This Super Mario Brothers 3 250GB hard drive isn’t anything more clever than a retro game cartridge pried open, gutted, and crammed with a cheap 2.5″ SATA drive. Even so, could there be any more appropriate repository for an arcade cabinet’s NES ROM collection? This one was being sold by an Etsy seller for $180, and it’s doubtlessly long gone, but if there’s enough demand, surely an entire business could be forged from the pecuniary tricklings of indiscriminate retro-gamers.
NES 250GB Hard Drive [Etsy via Ubergizmo]
And for the media hungry people of today it would make finding WHICH hard drive a particular set of files are on, a whole lot easier… as a lot of regular external hard drives look the same…
I think the design is certainly clever, but I would make a suggestion for the next version. Either have the plug go into the bottom of the cartridge somehow, or fashion a dock of some kind to slide the cartridge into so drives can be swapped in authentic retro fashion. Right now, the case is acting solely as decoration, as I understand it.
While this would require slightly more construction and materials, the connection could be constructed out of something that will accommodate rough handling and repeated physical connection/disconnection.
Then again, this would require both more work and more hardware, and results in only slightly less manual labor involved with connecting and disconnecting, and introduces possibly less common and less easily-serviceable parts.
Who knows, if they notice they’ve been linked to from here, they might even read my comment.
I cringe a little bit when I wonder if they destroyed a perfectly good SMB3 cart to make that.
Now, a salvaged-from-the-desert Atari ET cart made into a portable drive, that I wouldn’t mind!