TB drive inside a machined aluminum case with a small window attached to the display base and weighs about 3.3 pounds. The gold and anodized black finish is reminiscent of the vintage Melco (Buffalo's parent company) record player, which was first released in 1978.
No matter how hard you try, you probably won't be able to squeeze the HD-SKL into your gaming PC without an angle grinder. Designed to be a showpiece, it has a power connector on the back and a USB 3.2 Micro-B port that is wider and flatter than a standard USB-A port.
If you don't want to wait for the drive to spin up while you put data in or take data out, you can use Buffalo's included software, SeekWizard (only for Windows users, but the HD-SKL works with PC and Mac as well), to move the read arm in different patterns. These patterns include simulating the normal behavior of the drive as it accesses data, or acting like a metronome or timer. It's fun, but leaving the drive to its own devices is probably one of the reasons Buffalo only lists a one-month warranty period.
The Buffalo HD-SKL isn't the first hard drive to show you what's going on inside while it's working. It's actually the successor to Buffalo's 4.3GB Skeleton Hard Disk, first released in 1998, which featured a completely transparent case where all the electronics were visible. At CES 2006, Western Digital announced a 150GB Serial ATA drive called the Raptor X. The drive has a similar design to the new HD-SKL, with a small window revealing part of the internals.