Perhaps the most important indicator in a hard drive is the S.M.A.R.T. check which is built in to virtually all models. This check is a way for your hard drive to warn you that something is wrong. The problem is a lot of systems only show S.M.A.R.T. checks at bootup, which really doesn’t do too much good. This is where Seagate’s SeaTools for Windows come into play.

SeaTools, obviously, checks Seagate drives, but also any hard drive which has S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. This makes SeaTools ideal for systems with multiple hard drives as you can check the health of each device from a single location. Additionally, you can perform non-destructive tests on drives in order to full test their health.

While there are other programs out there which do the same thing, I have found SeaTools to be just right for basic hard disk diagnostics from the convenience of Windows.

Copying Your Programs?

A lot of people new to computers assume you can copy entire programs from one computer to another and they will work. Unfortunately, for most software, that is not the case. Software programs usually have entire folders and many files that are needed to run smoothly. They also have registry entries that are needed to work properly. For this reason, you need to actually take the time to re-install all of your software. Yes, that means finding your program CDs and running all the install programs again. Trust me, not only is this necessary for a lot of your software, but your computer will just work a lot better if you do it this way.

Copying Your Data

Your data files are another matter. They are just files. They have no tentacles in the registry and can be moved around easily. So, the question is: How do you move your files from another hard drive?

Chances are you have a hard drive in another computer. That drive has a full installation of Windows on it, along with your entire old computing environment. But, keep in mind that all of it is on a hard drive. And that hard drive is removable from the old computer. Now, keep that in mind a moment while I address the most obvious ways to move your data.

• CD/DVD Disc. Yes, you can use the old computer to burn all of your data files to discs. Then simply throw the disc into the new computer and move the files. Nice and easy. But, if you have a lot of data, you’ll need potentially a lot of discs. And this can be annoying and slow.
• Network. If you are dealing with two completely separate computers, you can put them both on the network at the same time and use your network to move the files over. This is a nice, fast way to get it done, but it requires the time of setting up the network properly with the proper folder sharing permissions.
• Internet. There are remote computing services that can be used to move files, even if the computers are not even near each other. I use LogMeIn.com, for example. They have a file transfer setup which is quite fast and you can move large quantities of data with it. But, again, it requires two completely separate, internet-enabled PCs as well as a paid subscription to LogMeIn. If you are using a remote backup service like Mozy or Carbonite, then chances are you have a lot of your data backed up with them. You can also use their service to restore all of your data files to your new PC.

Down and Dirty Way

Very often you find yourself with one computer and two hard drives and you need to move data. You can do the entire transfer with one computer and without any network. It involves simply connecting BOTH hard drives to the computer at the same time. To illustrate, I’ll go through the way I did it when I downgraded from Vista to XP.

1. I had two hard drives, one with a full Vista setup and another which was blank. I wanted to put XP back onto this computer. So, I disconnected the Vista drive from the motherboard and power supply in order to protect it from being overwritten. I rebooted the computer with the blank hard drive in it and the Windows XP CD in the CD drive.
2. I installed XP and my software to the new drive the same way I would if the computer were brand new.
3. I then turned off the computer, reconnected the Vista drive, and rebooted.
4. I went into the BIOS and made sure the boot order would dictate that the drive with XP on it would boot and not Vista.
5. The computer boots into XP and now my entire Vista drive is visible inside Windows Explorer as a second hard drive.
6. I copy and paste all of my data files from the Vista drive to the XP drive. It will take a while depending on the amount of data.
7. I power down the computer, disconnect the Vista drive again, and reboot.
8. There I am, using the new hard drive chocked full with all of my data. Nothing lost.

If your hard drives are SATA, then you need not worry about any settings. Just make sure the boot order is correct. If you are using IDE, then you will want to make sure that you flip your former master drive into SLAVE mode so that it will work secondary to your new drive.

If you are totally afraid to open up your computer and connect/disconnect hard drives, then you can always use a USB drive enclosure to connect your old hard drive up via USB and do the same thing. But, that requires having or buying a USB enclosure. My way is completely free.

Also, if the drive you are copying your data from is from another computer, just remove the drive from the old computer and connect it to the new one temporarily. You don’t even need to fasten the drive into the case. Just let it sit on something loose. As long as it is not on a metal surface and is connected properly, your computer will use it just the same whether it is screwed down or not.

Who thought copy and paste could be used to copy entire computers!

