everythingaboutsatahardisk.com

Ahh.., defragmentation. I hate this chore but I bear with it since it keeps my hard disk neat and organized. And from what I hear it’s one of the most neglected maintenance processes that PC users forget. It’s one of the Tools option when you go to the properties of Windows (C:). What defrag does is to lessen the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It’s like a librarian who detects which book is not in its proper shelf, gets this particular book and place it back to its proper place with all the other books of its kind.

Image Source: Seagate

Another product unveiling here! Whew! Technology is really a fast-paced industry. I can hardly keep up with it!

Anyway, Seagate Technology LLC is to launch its updated Momentus laptop disk drive. The new Momentus 5400.4 version is 2.5 inches and has storage capacity of 160GB up to a maximum of 250GB. Not only that, the new version of the drive has a faster transfer rate of 3Gbit/sec � definitely afar cry from 2006�s Momentus 5400.3 which ran at 1.5Gbit/sec.

I guess this is Seagate�s attempt to bump off fierce competition from rivals (Western Digital Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Fujitsu Computer Products of America Inc. and Toshiba Corp.,). Brrr� Competition is indeed fierce if you take that into consideration!

Source: Computerworld

Second to my three-part post regarding the importance of hard disks since I know you can’t get enough (wink-wink).

Have you ever experience your hard disk suddenly conking out on you? I know there are signs but I’ll reserve those for later posts. Anyway, if you haven’t I’ll tell you. I’d rather have my monitor burst into flames since it doesn’t necessarily affect the work I’m doing on my PC. But data (goodness, if data is lost) which happens with an unreliable hard disk can really send me to the hospital. Am I exaggerating? No, I don’t think so.

All your digital photographs, software programs, home videos, music, hardware drivers, documents, etc are copied to another safe location. So even if your main hard-disk runs out of service, you don’t loose any of those irreplaceable treasures.

When you are upgrading the hard-disk of your computer, you can just create a disk image of the original hard-disk and then migrate that disk image onto the new drive. You don’t have to undergo the painful process of reinstalling the OS, all the software or migrating the documents from one hard-disk to another. It’s all done by the disk imaging software.

You have a nice, decent sized 20GB hard drive in your new iMac… but you notice that only 10GB is left! Yes, you did install a number of programs- but not 10GB worth. Or you may have an old Performa with a 1GB hard drive and find you only have 50MB left.

What happened to all that space? Well, the truth is that you probably have many duplicate files on your hard drive. How many? It’s hard to say, but there are a few common things to look for.

Almost every application installs a copy to make sure that you can read the included “ReadMe” file. You probably don’t even use the one copy of SimpleText that came installed on your computer! Use Find File or Sherlock to search for “SimpleText” and delete all but one copy.

Every tangible thing can conk out anytime. Even if you take care of your things, damage can never be avoided. There are a lot of do it yourself tips on the internet for almost all the possible repairable damages your things at home might encounter.

How about computer damages? If you are a computer expert, then by all means, do the repair on your own. However, if you know nothing about computers and plan to follow a do it yourself tip to fix that computer part (hard disk for example), do not dare experiment. Aside from ruining the warranty of your computer, you might damage more parts inside just by tinkering with it.

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) in the computer is a port that allows, well, devices with USB connectors to be attached or linked to the computer. This port enables the user to attach a wide variety of hard drives to store their data.

In some operating systems, the devices you attached to your computer through the USB are detected automatically (so, less the hassle of looking for the driver and installing it manually). These devices range from USB flash drives, additional external devices such as ROMs, floppy drives (though you’ll most likely find only a number of people who still use this) and so on and so forth. You can even transfer files from your mobile phone to your computer’s local hard drive through the USB (if your computer or mobile phone is not Bluetooth or infrared capable).

The motor has an outside rotor; the stator windings are copper-colored. The spindle bearing is in the middle. To the left of center is the actuator by means of a read-write head beneath the tip of its very end and close to center; the orange stripe next to the side of the arm, a threadlike printed-circuit cable, attaches the read-write head to the core of the actuator. The elastic, to some extent ‘U’-shaped, ribbon cable just about visible below and to the left of the actuator arm is the elastic section, one last part on the hub, that continues the link from the head to the controller board on the reverse side. 

The size of an HDD can be considered by reproducing the number of cylinders by the quantity of heads by the number of segments by the quantity of bytes/sector. Drives with ATA interface, bigger and in excess of eight gigabytes perform as if they were prearranged into 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors, for compatibility with older operating systems. Contrasting in the 1980s, the cylinder, which calculates reported to the CPU by up to date ATA drive that has no longer definite physical parameters given that the reported numbers are controlled by historic operating-system boundary and with zone bit recording.

Hard drives can get quite cluttered and can easily get crammed with unwanted files and others and as any techie knows, a deleted file here rarely gets deleted in the real sense. A deleted file normally has the header information deleted with the space it occupies made available for storage. The file fragments are still on the hard drive till they are over-written by new data that is stored over it. Time will come when a computer system may become sluggish and the only way to return it to it’s full glory would be to do a full format and re-install of all the necessary drivers and software. Read more…