Car companies in the 1950s figured out that the hotrod culture was essentially a low-cost R&D lab and marketing research division, and that popular modifications could be mass produced and sold to a broader public. Similarly, it looks like maybe computer component companies are catching the same wave made by the casemod folks.
Western Digital has just released (as covered by Slashdot a hard drive with a transparent window, so that you can see the parts moving inside. This is of course the same phenomenon as revealing a hotrod's engine, except mapped to computers:
Various peripheral component manufacturers (of boards, fans, etc), have known about this for a long time, but I'm glad to see the industrial designers at the major component manufacturers figuring it out.
