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Google wants hard drives designed to store your cloud data
Take a look at the hard drive in your desktop PC. It might hold terabytes of data, but the basic 3.5-inch design can be traced back to the early days of computing -- not really relevant in an era when a lot of your content sits in the cloud, is it? Google wants to change that. It's hoping to work with both the tech industry and researchers to design hard drives that are tailor-made for cloud-based storage. It wants to optimize the "collection" of disks instead of focusing on individual drives, and is more concerned about capacity and performance -- the things that matter most in a bustling data center -- over sheer reliability.
Ailing Mac? Try Drive Genius 3
When your Mac starts acting unreliably your first line of defense is Apple's Disk Utility, but that solves a small number of problems, such as permissions and disk verification and repair. A good second line of defense is Drive Genius 3 for Mac from Prosoft Engineering. Drive Genius offers repair and maintenance utilities you can use to make sure your hard drive runs at maximum efficiency. This US$99 suite of programs includes the following modules: Information, Defrag, DriveSlim, Repair, Scan, DrivePulse, Integrity Check, Initialize, Repartition, Duplicate, Shred, Benchtest, and Sector Edit. When you launch Drive Genius you can choose any one of the available utilities from a set of icons displayed across two screens. Each module presents an option to choose a drive, volume or files and folders on the right, depending on the utility's purpose. Options available for each utility appear in the main window with simple instructions. A question mark icon on the bottom right opens the help file. The simple Preferences offer three options. You can choose to show the custom animation of data moving around a disk as a tool works, check for updates, and turn on email notification when a tool finishes its task. This last preference is a subtle reminder that many of the functions take a significant amount of time to run. The Modules The Information module provides a complete description of your hard drive, probably more information than you want. The balance of the modules are best run after you backup your data, in case of unexpected problems. Scan, Integrity Check, and Benchtest run read and write tests on your hard drive. They check for bad blocks, the health of your hardware, and in Benchtest, test the drives read and write speeds. As these tests sort of hammer on your drive, any electrical interruption or serious drive problem can result in data loss. That's one good reason to make sure you have a good backup or copy of your drive on hand. The Duplicate module can create a backup for you, but as with many of these tools, it will not copy your current start-up drive unless you start from a different drive. Duplicate creates a bit-by-bit copy of your drive, so you must use a blank drive of equal or greater size to use it. Personally, I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to backup my drives, but including a backup module in Drive Genius just makes sense. It's actually best to use the Drive Genius startup disk from which to run most of the tools. These tests chew through quite a bit of time, so make sure you run the programs when you don't need the machine for a number of hours. The problem I often solve using Drive Genius 3 is a slow drive and one that mysteriously is eating up space at a surprising rate. That's where DriveSlim and Defrag come in handy. DriveSlim is useful to search for large files, duplicate files over 1 MB, Unused Localizations (language files you don't need), Universal Binaries, and Cache and Temporary files you no longer need. I'm not quite sure I understand how it works though. I wasn't happy with the way DriveSlim displays the information, I found that it showed duplicates that were not, but only with files over 320 MB. On one drive, using Mac OS X 10.6.8, it listed both duplicate files and on another, in OS X 10.8, it listed only one file and I had to search for the duplicate in the Finder to see where it was stored. I then manually removed the file stored in the wrong folder. I'm sure that's not the way the tool was designed to work, but I was not confident to just check a box next to the DriveSlim found file and have it decide which file to keep, where to alias that file, or where to back up the file. You can choose which of the files to locate, but if you choose to act on only one type of file, you must run DriveSlim again to work on another type of file. Time consuming to say the least. Even though most people claim you don't need to defragment a Mac-based hard drive, the OS actually only defragments files that are less than 20 MB. If you create or edit sound, video, or photographic