VHS Tape Storage Drive

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This project turns a old VHS Tape into a USB storage drive. It looks like a normal VHS cassette tape except for the USB cable that sticks out of the shell. All of the project guts are hiding in the areas around the clear windows so that when you have a quick look at the front of the tape all seems normal. When plugged into a computer the VHS Tape Storage Drive will act as a normal USB drive except when the drive is accessed the tape reel will turn and the windows will light up. This will keep at least one of my VHS tapes out of the landfill.

The operation is quite simple, the USB cable connects to a thumb drive inside the device. The thumb drive has been cracked open to expose the circuit board, USB power and the drive LED output has been tapped into. These 3 points are wired to a small circuit board, there is a circuit that stretches the drive pulses into an on or off signal that is buffered by a transistor to power the internal motor and LED lights. The pulse stretcher was needed since the USB drive would flash when it was being accessed. This would have caused the motor action to be very jerky and the internal lights would also have flashed.

The cost to purchase all the parts for this project should be between $10 and $15 depending on the deal you can get for the USB thumb drive and assuming that you have a few items in your parts junk box. Construction time should be 3 to 4 hours but it took me longer since I took a ton of pictures along the way and has some belt drive (or should I say rubber band drive) issues.


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Gather the parts you need. (page 2)
Remove the Recycled DC Motor. (page 3)
Prepare the VHS Tape. (page 4)
Open the Thumb Drive and find the LED Drive Circuit. (page 5)
Wire up the Thumb Drive. (page 6)
Construct the Control Circuit. (page 7)
Mount everything in the Tape Shell. (page 8 )
The Device is Finished. (page 9)

 

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78 Comments


  1. Hi,
    Why are there 3 diodes in series?
    Could I just use one?


  2. properly to lower the voltage to the led, in a cheap way.


  3. this looks nice but i hate such things. things with no purpose like spinning those things. if you want to make indicator for reading or righting use led or something

    but what would be cooler is to right data on actual video Tape
    in old days as i know they were writhing data on thin magnetic Tape so it is possible but it is interesting how much data can be stored on VHS Tape?

    sorry for bad english


  4. Hi Jeff,

    The three diodes are there to drop the voltage to a point that the transistor is not biased until the thumb drive output is actually on. The thumb drive LED output does not go to 0 when off…


  5. Hi Mikheil,

    Actually there are 4 blue LEDs that indicate reading or writing. Spinning the reel is just for fun. But if you are looking for a purpose you sure won’t find that here. 🙂 Tape backups are still used today by large organizations for backup purposes. It has been many years since I have worked with backup tapes but I remember that it was possible to backup a full hard drive onto one back then.

    I actually wanted to have a loop of actual tape running around the reels but as you can see there really would have been no space to add anything and still keep both reels working.


  6. Then you’d have to rewind your USB drive. Although it’d be cool to have it still work as a video tape.

    I was expecting data to be stored on the tape itself using a hacked VCR. That’d be a neat project.

    What did you do with the film, anyway?


  7. Hey Voice,

    I still have the film in the corner. I will probably keep 50 or so feet and toss the rest. I hate to throw stuff out but I think I sometimes need to let it go. 🙂


  9. cool hack. it would be nifty for one of the wheels to be able to manually rewind and take up the usb cord so it is out of the way during storage. Then i guess you’d need some type of slip ring connection between the usb cable and the storage card leads… hmm. possibly doable w/ parts from one of those retractable phone-line cords. or maybe just run the usb cord through the center of the vcr tape wheel and all axial-twisting be damned.


  10. Hi John,

    That is a good idea. In a perfect world it would have been nice to have the cable be hidden also. The simplest solution probably would have been not to use an extension cable at all, or use one that was made only 2 or 3 inches long so that it could be hidden under the flap.


  11. I enjoy this site I really do, but I sort of expected a better hack from its founder…



  13. This is a fun hack. Some hacks do not require a purpose, so much as you have some useless items what can you do with them. What impressed me was the pic’s and documentation. just awesome!! I hope future content providers get that!! I got a clear idea of what I would need to do to duplicate this hack! That is what keeps me coming back for more.
    Thanks Alan Keep up the good work!
    Robert



  15. What a clever idea. When I first saw the article headline I thought it was actually saving data on to the VHS tape! Not sure much data that would have been able to save 😉


  16. Quite a few years ago I used a VHS tape to back up my Amiga. It would store about 10 gb in SP mode. (never got to prove that though)



  18. Well, It’s a nice hack. I would like to have the front lid closed completely and have the cable stacked there, there should be enough place for that. And I also have my Amiga tape backup on VHS somewhere in my old home. These days you may use DV cameras as streamer. I’ve made some calculations and it is cheaper and faster to use a TB disks now and plug in them just for backups. Of course as a ghetto (=crisis) solution, VHS streamer could work, if you can manage to get the stream back to PC (on Amiga it was easily done, as it was number one home and multimedia computer of that time, when (IBM) PCs were still with green or amber alphanumerical screens 😛 )



  20. Hi Checkerbarn and Sanctus,

    I never had the pleasure of having an Amiga growing up (I did drool over them though). How fast were those units at backing up on VHS? I had a audio cassette drive for my Timex Sinclare 1000 and Commodore 64. All I can say about those was they were slowwwwwwww.


  21. I have to agree a retractable cable would be nice. What would make this thing really amazing is if it could play/fast-forward/rewind depending on its activity, or even semi-randomly when accessed just to give the effect. That would make me want to build one.













































  67. Does anyone have info on retrieving recorded over video on vhs?






  72. Really Cool – like these old car radio adapter for portable CD-Players 🙂


  73. this looks nice but i hate such things. things with no purpose like spinning those things. if you want to make indicator for reading or righting use led or something

    but what would be cooler is to right data on actual video Tape
    in old days as i know they were writhing data on thin magnetic Tape so it is possible but it is interesting how much data can be stored on VHS Tape?

    sorry for bad english

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