I had an ancient hardcard[0] that was obsolete when I got it in the 90s, but it was the first HDD I owned so it made me very happy. Unfortunately, to get it to spin up, you had to shake the thing vigorously for about 10 minutes, which wasn't such a big deal because there was no case - it was an open benchtop computer.
Funnily enough we had one of those (or something like it) in the college I went to, also in an open bench top computer. The HD had no cover, and you had to give the disk a spin to get it moving after power-up. Oddly it never suffered ill-erects from environmental contamination of the head / platter. I guess the densities were low enough not to matter so much.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard