Only a quarter of the drives we’re tracking cost less now than they did before the flooding. A couple have come full circle, but the vast majority have higher prices.
via Hard drive prices one year after the flood – The Tech Report – Page 1.
Tag Archives: hard drives
Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods
HDD shipments in 2012 for the overall computer market, including PCs, are forecast to reach 524 million drives, up 4.3% percent from 502.5 million units last year, according to an IHS report.
Hard drive prices, however, will remain high, and prices are not expected to fall to pre-flood levels until 2014, IHS stated in a report earlier this year.
via Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods – Computerworld.
Hard drives sales will also get a boost from ultrabooks, including machines that use hybrid drives, which combine spinning disk with solid state storage. Those drive shipments are flat now but will take off in the fourth quarter of this years, according to IHS.
Helium-filled WD drives promise huge boost in capacity
HGST said the new seven-platter helium drives will weigh 29% less per terabyte of capacity that today’s five-platter drives. In other words, a seven-platter helium disk will weigh 690 grams, the same as today’s five-platter drives.
Reducing drag on the platters will also allow HGST’s new helium drives to use 23% less spindle power to turn. A five-platter drive today draws 6.9 watts while idle. The new seven-platter helium drives will draw 5.3 watts of power in the same state.
via Helium-filled WD drives promise huge boost in capacity – Computerworld.
Disks from the Perspective of a File System
Most applications do not deal with disks directly, instead storing their data in files in a file system, which protects us from those scoundrel disks. After all, a key task of the file system is to ensure that the file system can always be recovered to a consistent state after an unplanned system crash (for example, a power failure). While a good file system will be able to beat the disks into submission, the required effort can be great and the reduced performance annoying. This article examines the shortcuts that disks take and the hoops that file systems must jump through to get the desired reliability.
via Disks from the Perspective of a File System – ACM Queue.
Luckily, SATA (serial ATA) has a new definition called NCQ (Native Command Queueing) that has a bit in the write command that tells the drive if it should report completion when media has been written or when cache has been hit. If the driver correctly sets this bit, then the disk will display the correct behavior.
In the real world, many of the drives targeted to the desktop market do not implement the NCQ specification. To ensure reliability, the system must either disable the write cache on the disk or issue a cache-flush request after every metadata update, log update (for journaling file systems), or fsync system call. Both of these techniques lead to noticeable performance degradation, so they are often disabled, putting file systems at risk if the power fails. Systems for which both speed and reliability are important should not use ATA disks. Rather, they should use drives that implement Fibre Channel, SCSI, or SATA with support for NCQ.
On Linux here’s how you can check if your drive has NCQ.
$ cat /sys/block/sd?/device/queue_depth
A 1 indicates no NCQ. and
$ cat /sys/block/sd?/device/queue_type
My green drives came back with none.
HDDGURU: Laptop and Desktop Hard Disk Drives, Tests, Software, Firmware, Tools, Data Recovery, HDD Repair
Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive?
This is a story of my efforts to repair the drive myself, my research into the question of whether or not users can repair modern hard drives, and the results of my efforts. If your drive is still detected in BIOS, you may be able to use software tools to retrieve your data. Here, we’re going to focus exclusively on hardware-related failures, and what your options are.
via Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive? | ExtremeTech.
Surf the internet for more than two minutes, and you’ll find people who recommend you do one of the following things:
- Stick your hard drive in the freezer
- Pop your hard drive into the oven
- Give it a few taps with a hammer or rubber mallet
LOL. I have been desparate to try the freezer trick a couple of times without luck.
How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux
If you don’t have a Fedora CD, then you need not despair. You can also repair the boot loader using one of the numerous live CDs available.
via How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux | All about Linux.
The chroot command is featured in this howto article.
SSD prices in steady, substantial decline
To get a better sense of the SSD picture, we’ve analyzed a mountain of pricing information dating from early 2011 to Tuesday. The folks at Camelegg graciously provided the data, which we’ve sliced, diced, and compiled in pretty graphs. Camelegg tracks prices at Newegg, which should give us a good sense of what’s going on in the overall market.
via SSD prices in steady, substantial decline – The Tech Report – Page 1.
Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing
DBAN is a self-contained boot disk that automatically deletes the contents of any hard disk that it can detect. This method can help prevent identity theft before recycling a computer. It is also a solution commonly used to remove viruses and spyware from Microsoft Windows installations.
DBAN prevents all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis. It does not provide users with a proof of erasure, such as an audit-ready erasure report.
Professional data erasure tools are recommended for company and organizational users. For secure data erasure with audit-ready reporting, contact Blancco or download a free evaluation license.
Darik’s Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing.
SSDs have a ‘bleak’ future, researchers say
“This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive for many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications,” Grupp, lead author of the study, wrote in a research paper.
via SSDs have a ‘bleak’ future, researchers say – Computerworld.
Because SSDs have no moving parts, the time needed to write and read data is more than 100 times faster than that of hard disk drives that use read-write heads on actuator arms to find data on a spinning platter. But as NAND flash circuitry continues to shrink in size, the performance gap with hard disk drives will become more narrow, Grupp said.