files, you may have some hefty sized files on your drive(s). As Apple states in one of its manpages for XSan: "There are two major types of fragmentation to note: file fragmentation and free space fragmentation." "A file extent is a contiguous allocation unit within a file. When a large enough contiguous space cannot be found to allocate to a file, multiple smaller file extents are created. Each extent represents a different physical spot in a storage pool. Requiring multiple extents to address file data impacts performance in a number of ways." In short, if pieces of the file you want to use are scattered all over your hard drive, it is working harder to deliver that file to you, slowing your workflow, and potentially reducing the lifespan of your hard drive. In checking a couple of my hard drives I found movie files that were divided into over 2000 fragments and photo files with over 100 fragments. When you run Defrag the files are concatenated into one whole file and the free space is moved to one area. I did test defragmenting my startup drive, not a recommended action to take, but I have a current backup. Drive Genius reboots your Mac into the Command Line and runs the defrag command, which also repairs your drive and reboots your Mac when its done. It worked fine, but a bit unnerving to watch. The Repair module seems to duplicate the functions of Disk Utility, such as verify and repair disk errors and permissions. It will also rebuild the drive's catalog file. The rest of the modules are aimed at setting up your drives. You can Initialize a drive and format it for GUID (recommended for Intel Macs) or use the old Apple Partition Map. You can also Repartition a volume, but not your start up drive–unless you start off the Drive Genius 3 disc. Partitioning lets you divide one drive into multiple volumes. I seem to be one of the few people who still partitions my drives and use this function when I first use a new drive. Explanation of initializing, partitioning, and Sector Editing your drive are beyond the scope of this review, but you can find more information on the Drive Genius site and in the Help file. One word of caution, if you do not know exactly what you are doing, never use Sector Edit, because it can corrupt the drive and render files useless. Last is the newest module, added in Drive Genius 2, DrivePulse. This module loads into your Apple menu bar and monitors your drives in the background. I found it unnecessary on my new iMac, but have used it in the past on older machines. It checks for fragmentation, and file and physical drive problems. On my new iMac most of the drives I loaded yielded a Pending status. It checks drives when the machine is idle, so it doesn't interrupt your work. You can turn it off from the menu item or within Drive Genius. Conclusion The one thing Drive Genius will not do is run any tests on a drive that has serious physical problems, which is a shame. I started my tests using a 160 GB Iomega Ego that had trouble mounting. Anyone who deals with drives knows that clicks means ensuing death, but usually you have a little time to remove your files before the drive goes belly up. Well, this drive with three partitions fell off my desktop within 5 minutes. Drive Genius could see it initially, but would not run any tests and I couldn't recover anything from it. Drive Genius 3 is especially useful if you create or edit very large files. For this review, I tested version 3.2.2, but have also used version 1 and 2 in the past. The price of Drive Genius pales against the cost of a new hard drive. At about $7.60 per module, it helps you keep your machine lean and mean and working at peak efficiency. Requirements: Intel-based Mac OS X 10.6.8 to 10.8.x 1 GB RAM Does not support Drobo drives Limited support for FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, and Software RAID Upgrade from competing product for $75
HGST develops helium-filled, high-capacity hard drives: no, they won't float away
With certain exceptions, talk of advanced hard drive technology regularly has a tough time escaping research labs. Western Digital's HGST is promising a much more tangible project that could boost data capacities by a wide margin. By filling the gaps between drive platters with less buffeting-prone helium instead of air, HGST can safely fit as many as seven platters in a typical, 3.5-inch desktop hard drive instead of the current five. Going with the lower density gas creates a raft of side benefits, such as fitting more data on a single platter along with reducing the drag that both slows down and heats up the disk. We'll have to wait until 2013 to see shipping helium-filled drives in our PCs; given the slightly exotic nature of the technique, though, we wouldn't count on HGST or Western Digital handing out drives for free like balloons at a birthday party.