Warning Signs

In some cases, you start to see signs of a problem before the drive up and dies on you. Early warning signs include:

1. Computer freezes often. When it happens, the mouse cursor is unmovable and keyboard input is ignored. Nothing works and a restart is required to recover the computer.
2. Files Mysterious disappearing.
3. Frequent lock-up during booting. I say “frequent” because all computers will freeze every now and then and it doesn’t necessarily mean the drive is failing. You’re looking for a pattern here.
4. File access mysteriously slows to a turtle’s pace. Saving files or open files simply takes forever.

These are typical warning signs of a pending drive failure. When you start to see a noticeable increase in these patterns, backing up your data needs to take top priority. Otherwise you really are playing Russian roulette with your hard drive.

Signs of Real Failure

When the drive actually fails, it is a mechanical failure. Many times you will actually hear the drive making strange metallic noises. This is the read/write head thrashing around aimlessly and indicates failure. When your system has a crashed hard drive, it will not be able to boot. You may even get a blue screen of death.

Hard drive failure is a black and white thing. If the drive is working at all, you have a drive which is about to fail and is exhibiting the above warning signs in varying degrees. Once actual failure occurs, it just doesn’t work.

Diagnostics

The first thing to do is run through some inspection of the computer to see if this is indeed a drive failure. Here is a basic checklist. Now, if the PC was working fine and then just stopped working, chances are these items are not the case.

1. Check to ensure the power cable is properly connected to the drive.
2. Check to be sure the data cable is properly connected to the drive.
3. If it is an IDE drive, ensure the ribbon cable is aligned properly. Red edge of the cable is aligned with Pin 1 of the connector on the drive. Pin 1 is closest to the power plug, typically.
4. Master/slave assignment is correctly set if this is an IDE drive.

Once the physical connections have been verified, it’s good to see if the computer can even see the drive at all. If this is an IDE drive, go into the computer’s BIOS and have it auto-detect the drive. If it can detect it, then we know we have a solid connection. It doesn’t mean the drive is good, just that the BIOS can see it.

Using a bootable diskette for your anti-virus program, reboot and run a scan on the drive. It will scan the drive, including the boot partition, for viruses. If it finds anything, let it do it’s job. If it is able to successfully scan the drive at all, the drive is at least still working.

Use a third-party disk management program or simply FDISK to view the partitions on the drive. If no active partitions are found, then you know the partitions are screwed up. Unfortunately, that would be bad news. You can try a data recovery utility (see below) to recover the data. Otherwise, you will need to re-partition the drive and lose your data in the process.

You may want to run a ScanDisk or Check Disk on the drive. This is best if the drive is functioning partially. If you have a full mechanical failure, nothing will work. If some data is retrievable but others are not, then we have a partial failure. Try running Scandisk or Check Disk to scan the drive. Allow it to perform a full scan and fix anything it finds.

Yep, It’s Gone. Now What?

Well, first off, my heart goes out to you. If you didn’t use backups, you just lost a bunch of data. If you did, you are minimally looking at the annoying experience of having to set up the entire computer again.

Either way, you will need a new hard drive. Once installed, you set up the new hard drive as usual and re-install all your software. You then restore all your backups and you (hopefully) are good to go. Just trash the old drive. The data is not retrievable in most cases which means that throwing it away with your data on it is not really a risk.

Data Recovery

Too commonly people lose a hard drive that had data on it that was not backed up. These are the people who are then scrambling for ways to recover the data from a crashed hard drive. In some cases, this can be done. You should know up front, though, that it is going to cost you some money. Perhaps a lot of money. As of now, a quick Google search shows typical price ranges between $300 and $400. It isn’t cheap and you need to weigh out the cost of the service versus the cost of losing the data.

The art of data recovery depends solely on the nature of the drive failure. For example, if the electronics of the drive died but the mechanics are OK, then replacing the electronic board can revive the drive. Also, if the read/write head died but the platters still spin and are intact, then the data is still there. A new read/write head is needed to get the data.

The first thing would be to have your drive evaluated by a data recovery service. Since data recovery is very custom to the nature of the failure, prices vary.

Software Options

And since I know people will ask, no, there is no software utility out there that can recover data from a crashed hard drive. If the drive is not really crashed, then perhaps a disk utility can help you recover something. But, a true crash is a problem with the drive itself, and no software can overcome that one.

