The Weekly Geek » Hard Drives

Special Update – Thailand flooding impacts disk drive industry

Kent — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:55:39 +0000

I attempted to find a direct link to Seagates web site with this information, it came to me in an email from Seagate. We prefer Seagate drives but also use Western Digital (see my previous posts) as they are owned by Seagate.

Below is the text of the email to us partners.

“As has been widely reported, the severe flooding in Thailand is a tragic situation for families and businesses across the region. To aid in the relief and recovery efforts, Seagate is donating US$1 million across a few key organizations in Thailand.

With regard to Seagate business operations in Thailand, our component and drive assembly factories are operational and accessible. Our production is not constrained by either internal component supply or by our ability to assemble finished products. Rather, we are constrained by the availability of specific externally sourced components. Seagate now expects to ship 41 million to 45 million hard drives in the current quarter, a change from the prior projection of 40 million to 50 million units.

Throughout the entire industry, demand will significantly outstrip supply at least for the December quarter and the supply disruption will continue for multiple quarters. Unconstrained demand was expected to be approximately 180 million units for the December 2011 quarter. It is now expected that industry shipments will be limited to approximately 110 to 120 million units.

As such, our business priorities are focused on supporting our external component suppliers’ efforts to rebuild the supply chain as quickly as possible, and to work with customers to strategically align their near- and long-term requirements to our production capability. We are aligning our production schedules and product builds to best support both our suppliers and our customers. Our product roadmap has not changed.

Please understand that this is an evolving situation that we are diligently monitoring on a daily basis. Foremost in our minds is the tragic nature of this disaster, and our thoughts are with those personally affected.”

Expect price increases on new computers throught the holidays.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week.

Western Digital hard drives are going to be hard to get

Kent — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:42:32 +0000

The flooding in Thailand is causing issue with every life there, their jobs are in trouble too. Western Digital has had to stop producing hard drives for now. 60% of Western digital hard drives are made in Thailand. Also other semiconductor, logic chips, hard drive motors and other technology producing plants are located there too. Expect parts to be hard to come by, expect computer prices to rise, expect repairs to start costing more.

Forbes has an article here http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2011/10/17/thailand-floods-will-impact-hard-disk-drive-coernmponents/

I also have the Western Digital Press Release here

Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) performance

Kent — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:54:30 +0000

Many articles have been written about SSD hard drives, Intel recently put out a review of the speeds of these drives new compared to well used and thus fragmented. I would just like to throw my results in to the piles of articles.

A year ago this week I built a test Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate machine with a 40 GB SSD drive from Intel. I have all the same security and misc. software that I use on my other computers so it is a fairly easy one-to-one comparison. Well, talk about fast boot times. From “power on” to ready(and I mean ready, not just at the Windows desktop but still loading background “stuff”) takes 38 seconds. Yes, you read that right, 38 seconds. My next fastest machine takes just shy of 2 minutes.

Beyond boot there is what we have to deal with in the everyday, that is the opening and closing of programs, checking e-mail, retrieving, creating and storing of data as well as internet research.

Before we go any further let me go over how I have setup this computer. The SSD only has my programs on it (Windows, Office 2010, ESET, Adobe…). For my data (files, videos, music) I have installed a 1 Terabyte Western Digital “Black” hard drive. I chose the Black series for stability, this PC was to replace my home media center computer (XP Media Center 2005) that has an original 200 GB hard drive from a vendor I rather not mention. The problem with it is that it takes almost 9 minutes to boot. I have reinstalled that system twice over the years, it is the hard drive in this case.

Back to this system, SSD drives are not supposed to be defragmented, I did not believe this to begin with, just like I never believed that Windows NT machines did not need to be defragmented. By defragmenting you wear out the SSD drive much faster. Why? Well, basically these SSD drives are just glorified USB / Thumb drives and the way they are written to and read from is totally different than regular hard drives that spin on platters. At this time, Diskeeper has come out with a program specifically for reorganizing the files on a SSD drive while maintaining the life of the drive. http://www.diskeeper.com/hyperfast/. I plan on experimenting with this program over the next few weeks, hopefully I will remember to report this to you all.

With that said, even without defragmenting over the last year, I still get excellent performance with my SSD. Opening any application is almost immediate, especially Outlook. When you need to switch between programs, open and close others throughout the day and retrieve data you can count on a SSD to save you time.