LaCie 2big, 4big Quadra drives hop the USB 3.0 bandwagon, give Macs 12TB of speedy storage
LaCie has been sprucing up its smaller drives to handle a new crop of Macs that support USB 3.0. It's now turn for the big boys to play. Updated versions of the 2big Quadra and 4big Quadra (not yet shown here) use the faster port to reach the potential of their high-capacity RAID arrays, peaking at either 210MB/s for the dual-drive 2big and 245MB/s for its quad-drive cousin. We're not seeing a fundamental shakeup of the design apart from the higher speeds, although that's not necessarily a problem given the FireWire 800 to catch legacy users and hot-swappable bays for future upgrades. Video editors and other storage mavens should just prepare themselves to pony up. The upgraded Quadra models will start at respective $499 (4TB) and $1,099 (8TB) prices when they ship in October, and they're only poised to get more expensive when LaCie sets the costs for the higher-end 6TB and 12TB models.
Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad
There's been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there's only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP's Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don't be sad knowing that the floppy's story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that. [Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]
France's ANDRA developing a million-year hard drive, we hope our badly-written blogs live in perpetuity
Us humans have been quick to embrace digital technology for preserving our memories, but we've forgotten that most of our storage won't last for more than a few decades; when a hard drive loses its magnetism or an optical disc rots, it's useless. French nuclear waste manager ANDRA wants to make sure that at least some information can survive even if humanity itself is gone -- a million or more years, to be exact. By using two fused disk platters made from sapphire with data written in a microscope-readable platinum, the agency hopes to have drives that will keep humming along short of a catastrophe. The current technology wouldn't hold reams of data -- about 80,000 minuscule pages' worth on two platters -- but it could be vital for ANDRA, which wants to warn successive generations (and species) of radioactivity that might last for eons. Even if the institution mostly has that pragmatic purpose in mind, though, it's acutely aware of the archeological role these €25,000 ($30,598) drives could serve once leaders settle on the final languages and below-ground locations at an unspecified point in the considerably nearer future. We're just crossing our fingers that our archived internet rants can survive when the inevitable bloody war wipes out humanity and the apes take over. [Image credit: SKB]
Corsair Force GT SSDs put through their paces, have graphs to prove it
Instead of singling out one of Corsair's latest SandForce-equipped SSDs, the folks at StorageReview sussed out performance differences by putting each drive through the wringer. Though read / write specs are relatively uniform across the line, barring some slight dips in speed, they dug up a few juicy morsels of info that could benefit both frugal and performance-minded shoppers. In a read intensive gaming test, the 60GB entry drive performed similarly to the 480GB behemoth. Another notable result was a 60% jump in throughput between the 120GB and 180GB models. Keen on eking out the most performance-bang for your buck? Hop over to the source for the full skinny and a bevy of charts.
Intel to finally issue firmware fix for faulty 320 series SSDs (update: available now!)
When Intel first unleashed its third generation 320 series SSDs, we were thrilled with their prices that were 30 percent lower than Chipzilla's previous offerings. The love fest didn't last long, however, as many customers soon found they hadn't gotten what they paid for -- drives of all sizes were reporting only 8MB of capacity due to flawed firmware. Well, good news, storage speed demons, Intel's in the final stages of testing a firmware fix, and it'll be made available "within the next two weeks." SSD salvation's only a few days and a download away, so hit the source for the full details. [Thanks, Philip] Update: Look's like the update's live folks, so just head on over to second source link below and get all those bytes you paid for!
TUAW's Daily Mac App: GrandPerspective
Finding large space hogging files in a complex file system like that on your Mac can be difficult. GrandPerspective, a small open source program, aims to help you find and remove space wasters quickly and easily. GrandPerspective first scans a target folder, be it your entire disk or just your iTunes folder for instance. It can then build a treemap based on the file size and type, color coding the files in a user configurable mapping scheme, showing you your file system visually. From there you can identify those files and folders that are taking up the most space. Once you've found an unusually large file you can find out what it is by hovering over it or clicking it, with file information such as name, size and file type displayed in the right hand draw. You can then either delete that file directly from GrandPerspective (if enabled in the application preferences), or reveal that file or folder in Finder. You can also zoom the treemap in or out to get more detail, as well as re-scan at any time, either just the folder selected or the whole drive to update for any changes you've made. The color mapping can be changed to color like file types, extensions, names, levels or folders, which makes grouping similar files easy. Filters can also be used to scan your files for all sorts of things like file type, size, name -- you name it, there's a filter available. If you're looking to free up disk space on your drive, GrandPerspective makes it easier to find unwanted space hogs and is certainly worth the free download. Thanks to aliasnexus0 for the suggestion.
