secAU Kicks Off Hard Drive Overclocking Competition

In ye olde days, overclocking was a mysterious art, one that few would dare venture into. Today? It seems to be almost as common as simply using a PC – at least in enthusiast circles. Whether it be your CPU, GPU or memory, overclocking is a quick way to squeeze extra performance out of your hardware. But how about overclocking a component that quite frankly shouldn’t be? Such as a hard drive?

Overclocking storage isn’t exactly that new, and even recent SSDs have included overclocked chipsets in order to deliver faster performance. But a hard drive is different. It features moving parts, is dependant on spinning platters for reading, and isn’t really something that seems like it could be overclockable. After all, it can’t be easy. 7200 RPM drives are the norm, and we’ve yet to see drives faster than 15,000 in the enterprise.

That hasn’t stopped security research firm secAU from starting a little competition, though. The goal? Take a Western Digital 500GB Caviar Black hard drive and overclock it so that the entire disk’s contents can be read in under an hour (as opposed to the usual 2 hours).

The rules for getting this done are few, but the most important is that whatever you do to the drive must be reversible, because in the end, if the technique is viable, then it could well become a common method of speeding up drives for special cases where lots of data needs to be read fast. This would be important especially in security cases where many drives need their data copied to another source.

Things like flashing the firmware, increasing the voltage or virtually doing anything else that improves the performance is accepted. But if it kills the drive after the procedure is done, that pretty much ruins your chances.

I do wonder how feasible it would be to take an enterprise 15,000 RPM drive and replace its platters with those of the 500GB Caviar Black. Seemingly impossible, but is it?