Hard drives gone bad don't always have to end up in the trash. Miguel Rivera, a systems administrator, took a pile of used drives, gutted some and turned them into beautiful sculptures.

"The overall concept was to make something out of just hard drive parts and pieces," says Rivera. "I wanted it to look solid and heavy so I leaned towards just using metal – no plastic or gluing things together."

The results are creations that almost take your breath away in their complexity and beauty.

Rivera's first sculpture was made out of a standard 3.5-inch hard drive, and designed to evoke a car. "It wasn't really difficult putting this one together since I didn't have to modify anything other than the cover – everything else just screwed on," he says. It took 33 hard drives – each wheel made of eight discs from gutted drives, and one intact drive for the body – and a whole weekend to make.

From there, he created his second project, a mini car that took 29 hard drives. The third project, the "fat boy motorcycle," was even more complex. "This one was a bit tricky for me because I just couldn't get parts to mix well at first to reflect the look I wanted," he says.

The bike took about three full weekends to put together. Rivera, who works at a U.S. Air Force base overseas, says he added a pair of dog tags a Navy chaplain gave him as "a tribute to our selfless troops."

The front wheel of the bike has eight discs, the rear 28.

The most complex of Rivera's creations is a robot he calls his masterpiece. It took about two weeks to create. The robot is made of 14 laptop hard drives with 18 additional discs from gutted hard drives and spare parts. "This piece allowed me to show off some internal pieces of hard drives I wasn't able to incorporate with any of the other pieces like using the armatures as weapons."

Rivera also included a cable management arm from a Dell 2950 into the robot and bent the hard drive covers to show off its insides.

"The hard drive sculptures are a personal challenge and a chance for others to see what the inside of a hard drive looks like in a creative way," he says. "It's my therapy after a five-day, 12-hour-shift work week."

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Photos: Miguel Rivera