The data recovery software one finds when searching for it is designed to recover from accidental deletes or corrupted file structure. If these thing happen, there is a chance you can recover it on your own. Once the drive actually dies, though, your only option is to use a data recovery service.

If you look at the rest of the PC, it operates by electronics only. Electrons move very quickly. The traditional hard drive consists of a series of discs, called platters, which store data. A read/write head moves across the surface of the platters to read and write data. In simpler terms, it’s mechanical. And that means slow (at least compared to non-mechanical parts).

Solid State Drives

The trend is that PCs are likely to move toward the use of solid state drives (SSDs). A solid state drive is a drive that uses non-volatile memory to store data. It allows data to be stored and accessed without any moving parts, very similar to how a USB flash drive works. By getting rid of these moving parts, a solid state drive gets rid of issues like seek time, latency, and even hard drive failures. After all, hard drives are capable of failing because they have moving, mechanical parts. Get rid of the mechanical parts and you no longer have a drive that can crash.

There are differing types of solid state drives. One kind is based on SDRAM, which is volatile memory. Volatile memory simply means that the memory will maintain it’s data only so long as power is supplied to the memory. As soon as the power is cut off, everything is lost. The RAM in your computer uses this technology. SSDs based on this technology have the same speed benefits of normal PC memory, which is roughly 200X or faster than today’s hard drives. The kicker is that you have to maintain a battery in the unit to keep power moving to the volatile memory. For this reason, this type of SSD is only going to be used for certain applications, and probably not inside the standard PC. At least not for standard data storage.

Then you have the Flash-based drives, which use non-volatile memory. This means that they will retain the data even when power is suddenly removed. These kinds of drives are still MUCH faster than the standard hard drive, but they are not as fast as those drives which use volatile memory.

So, How Good Are These?

Good. A flash-based drive has a lot of advantages:

• Fast start-up, since you don’t have to wait for the disc platters to spin up
• Much faster access time
• Much faster boot times and application load times
• Longer life span. While drive crashes are not a risk, the memory itself does have a life span. It is said that a typical flash drive will have about a 10-year life span. Technically, the technology in use in today’s hard drives has a long life span (the actual data), however, because of the mechanical nature of the drives, actual life span is much less.
• No mechanical parts means less power, less heat, and NO NOISE.
• Speed consistency. Normal hard drives usually slow down as they fill up, whereas flash drives can maintain constant speed even if at peak capacity.

One of the drawbacks is that data is not recoverable. If a hard drive crashes, the data is usually still on the disc platters. This means that a technician with the proper equipment can usually take the drive apart and recover the data from the disc. With flash drives, this is not possible.

And, of course, today we have major drawbacks of price and capacity. These types of drives are not yet commonplace. The ones that are out there are relatively small compared to normal hard drives. And you pay through the nose for them, too. I would expect, though, that as the technology gets better, we will see larger capacities for less money, just as we got during the perfection of the hard drive.

Today’s Options

Since this technology is rather new, what is out there is used typically by a select audience who pays a lot of money for the privilege. Right now, most SSDs in use are in ultra-portables, notebooks and tablet PCs. The technology has been used in cell phones for longer than that, at reduced capacities.

Manufacturers active in development of this technology include Sandisk, Samsung, A-DATA, and some other lesser known companies. Capacities range from about 32 GB to up to 160 GB. The sweet spot right now seems to be around 64 GB. The 160 GB drive was released by Adtron in February 2007 (view the press release ). Seagate just announced they will begin manufacturing flash drives in 2008.

Conclusion

Are flash drives likely to totally take over the market any time soon? Probably not. In-Stat predicts that SSDs will be shipped for about 23.8 million PCs by 2011. This is only about 6% of the total market. That’s a huge growth, considering hardly anybody is using it right now. But, 6% of the market is not a total takeover.

Even so, SSDs do represent the future of the hard drive. Or better stated, a replacement for the hard drive.

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Before Installation

Installing a hard drive is a medium level job. If you are confident in yourself and would like to save the money a computer guy would charge to do it, go ahead and do it yourself. It won’t be that bad. The physical installation is actually pretty easy. Getting it ready for use takes a little longer.

The worst part about installing hard drives is setting the jumpers on the drive so that it works correctly with your current hardware. You only need to worry about jumpers if you are using an IDE hard drive. IDE hard drives have settings for master, slave and cable select. This is because, for an IDE drive, it matters. For Serial ATA drives (SATA), you don’t need to worry about jumpers at all. Now that SATA is becoming much more prevalent than IDE, it is becoming a lot less likely that you will need to worry about jumpers during this process.

