Finally. A 7200rpm drive with 1TB of storage from Western Digital. (Didn’t we already have one of those?) Anyway, they are touting this as the fastest 3.5″ SATA drive on the market. It does have a 32MB cache and a 5 year warranty so it may be a good choice for those wishing to up their storage capacity. I am starting to warm to Western Digital as their recent offerings seem to be stylish, fast and stable. (And I have one in my iMac that i would hate to have a failure!)
Category: Misc
Posts either without a category or with uncategorisable content
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Identity Fraud
What happens to your hard drive once it is replaced under warranty?
This is the question we are being asked by our customers once we have recovered data from their hard drive. Is there a process in place which is used by resellers or drive manufacturers, that ensures your data does not fall into the wrong hands?
Watch this space for further information…….. -
Seagate May Sue Rival SSD Makers
The next battle in the war on SSDs may have just begun. Apparently Seagate are convinced that SSD makers such as Samsung and Intel are violating some of Seagate’s (and Western Digital’s) patents. The wizardry which relates to the way a storage device communicates with a computer is at stake, even though Seagate themselves don’t appear too taken with an SSD based future. CEO Bill Watkins is quoted as saying, “realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell.” I would have to agree with that at the moment. Cost per GB, reliability and speed are among the many drawbacks currently facing solid state drives when compared to traditional hard disk drives. Once these issues are resolved then the need for regular backups will become all the more important in my eyes at least. There are currently many ways in which we can resurrect a failing hard drive but next to no ways to recover a failed SSD.
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1.6TB Ultra320 SCSI SSD
According to Engadget, BiTMICRO have announced a new solid state drive which packs in 1.6TB of storage into a 3.5″ form factor drive. The E-Disk Altima E3S320 promises sustained data transfer rates of up to 230MB per second and are also expected to be available in more modest 16GB varieties. Engadget suggest remortgaging your house which may not be too far wrong if current SSD costs are anything to go by.
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Hitachi Talks of 4TB Drives
Hitachi has apparently just started talking of their latest breakthrough in ridiculously HUGE capacity hard drives. These 4TB 3.5″ drives feature read/write heads that are 2,000 times smaller than a human hair. They also go on to mention that the same techology would allow a 1TB 2.5″ drive.
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Americans Start Stockpiling Hard Drives
It would appear that the ITC has launched a patent investigation concerning five manufacturers that could mean higher costs and supply difficulties in the states. The patents owned by a Californian couple cover the use of ceramic bonding tips on the internal wiring of the drives. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard and Dell are all in the frame for importing the drives into America. In my opinion it looks like the patent only covers a very obvious progression in the manufacturing process which would likely have been reached independently. We should see how this pans out in the next few weeks.
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The Worlds Worst Backup Solution; LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 2TB
Anyone that has ever looked inside one of these “drives” will realise that they are only suitable for temporary storage capacity. There is nothing magical inside the enclosures, just a couple of standard hard drives and a small RAID 0 controller. What people (ie. general users) tend to do with a drive of this capacity is copy over all of the big data (pictures, movies and music) from their desktop or laptop computer and then delete it from the original location to save space. Not only is this not a backup but the chances of this drive failing are more than doubled due to the fact that the data is striped across two drives, either of which could fail at any time. In a RAID 0 only one drive needs to fail to take out all of the data.
One terabyte drive fails = 2TB of data gone!
Anyone thinking of using one of these should consider buying two and using software to mirror them. At least you would have some redundancy. There are of course much easier and not to mention cheaper ways to set up a redundant backup solution. We will post a more detailed guide of how to do this in the near future.
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Magnetic Wobbles Main Cause of Unstable Disks
ITPro.co.uk reported yesterday that a new study has revealed some interesting information about why some hard drives fail. The main cause of drive failures is apparently a magnetic effect which causes the areas on the disc platters to change their polarity. This was previously thought to be the case but the new study goes into much more detail, even suggesting that the material used by manufacturers may have its part to play. This change in polarity then jumps to neighbouring tracks causing widespread data corruption. Known as magnetic avalanche, the process could be better described as magnetic wildfire or magnetic exlosion due to the fast and devastating effect it can have on our data. I wonder if this problem could be what is wrecking so many Seagate Momentus 2.5″ drives?
http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/120196/magnetic-wobbles-cause-disk-failure.html (Link now Broken, Provided for reference)
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Samsung Start Manufacture of 64GB 1.8" SSDs
Samsung has today started production of it’s 64GB solid state drive. (How long until we see that in an iPod hack?…) These 1.8″ flash hard drives would be a welcome addition to any portable device, provided you keep regular backups. At least if the drives do fail you won’t have to put up with the heart wrenching click of death. (but good luck trying to desolder and then resolder all those chips in an ill-fated and expensive data recovery attempt.)