To celebrate its parent company's 50th anniversary, Japanese company Buffalo has launched a limited-edition external hard drive with a window that lets you see the workings of the platters inside. But don’t rush out your credit card just yet. This Buffalo Skeleton hard drive is limited to 50 units, each priced at 100,000 yen (approximately $695), and will be on sale through a lottery starting in June.
The Skeleton drive houses a 4TB drive in a machined aluminum enclosure, has a small window mounted on the display base, and weighs about 3.3 pounds. Its gold and anodized black finish is a nod to vintage record players from Melco (Buffalo parent company) first introduced in 1978.
The back of the external drive has a power connector and a USB Micro-B port (not USB-C).
Buffalo offers a companion software called SeekWizard (only available to Windows users, but HD-SKL is available on PC and Mac computers) that can control the reading arm to move in various patterns. These modes include simulating the normal movement of a hard drive as it accesses data, or making it run like a metronome or timer. It's interesting, but having the drive run like this is probably one of the reasons why Buffalo only offers a one-month warranty.
Buffalo's original Skeleton Hard Disk (left) debuted in 1998 with a completely transparent casing. The new version (right) has a machined aluminum casing with a small window on the front.
The Buffalo HD-SKL isn't the first hard drive to reveal its inner workings at runtime. It's actually a 4.3GB version of its original release in 1998SkeletonThe successor to the hard drive, the latter uses a fully transparent casing, allowing all electronic components to be seen at a glance. At CES 2006, Western Digital introduced a 150GB Serial ATA hard drive called the Raptor X, which had a similar design to the new HD-SKL but used a small window to show off some of the internals.