Before installation, inspect the inside of the computer’s case and determine where you want the drive to go. If you are using an IDE hard drive, you want to optimally connect the drive on a different IDE channel than your DVD/CD drives. Most motherboards have two IDE channel connectors. So you would put your disc drives on IDE2 and your hard drives on IDE1. For SATA drives, your life, again, got easier. SATA gets it’s own channel and, as of this date, SATA DVD drives are very uncommon.

Materials Required

• Hard drive
• Copy of the hard drive manual (if you need to set jumpers; this can be downloaded if your drive didn’t come with one)
• Controller card (optional; use this if you don’t have a spare connector on the motherboard or space on an existing ribbon cable to connect your drive to. Make sure you get one that matches your drive - Serial ATA for an SATA drive; ATA/100 or ATA/133 for an IDE drive; SCSI for a SCSI drive.)
• Data cable for the drive (if you aren’t installing the drive as a slave on an existing cable)
• Power cable Y-splitter (if you don’t have a spare power connector)
• Ultimate Boot CD (if you want to clone your old hard drive to your new one)

How will you be using your new drive?

If you are replacing your primary hard drive, make sure you back up any data you want to save before you start. If you don’t want to reinstall Windows, you can clone the contents of your old hard drive to your new one using the setup utilities that hard drive manufacturers provide, or you can use a specific cloning program like HDClone or PC Inspector Clone Maxx. All of the above-mentioned utilities are available on the Ultimate Boot CD, so you can download and burn that and then choose the utility that is easiest for you to understand. (If you don’t have access to a high-speed internet connection, you can order a CD for a small fee.)

If you are willing to reinstall Windows, make sure you have discs for Windows and all your programs. This will prevent frustrations about losing programs after you have already formatted your computer.

If you are simply installing a secondary hard drive for storage, you don’t have to make any changes to the configuration of your current hard drive. If, however, you are installing a second IDE drive, it is possible that you will need to alter the jumper configuration of your primary hard drive. If your current hard drive is set as “Cable Select” (meaning it is the only drive on the channel), then you may need to change it to “Master” which will allow you to add the second hard drive as a slave (see below).

Setting Jumpers: IDE Drives

IDE can accommodate two drives per channel, with most computers having two channels built in. The primary drive on a channel is called the Master, and the secondary one is called the Slave. The IDE channels are also labeled as Primary (or IDE1) and Secondary (or IDE2). The hard drive that the system boots from is usually the primary master. Generally, if you’re adding a second hard drive you would set it up as the primary slave. (The secondary master and slave are usually used for optical drives, although they can accommodate hard drives if needed.)

Most drives come set to be used as masters, so if you want to use one as a slave, you’ll have to change the jumpers, which are located between the power connector and the IDE connector. Each manufacturer has different jumper settings, so I can’t give you exact instructions here. However, there is often a diagram on the top of the drive telling you how to set the jumpers, and if not there will certainly be instructions in your hard drive’s manual (which you can download from the manufacturer’s website if your hard drive didn’t come with one).

Another jumper setting, which you can use if you have an 80-conductor ribbon cable, is Cable Select. 80-conductor cables can be identified by their much finer wires compared to 40-conductor cables and by their connector colors (the motherboard end will be blue, red, or green, and the drive connectors will be black for the one on the end and gray for the one on the middle). With both drives set to Cable Select, the computer will recognize the drive hooked up to the black end connector as the master and the one hooked up to the middle gray connector as the slave.

Setting Jumpers: SATA Drives

Good news! There are no jumpers to worry about on SATA drives. Some SATA drives do have a jumper which controls the speed of the SATA drive itself, but you do not need to worry about anything related to master, slave or cable select.

