[AI] hard drive
It is a C-gate external 1.5 Terabyte hard drive now available on tigerdirect.com. The nice thing about this hard drive is that if it is not in use after a while, the drive will shut itself off to save power. The drive is USB 2.0 compatible and comes with a six year warranty. If you would like to read more about it, go here to the following Url. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4183659CatId=2422 The cost of the drive is $139.99 before shipping and handling. To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent
Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent Apr 26, 2007 Your hard drive may not be as reliable as manufacturers would like you to think. Recent studies by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Google suggest that vendor Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) ratings for hard drives are a bit misleading. The Carnegie Mellon study, conducted at several locations, found typical failure rates of 2 to 4 percent and a high of 13 percent, in contrast to the less than 1 percent you'd expect based on vendor MTTF ratings (see chart or click on the thumbnail image below). Google's study pegged the annual failure rate at about 3 percent. Click here for full-size image. Both studies were based on observations of approximately 100,000 drives, with Google looking at its own farm of consumer-grade disks and Carnegie Mellon examining both consumer-grade drives and the ostensibly more reliable enterprise variety; the latter have beefed-up actuator magnets, more-robust spindle motors, and advanced features such as rotational vibration safeguards. Vendors attribute part of the discrepancy between their ratings and the findings in these reports to differing definitions of disk failure. For vendors, it's when a drive fails on one read or write attempt within a set period--typically about 24 hours--on the test bench. Vendors say that, by that criterion, nearly 40 percent of returned drives have not actually failed. The two new studies, however, consider failure to be any symptom that causes a user--presumably, in both cases, experienced IT types--to replace the drive. Such symptoms include software problems, driver conflicts, and the like, as well as drive failure as defined by vendors. Also, vendors base MTTF numbers on the past performance of similar drives; no one tries running a new model for years to prove it will last. Surprisingly, Google's study found no correlation between drive failure and elevated heat and activity levels. The largest percentage of failures occurred on drives operating within a mild 77-to-88-degree range. However, desktop PCs typically operate at temperatures well over the maximum of 125 degrees reported in the Google study, so the findings do not support running hard drives without adequate airflow to cool them. Google found that failure rates varied significantly according to make and model, but the company declined to identify failure-prone models. Carnegie Mellon points out that bad manufacturing runs occur and that improvements over the past few years may be yielding more-reliable drives. Google's study relied in part on SMART (Self-Monitoring And Reporting Technology) data from drives that have this feature. But so many drives failed without any SMART warnings that Google concluded the feature was not helpful in predicting real-world failure patterns. Google's findings do support one tip: If you encounter a scan error during a routine error check (by running Scandisk, for example), your drive is 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives that don't show such errors. IT pros recommend replacing a drive with scan errors. The most likely immediate fallout from these reports is that vendors will stop touting MTTF figures. In my online research, MTTF figures for consumer drives were already few and far between. Corporate buyers might rethink purchasing plans in light of Carnegie Mellon's finding that fiber-channel and SCSI drives appear no more reliable than the cheaper SATA variety. But IDC analyst David Reinsel says fiber-channel and SCSI drives are still worthwhile when performance matters. For most of us, these reports simply reemphasize the need for smart practices. Keep your drives cool and, most important, backed up so that if failure occurs, it's merely an inconvenience and not a financial or emotional disaster. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131168-pg,1/article.html Vikas Kapoor, MSN ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype ID: dl_vikas Mobile: (+91) 9891098137. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] Hard Drive Rivals Promote New Hybrid Technology
Hard Drive Rivals Promote New Hybrid Technology Jan 5, 2007 Hard Drive Rivals Promote New Hybrid Technology Hybrid Storage Alliance group created to promote disks with flash memory that improves performance and power efficiency. Martyn Williams, IDG News Service Thursday, January 04, 2007 06:00 AM PST TOKYO -- The five largest hard drive manufacturers will work together to promote a new technology that promises to improve system performance, the companies announced today. Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu, Samsung, and Toshiba have formed the Hybrid Storage Alliance group to promote the technology, which is expected to come to market later in the first quarter. How It Works Hybrid disks include flash memory that works like a buffer between the computer system and the hard disk. The memory is used for short-term storage heading both to and from the disk and reduces the amount of time the disk spins. That will reduce power consumption; a performance boost is also expected because reading and writing data from flash memory is significantly faster than from a disk. It takes advantage of the capacity of the hard-disk drive and the snappiness of solid-state technology, said Marc Noblitt, senior interface market development manager with Seagate. When the PC comes out of hibernate it has the correct data in the flash to come out much quicker. The technology has been developed by Microsoft and support is built into the new Vista operating system that goes on general sale on January 30. It's designed to eliminate the delay familiar to many computer users while the machine locates and loads a file from the hard disk. By anticipating the next required file and having it in flash memory the system can get it immediately. The group will evangelize the technology to users and seeks to expand beyond its five members to companies such as chip set vendors and benchmark system makers, said Joni Clark, product marketing manager for notebooks at Seagate. Several of the companies have already demonstrated prototype drives with built-in flash memory. Last year Samsung demonstrated drives with 128MB and 256MB of embedded flash at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle in May and followed up in July by announcing the development of a drive with 4GB of flash memory . Both Seagate and Hitachi are planning drives. Intel's Rival Technology Hybrid drives face competition from an Intel-backed technology called Robson, which seeks to achieve the same benefits by placing a flash memory cache in the computer. The Intel system is due in new laptops starting in the second quarter of this year. It has the advantage of working with any current hard disk but requires a new interface card, said Noblitt. On-boot performance and overall performance both should be comparable, said Noblitt. When it comes to battery performance, he thought hybrid will have the edge: We're storage companies and we know when best to get data, so we think we'll have the advantage. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128395-pg,1/article.html Vikas Kapoor, MSN ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype ID: dl_vikas Mobile: (+91) 9891098137. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