Is a new SSD drive the answer to all your speed issues? No, not by a long shot, but with plenty of RAM (4GB for 32 bit systems and 8 GB for 64 bit systems), up to date BIOS and drivers and a quality network connection (Gigabit) you will have the best performance in a laptop or PC that can be achieved within reason. Now if you want to tweak your operating system, you certainly can get more speed out of a computer, just check out the articles and PDF downloads free located throughout this site.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!

Western Digital Hard Drive Naming Convention

Kent — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:14:05 +0000

I am a big fan of Seagate hard drives. A couple of years ago, Seagate bought Western Digital. Since then the WD brand has changed the naming convention of its hard drives. Now you can get a “Blue”, “Green” or “Black” hard drive all in the same gigabite size, such as 1TB (terabyte).

So what is the difference, well, the “Blue” is the everyday inexpensive model that keeps prices down on parts. It still comes with the WD 3 year manufacturer defect warranty, nothing fancy, just plain and inexpensive. Our example of a 1TB drive will have 32MB of cache RAM and will be SATA running at 3Gb/s (Gigabits per second) and spins at 7200 RPM.

The “Green” drives are specifically more “eco-friendly”, the 1TB drive will have 64MB of cache (double that of the “Blue” model) but run at the slower 5400 RPM (that is how it “saves energy”). It too will be SATA running at 3Gb/s and have a 3 year warranty.

The “Black” drives are made for speed and accessing data, generally they are designed for workstations or light servers. Sticking with our 1TB example, it will have 64MB of cache like the “Green” version but will spin at 7200 RPM like the “Blue” edition and its data transfer rate is 6Gb/s, yup, twice the others transfer speed. On top of all that it comes with a 5 year manufacturer defect warranty.

To give you an idea of pricing.

Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS 1TB is currently $69.99 at www.newegg.com

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS 1TB is currently $59.99 at www.newegg.com

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB is currently $89.00 via www.newegg.com

So you can now decide which is best for you. Until we meet again, have a virus free week!

PC things to do Yearly

Kent — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:22:10 +0000

A great big howdy to one and all! I just moved my office back into the dungeon from my living room. During the move I noticed and thus remembered how dirty computers and technology equipment can get just sitting. This reminded me of the “PC Things to do series” I wrote about and has prompted me to add another article.

Previously I have written my suggestions on things to do every day: http://www.theweeklygeek.com/2009/08/31/pc-things-to-do-everyday/

Things to do every week: http://www.theweeklygeek.com/2009/09/01/pc-things-to-do-every-week/

My suggestions on what to do monthly: http://www.theweeklygeek.com/2009/09/03/pc-things-to-do-every-month/

Here is my list of things to do yearly. Physically clean the computer, with the system off and unplugged clean the outside of the case, the monitor and then remove the side of the case and dust the inside.

I used our normal household cleaner on the case and monitors bezel. I have LCD cleaner for the monitors screens however in the past I have sprayed eye glass cleaner on an eye glass cloth and then wiped the monitors.

As for the inside of the case, I take them outside and use canned air. Some people use small compressors. I don’t like them for a couple of reasons. First they can accumulate moisture and then spray that inside your computer, second they have a lot more pressure than canned air and can dislodge wires and devices like RAM or even processors, not something I want to not see and then spend extra time diagnosing. Make sure that the CPU and case fans as well as inside the power supply are well cleaned, the fans are where most of the dust builds up.

Enough about cleaning, the next thing I recommend is running full hardware checks. I know you have run your cleanup and defragmentation but that does not check for errors on the drive or in RAM. The major hard drive manufacturers have software that will scan your hard drive for errors.

Western Digital hard drive software: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en#

Seagate’s SeaTools: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Fujitsus diagnostic tools: http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/support/utilities.html

Microsoft (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp) and others have memory testing programs (I like Memtest http://www.memtest.org) that will check for issues with your RAM modules.

Of course many motherboard manufacturers have system tools for their boards. If all else fails, there are several Live CD versions of Linux that have generic tools that can be used. Knoppix is one such CD and is located here http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html.

That is all I can think of at this time, if you have an idea or tip you would like to share feel free to e-mail us, until we meet again, have a virus free week!