Intel to owners of failed SSD 320s: we're 'aware of the customer sightings'
We can imagine few things more horrible than booting up your new 600GB SSD and seeing a reported capacity of 8MB. That's exactly the situation reported by users of Intel's SSD 320 series for over a month on the company's support forums, as well as on Amazon reviews. One disappointed (to say the least) user describes that very scenario, and he's not alone. According to several forum members, the problem seems firmware related and shouldn't require a recall, while Intel says it's "aware of the customer sightings." Short on meaningful details, the statement promises an update is coming with more information -- bite-sized consolation for the owners of byte-sized drives.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Onyx
Cleaning up a Mac is something many users never do, but if you want to squeeze all the performance and disk space you can out of your Mac, you need a tool like Onyx. A free multi-purpose utility, Onyx lets you run a myriad of system tasks such as disk maintenance, cache clean-up and index rebuilding. You can use Onyx to clear away the cobwebs that collect in things like the browser cache, font caches, boot, kernel and extension caches, as well as logs from crash reporters, system diagnostics and Software Update. If that wasn't enough, you can also get Onyx to delete previous iTunes libraries, the QuickTime Content Guide, recent items lists and even Mail downloads. OK, you can do most of these things yourself manually, but Onyx makes it fast and easy to do it all from one place. Cleaning isn't the only talent Onyx has -- it's able to do quite a few maintenance and repair tasks such as verifying your startup disk, which it will do on it's first run automatically. By rebuilding the Spotlight Index or LaunchServices, you can often cure small corruption issues with your Mac. You can check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your internal disks, verify file structure and fix disk permissions without having to open Disk Utility. Onyx will also let you change some hidden preferences in Finder and other Apple programs such as iTunes and Mail, allowing you to tweak a few things here and there. Onyx is a great free system utility that we've covered many times in the past and which allows you to perform a load of different tasks all from one application. If you're interested in cleaning out OS X, download Onyx today. By the way, Onyx also works well with OS X Lion.
'3D Towers' double disk storage capacity, don't require glasses
Here's some exciting news for all you data storage enthusiasts and academics out there: researchers in France have found a way to double the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives by constructing "3D towers" of information. The team from SPINTEC created these pillars out of bit-patterned media -- separated magnetic nanodots, each of which carries one bit of data. By layering the dots in specific formations, the team created a "multilevel magnetic recording device" with an areal density of two bits per dot -- twice what it started with. According to researcher Jerome Moritz, these findings could provide IT companies with a new way to circumvent physical limitations to their data storage capacities, allowing them to build up and over the vaunted one Tbit per square inch barrier. The team's full findings were recently published in the American Institute of Physics' Journal of Applied Physics. You can read the full article at the source link or, if you're afraid of paywalls, just check out the PR below.
1TB hard drive thrown into a toy TARDIS, gives us a proper Time Machine
It's common knowledge that the Doctor's time- and space-bending TARDIS is a lot roomier on the inside than its external dimensions let on, and now we can put a definite number to just how much space there is in there: a terabyte. Yup, that's how much storage Max Shanly managed to cram inside his "toy" TARDIS. It took a bit of elbow grease (plus a screwdriver) to get it all to fit, but most of the credit here is for sheer ingenuity -- who doesn't want to back up his data onto a freaking Time Lord's intertemporal transportation device? Max is currently working on hooking up the flashing light up top to represent hard drive activity and we're calling up our favorite KIRF suppliers to get them cranking these out. [Thanks, Max]%Gallery-101940%
Sony, Tohoku University develop blue-violet laser with 100 watt output, eyeing 1TB optical disk future?
