Hard disk hacking
I am very curious about how long this hack took to complete. I write firmware for SSD controllers for a living, and this would probably take me many months of full-time work to pull off with an unknown controller (granted, I generally work on algorithms at a slightly higher abstraction layer in the firmware, and some of my colleagues who are more focused on the hardware interfaces could figure something like this out much faster than me). I am incredibly impressed by this effort.Also, I want to mention that it's common to have multiple processors in storage controllers. I can't talk about the specifics of the drives that I work on, but for SSDs at least there are several layers of abstraction: the host interface to receive the data, a middle layer to perform management of the data (SSDs require things like wear leveling, garbage collection etc in the background, to ensure long life and higher I/O speeds), and a low level media interface layer to actually write to the media. These tasks are often done by different processors (and custom ASICs).