As the world becomes increasingly (and justifiably) dominated by flash storage, old fashioned hard disk drives are becoming increasingly (and justifiably) useless. But slap a set of hands and a quartz movement on one, and boom! You’ve got yourself a pretty awesome-looking watch.
The HDD Watch is a real thing created by an industrious Frenchman named Jean Jérôme. Inspired by a gag photo he saw in a watch forum, Jérôme started building these watches out of ever-so-adorable and terribly obsolete Microdrives. The hands themselves are designed to look like the reading arm of a hard drive, and the band bears a printed (not real) circuit board design.
Even though the hard drives are real—and once boasted a capacity of 4 gigabytes—they don’t actually store data unfortunately.
Jérôme’s already built ten of these by hand and is raising money on IndieGoGo to build at least 500 more. There are a few early bird specials left that will let you get an HDD Watch for a little over $120, and Jérôme’s project has already doubled its goal.
Next, the crazy Frenchman wants to build hard drive watches with a portrait orientation which could help them look a little less huge on your wrist as well as a hard drive watch with a mechanical movement. Now if he could only figure out how to get them to store data too. [Gizmodo France]