As much as some would like to envision a world entirely bereft of disk-based media, with Blu-ray being the medium's swan song, that ain't happening. Sony's already looking to the future, and in cahoots with Tohoku University, it has developed a blue-violet laser capable of 100 watt output. That's reportedly more than 100 times the "world's highest output values for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers." In the press release, the company said its tested using such technology for next-generation, large-capacity optical disc-storage, and while that doesn't say too much at face value, the Examiner reports (by way of various Japanese news outlets) that it equates to 20 times the storage of current Blu-ray disks, or about 1TB of data. Don't worry, we're sure all those 4K 3D films will still find a way to justify a "barebones" release dearth of features before magically making room for a second (and even third) Special Edition in time for respective holiday seasons.
Samsung's Spinpoint F4 320GB is fast and quiet, we think
You still rocking a desktop rig at home? Then you might want to check out Samsung's latest 3.5-inch spinner, the SpinPoint F4. The latest F-series drive features a 7,200 RPM platter rotation and 8MB/16MB buffer memory in capacities of up 320GB. While detailed performance specs aren't given, the SATA 3Gbps F4 has a one-head design with fewer moving parts (for quieter operation) delivering a 10% increase in read/write performance over Samsung's Spinpoint F1 while consuming 7% less power. Unfortunately, that's not very helpful for comparison against other manufacturers' drives now is it? Regardless, it's shipping to OEMs now.
Toshiba's 320GB hard disk is world's largest 1.8-incher
That's the world's largest capacity 1.8-inch hard disk drive right there. A claim met by a list of specs going a little something like this: 3.0Gbps SATA interface, 320GB capacity, 5,400 RPM, 16MB buffer, and 19dB of emitted noise during seeks -- a 4dB cut from Toshiba's previous generation of 5,400 RPM 1.8-inchers. Of course, these 1.8-inch mechanical HDDs are the form factor most commonly found in those netbook-shoving CULV thin-and-light ultraportables now coming onto the market. Look for it in December when the MK3233GSG hits mass production.
TDK's heavily stacked 320GB disc shows its nearly-clear face at CEATEC
As with pretty much every other optical disc out there that claims to hold a near-infinite amount of data, we're still skeptical about TDK's ability to actually bring to market the 320GB spinner you see above. But hey -- it's got ten 32GB layers and it's practically see-through. Did you really expect us to walk on by without clicking the shutter even once? Exactly.%Gallery-74888%
TDK stacks 10 layers on a single 320GB disc
Even though we have yet to see the long-hinted 100GB and 200GB prototype Blu-ray discs as real products, TDK is looking beyond that, ready to display 320GB ten-layer platters at CEATEC 2009 that can be read and written with current blue laser technology. Key in stacking so many layers is improving the transmittance of the outermost layer as seen above - that nearly clear one on the right doesn't require a more powerful laser to get through. The only thing we can't see? When or if any of these will actually be released. [Via Hot Hardware]
Apple releases MacBook Pro firmware to silence those 7200 RPM HDDs
That new MacBook Pro's 7200 RPM HDD singing you too many ballads lately? As promised, Apple today released a new firmware update to silence that troublemaker. If it doesn't come up through automatic system update, you can obtain Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0 (catchy name, eh?) via the read link. Admit it, you're gonna feel just a teensy bit lonelier once your laptop stops chirping so much. Update: Apple today also released Bluetooth Firmware Update 2.0.1, which alongside various bug fixes improves compatibility with the company's wireless mouse and keyboards on all machines with the Broadcom chipset -- that includes all unibody laptops and any Mac released in 2009. [Via TUAW]
Samsung's 250GB SpinPoint N3U has on-board USB, personal bonus card
It may not be the first 1.8-inch hard disk we've seen pushing a 250GB capacity, but damn if Samsung doesn't know how to market its tech. See, these drives are small as Samsung skillfully demonstrates by photographing its new Spinpoint N3U disk in front of a credit card. And by including a native PATA to USB controller on the circuit board, Samsung has helped manufacturers eliminate a bit bulk from future portable USB disk offerings. The 3,600rpm drive itself features 125GB per platter, 8MB of cache, and should be capable of withstanding drops from about 20-inches. At least it will when these begin shipping in mid-July for about $200.
