Christopher Campbell and Mary Munoz started out as two San Francisco Art Institute students who simply enjoyed 3D printing knick-knacks around the house. With a bit of a push from their friends and families, though, the two realized that they could make a business out of their 3D printed tchotchkes. They began with a focus on customizable 3D printed USB drives, selling them through their FormURLife shop on Etsy. Since then, they’ve launched an official site and their product line has grown to include 3D printed hard drives, to be sold starting July 14.
Before I had even realized that the FormURLife team was willing to offer readers a discount, I thought that the idea was pretty neat, but that may have been because I’m in the market for an external hard drive myself. The FormURLife drives are made up of Seagate hardware covered in a 3D printed shell and measure 4.65 x 3.5 x 0.65″. They connect via USB 3.0 and, most importantly, can store up to 1 TB of memory.
When customizing your own, you have the choice of two hard drive shapes, four different text designs, seven different 3D patterns, and a bunch of different colors. So, you can select, say, a text template – four lines forming the perimeter, four lines vertically aligned, two words on either side, or a monogram – and write out your text in various colors, then pick a texture to lay across the face of your hard drive, and choose the colors of the device itself. As you can see, I’ve designed one for my bearded dragon, Shanté, so that she can store all of her pictures of wormies. For $140, it might make Shanté a nice Halloween present (her favorite holiday).
As FormURLife has only just gotten its website up and running, I expect a lot more 3D printed tech from Campbell and Munoz. They take custom orders, so, you could even print something as detailed as “The Origin of Captain America” hard drive designed by scanning/3D printing bureau CoKreeate.
To kick off their new product launch with a bang, FormURLife is kindly offering a 10% discount on their 3D printed hard drives to 3DPI readers who enter the promo code “3DP10” from now until the end of July. And, to top things off, one lucky reader will also be eligible for a customizable, 3D printed 32gb flash drive! Enter for a chance to win by following the directions below:
1. In honor of Shanté, find a picture of the cutest 3D print or CAD model that you or the internet has to offer.
2. Next, find the post for this article on the 3D Printing Industry Facebook page.
3. Post your pic with a caption in the FB comments and you’re off!
At the end of the month, a winner will be randomly drawn from all of the cute 3D prints posted on this article’s Facebook link and receive their very own 3D printed thumb drive!
