Hitachi shipped it’s first 1 terabyte hard drive several months ago and now Cnet is reporting that Seagate’s first 1 terabyte capacity hard drive will be available in the next month or so.
Seagate’s hard drive comes with a 5 year warranty and both Seagate and Hitachi have priced their units at $US399.
I realise that as I post this it’s getting close to April Fool’s Day but this tip is really quite genuine and it sometimes it does work. It’s not going to work every time but sometimes it does and so it really is worth trying.
All to often a hard drive in a computer fails and you lose the data it contained. Many people either don’t back up their data at all or don’t back up their data often enough and so when a hard drive fails - as it inevitably will - they lose all their data.
Usually the failure of a hard drive is the end - there’s nothing a computer technician can do but replace it with a new unit. However, sometimes it is possible to encourage a hard drive to come back to life just long enough for you to recover the most important data.
So how do you encourage it to come back to life and give up all those important records that it’s holding?
This is where I have to assure you once more that I’m serious, I have seen this four step process work.
1. Seal it inside a plastic bag - a zip-lock bag is the best.
2. Put that bag inside one of those plastic bags that motherboards come in.
3. Place it in the freezer for 40 minutes (yeah I know - it sounds totally crazy but it does work in some instances and if you want the data then this may work for you.)
4. After 40 minutes in the freezer take it out and connect it to a computer as a slave unit and then see if it will appear in Explorer. If it does then don’t waste any time in transferring the data to another hard drive.
If it doesn’t work for you then I’m sorry - as I said earlier, this process does not work for every hard drive that has failed.
by Stuart Livesey
In the last 10 days there seems to have been a mini surge in the number of computers coming into the shop with failed Western Digital 80 gig hard drives. Ironically the first one Rick, at the best computer shop in Hervey Bay, saw was his own office desk top and five or six others soon followed.
Each one of the hard drives that failed was built by Western Digital in 2003 and installed in machines in that year or early 2004.
When a hard drive fails there is very little if anything that anyone can do to repair it. Once it fails it’s gone and, in most cases, so has all the data that might be stored on it. There are some specialists who can recover lost data but their services are very very expensive.
These particular drives all came with a one-year warranty but no matter how long the warranty might be it only ever covers replacement of the failed unit - no hard drive warranty covers recovery of the lost data.
In one of the instances that came into the shop one family lost thousands of family photos and several years of research into their family tree.
You have to remember that hard drive failures are inevitable. Every hard drive will fail and the only way to protect your data is to back it up regularly. Back up at least weekly and don’t back it up to another sector on the same hard drive.
Forecasters are suggesting that we will be seeing the commercial release of desktop hard drives that will hold 1 terabyte of data before the end of 2006. Seagate has already released a 750GB hard drive and they are said to have development of it’s big brother well under way.
Adding to its high performance, professional series CompactFlash card lineup, ATP have announced the availability of its 4GB ProMax CompactFlash (CF) memory cards.
With the data transfer speed rated at up to 22.5MB/s (150X), the ProMax CF card is the fastest CF card in the market today and is specially designed to maximize the performance of the latest digital SLR cameras and video camcorders such as the Nikon D2X, D2H, D200, D100, D70, the Canon EOS series SLR cameras such as 5D, 20D, 30D, etc., and JVC camcorders.
How do you store your business records or family photos? What about your music or videos?
These days, with so much of our business packed into that whirring computer box, it’s only natural to think to storing your data on CD or DVD. After all, these days every computer comes with a CD or DVD burner so why not use it to store your data?
We certainly do, we have business records and important business files stored on CD going back as far as 1998. We also have a lot of our family records stored on CDs. Treasured photos, important family history papers going back to WWI have all been scanned and burnt onto CDs.
We have always known that CDs are prone to fail after a few years. I’ve mentioned it here before that cheap CDs are not ideal for storing important files because they deteriorate after just a few years. But now it seems that experts are also suggesting that good quality CDs are not ideal either.
Long term storage on hard disks is also not recommended because mechanical failure is quite likely.
Kurt Gerecke, a data storage expert with IBM, suggests that the only safe way to store important data is via magnetic tapes. He suggests that even good quality discs are unlikely to last beyond five years and el-cheapos bought at the local discount store are not going to last more than two years.
You can read the full story here at Computer World
I can remember when an 8MB flash card was a big deal for digital camera users - in fact I still have one and use it from time to time.
But these days with 6 megapixel cameras being common an 8MB card really isn’t going to be much use anymore. Especially when you can have big boy like this.
Kingston have a range of high capacity flash cards ranging including:
CF/1024-SFE 1 GB CompactFlash Card
CF/2GB-SFE 2 GB* CompactFlash Card
CF/4GB-SFE 4 GB CompactFlash Card
You should be aware though that the 4GB card only works in newer cameras and other devices that are capable of utilizing a FAT32 file system.
With cards that size it’s almost worth thinking about using them as a portable hard drive for your computer.
After my wander into the world of the weird and whacky as it relates to USB I thought I should hurry up and make sure that you understood that this really was a serious technical blog.
And so to prove my bona fides I offer you this - it’s known as the Monster Drive and it really does offer some serious data storage and transfer capabilities.
The Monster Drive is made by US Modular and the base model - a 2GB version costs about the same as a 512MB flash drive.
It fits in the pal of your hand and has enough storage capacity to hold around 600 MP3s or over 350 photos.
It also comes in 4GB and 6GB versions and can be used with Windows or Macintosh without the need for any drivers.
And for the ultra techno geeks here are the technical specs:
Reliable storage performance for any device with a USB port, including PCs, digital media players, handheld computers & other portable devices
Low power consumption
1500G shock resistance rating
Ultra lightweight & compact (weight 16 grams)
Media type: Glass
Rotational speed: 4,200 RPM
Media transfer rate: 52.4-99.6 Mbits/sec
Transfer rate: 3.3-6.5 Mbytes/sec
Seek time (avg.): 10 msec
Error rate (unrecoverable): 1 per bit
Head load/unload cycles: 300,000
Voltage: 3.3/5.0 VDC +/- 5% Auto Detect
Current (write): 275 mA
Current (idle): 18 mA
Dimensions: 42.8 X 36.4 X 5.0 mm
Temperature: 0° to 65° C operating
Relative humidity: 8 to 90% operating
Shock (half sine): 175G (2ms) operating
Vibration (swept sine): 1G 0-pk (5-500 Hz) operating
You can find out more about the company behind the product and some of their other state-of-the-art storage devices here
We’ve featured USB thumb drives here before but here is one that will store your data and lock down your computer as soon as you remove it from the drive.
The thumb drive and PC lock comes with a capacity of 256mb or 1Gig and you can find further details here
No … sorry … I haven’t found the secret that many people are looking for but Iomega just might be close. Fred Thomas is chief technologist with Imoega’s Advanced Technology Group and he sees that, withing the next few years, 300GB stored on something the size of today’s CDR is quite possible.
Iomega are developing a system that will allow 4 bits of data to be stored in the same space as 1 bit of data is currently stored. And if you wondered why that is so important let’s try and put it in some sort of perspective.
By law most companies are required to store every bit of information that they send or receive and that means that the biggest companies are regularly backing up huge amounts of data. In 2004 companies in the Asia Pacific region stored 65% more data than they did in 2003 and purchased over 76 petabytes of disk space to do it.
Damn … when I started with my first computer it was exciting just to own one 5.25 floppy disk and those disks first appeared in 1976.
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