Category Archives: Hard Drives

SEAGATES FLAGSHIP desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS) units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful customers.

A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then – out of the blue – it’ll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won’t be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there’s power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting.

Naturally the Seagate forums (as well as many other customer-driven forums, like retailers and hardware sites) are flooded with testimonies of customers’ experiences with Seagate support. These are helpful enough to ship you a new drive, as per the warranty, but invariably the drives end up bricking as well.

Data Detect are reporting that there’s a very high rate of failure on these drives. One user in particular reports having set up a 6 TB drive array and over the course of 1 month having half the drives fail on him. No official stats are available, but at least one RMA middleman has told us there’s about 30-40% failure rates.

According to data recovery experts Seagate has diagnosed the problem and issued a new firmware to address it. However, drives that have already been affected can’t have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down status.

Users are extra-peeved because beyond the usual RMA drill, if they want to recover the data on those drives they can get stuck with a hefty data recovery bill to pay.

Drive origin and firmware seem to be Thailand and SD15, but at least one user reports having had identical problems with a unit from the Wuxi(ng) fab and the SD35 firmware.

Of course clients have mailed and called Seagate about this, but it seems their execs are too busy to pick up the phone or write back. We’ll just refer them to that longstanding truth that good names are built over years and shattered in seconds. Data Detect is able to recover from these problems and has been doing so since the problems arose. In conjunction with its partners Data Detect have a cost effective solution to retrieve its clients data in quick time.

Contact Data Detect in Sydney Australia on 02 99294822 for further details

Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drives have worked their way through a range of performance and reliability problems to become a major feature in data storage systems. Aside from their rapid data transfer rate, they make it possible for companies to increase their storage capacity (into the terabyte range) without too much damage to their IT budgets. But according to Jerome Wendt, SATA disk drives haven’t ironed out all the kinks in their system just yet. In an article for Computer World, he says that SATA disk drives have a known deficiency that makes it necessary for companies to be careful when deploying the drives into a range of systems.

The problem is not that serious for small systems, but once a system goes beyond the 10TB mark it risks pieces of data becoming unreadable. Systems with over 100TB are certain to encounter this problem. The crux of the matter lies in a pesky bit error rate that occurs roughly once every 100 trillion bits. According to Wendt, not even RAID technology, which normally protects all storage systems against data loss, can detect unreadable bits on a SATA drive.

Wendt says that the problem is not really all that serious, provided companies don’t de-duplicate their data to increase their storage capacity. Even super-organised companies generate vast amounts of duplicate data as files and reports are sent around, recreated, edited, amended, saved and resaved in different locations. De-duplication gets rid of unnecessary duplicates, opens space and helps improve the organisation and management of data. The problem with the bit error rate in SATA drives, however, means that if the system can’t read a particular bit of information, and there are no duplicates to fall back on, companies risk a snowball effect. One unreadable bit of data can cause many other files to also become unreadable; the key to unlocking or reconstructing the data lies in that one vital bit that the SATA drive missed.

So while high-capacity SATA disk drives and storage systems have overcome numerous hurdles since their inception, and while they are valuable in solving the archiving and backup problems that many companies face, they are still not as infallible as users and vendors would like them to be.

Solid state drives (SSDs) are marketed primarily on the basis that they are more energy efficient than traditional magnetic hard drives. According to the theory, the fact that SSDs don’t have any moving parts means that they consume less energy than regular hard drives that have spinning platters and movable heads. But an article at Tom’s Hardware called “The SSD power consumption hoax” says that far from being energy efficient, SSDs actually use more power than other hard drives.

According to the article, SSDs draw a consistent level of power (the maximum) regardless of whether they are active or not. The level of power that conventional hard drives use, on the other hand, fluctuates according to the amount of activity. Power consumption drops considerably when they are inactive or activity levels are low. Data analysts tested a number of different SSDs from seven different vendors and each one rendered disappointing results.

Understandably, SSD manufacturers have responded strongly to these new, potentially damning revelations. Dean Klein, vice-president of memory system development for Micron said that only early-generation devices were used in the tests, which he freely admits were “quite power hungry”. Patrick Wilkison, who is vice-president of marketing and business development at STEC, has also spoken out against the results. He says that the tests were flawed because legacy drives were used, none of which will be used by any PC manufacturer. Wilkison adds that new versions of SSD have intelligent power management systems to combat excessive power use.

Intel, who weren’t included in Tom’s Hardware SSD tests, has nevertheless added their two cents to the battle by saying that SSDs can be “architected (sic) to improve battery life”. They are expected to release new SSDs with improved capacity (80GB to 160GB) later this year, all of which they claim to be power efficient.

Throughout this entire furore, it appears that everyone has overlooked the fact that Tom’s Hardware believes in the value of SSDs, and says that they are the way of the future. They merely wanted to point out the areas that they believe need improving in order for SSDs to reach their full potential. The thing that can’t be overlooked, however, is that they may have mislead consumers by testing old and outdated SSDs that have already been replaced with improved models.

Professional photographers use microdrives in order to take large numbers of high-resolution, good quality pictures in one sitting. Microdrives are essentially tiny hard drives – usually one inch big – and slot into the camera where the flash memory would normally fit. Their biggest benefit is their 4BG size, ensuring solid storage space for the photo enthusiast.

To their advantage, microdrives cope well with power loss – whereas flash disk memory is easily jumbled, should your computer experience a power surge. However, microdrives have a slower shutter speed than advanced CompactFlash cards, and their transfer speed is also relatively sluggish. They are more sensitive to shock, considering their capacity-size ratio.

Hard drive manufactures are continually upgrading their microdrives to correct the running speed and sensitivity drawbacks. Notably, Sony is closing gap on its microdrive speed, offering 2 and 4GB drives that are compatible with devices that hold a PC card type II slot.

Digital videos and quick-shutter succession photos can be easily stored in these minidisks, whereas flash memory will quickly run out. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has created a 4GB microdrive with a data transfer rate that’s 70% faster than previous models. The new microdrive has the distinction of being the world’s smallest hard disk drive, at only 16 grams and the size of a matchbook.