Physical Installation

Now’s when you actually take off the case and get your hands dirty. Let’s get started:

1. Turn the computer off, unplug it, and take the case off. At this point, you may want to make some quick sketches of just how everything is in there: Which direction is everything facing? Where and how are the cables connected? For some people, such sketches help to put everything back when you are done.
2. If you are replacing your old hard drive, remove the cables from the old drive. You will see both a ribbon cable and a small power plug. Do not force them out. The ribbon cable is usually quite easy to remove. Sometimes, though, the power connector can become stuck. Just rock it back and forth (lengthwise along the narrow side of the drive), taking care not to rip the connector off the drive. Then remove the mounting screws that hold the drive to the case frame. Sometimes, you may need to tip the case or get into some strange positions to reach all the screws; other times, the hard drive is mounted in a cage that you’ll be able to take out to get to the other side of the drives. Finally, remove the old drive from the case. Be sure not to bump anything too hard on the way out.
3. If you are replacing the old drive, slide the new drive in right where the other one came out. If you are adding a second drive, just pick any empty drive bay - one a bit below the current drive might work best, because it will make it easier to route cables. If you are installing a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay, you may need to add rails or a mounting bracket to make it fit. Screw the drive into place, making sure the screws aren’t going in crooked. Don’t force them.
4. If you need a separate controller card, install it now into any unused motherboard slot. Chances are that you don’t need to worry about this. It is usually only necessary if you want to add more IDE drives than your computer will support with it’s two built-in channels. If you are using SATA, your motherboard likely comes with enough SATA ports. If not, you can extend it using a controller card just the same way as with IDE.
5. Attach the cables to the hard drive and to the motherboard or controller card if necessary. There are two cables: the ribbon cable (or SATA cable) and the power cable. The ribbon cable goes from the controller to the drive. Most cables are keyed to the connector so they only go in one way; if the cable isn’t going in, try flipping it over. Don’t force it. If you are adding a second drive, simply choose a connector on the same ribbon cable that is not used. Most IDE ribbon cables come with three connectors: one on the end (usually black) and one mid-way (usually gray), then one further away on the other end which connects to the motherboard (usually blue, green, or red). In general, the master drive should use the black connector on the end and the slave should use the gray connector in the middle, but if each drive is set either as master or slave, the position is not as important. On a SATA hard drive, position of the drives on the cable does not matter at all because a SATA cable only accomodates one drive.
6. Plug the system in and turn it on. It is best to leave the case cover off for now in case you need to fiddle with something or troubleshoot the installation.
7. If you did not use a controller card, enter the BIOS (usually by pressing the F1, F2, F10, F12, or Delete key when you see the Power-On Self-Test or the manufacturer logo). Check the BIOS to make sure that the drives are all being recognized. If you installed a drive on a connector that was not in use, you may have to set the corresponding drive to “Auto.” If your BIOS has an auto-detect feature, you can use that as well. If you did use a controller card, it will pop up a screen showing the name of the card and any drives it has detected.
8. If the drives are not being recognized, check that both power and data cables are in tightly (including the motherboard end for the data cables), and that the jumpers are set correctly. If they are all recognized correctly, let’s move to the next section.

Software Installation/Cloning

Now that your new drive is installed, we can move on and get it set up with Windows. If you are replacing your current drive and cloning it to your new drive, you will need to connect both drives. Change any necessary jumpers (see “Setting Jumpers” above) so that both drives as well as a CD drive are recognized. At this stage it is not important to screw in your old drive; you can just rest it somewhere convenient, but don’t leave it hanging in midair. Boot from the Ultimate Boot CD, and select the utility you want to use to clone the drive. Go through the appropriate prompts, making sure to select your older drive as the source and your newer one as the destination (pay careful attention to the hard drive sizes indicated by the cloning program). You don’t want to clone your new drive with nothing on it to your old drive with all your data!

If you are replacing your current drive but not cloning its contents to the new drive, put your Windows CD in the drive and boot from it. You will be prompted during the first part of setup to partition and format your drive; if you are using Windows 2000, XP or Vista, make sure to use the NTFS file system.

If you are simply installing a secondary drive, boot into Windows. In Windows 2000/XP/Vista, your new drive will not appear at all in My Computer until you format it. In Windows 9x/ME, it will appear, but you will need to right-click on the new drive and choose “Format” from the menu. To format the drive in Windows 2000 or XP, right-click on My Computer and go to “Manage”. In the window that comes up, click Disk Management in the left pane. Once it loads, you should see an “Initialize Disk” wizard pop up. Partition and format the disk to your liking, but make sure not to convert it to a dynamic disk, as doing so will provide plenty of annoyances down the road.

Finished!

Congratulations, your new drive is installed!  Now that you have installing your hard drive under your belt, you might be interested in partitioning your hard drive (that means dividing your space so you can separate data).

A visual look at what’s involved in installing a standard hard drive.

If you have looked at computer store shelves lately, you have probably noticed that SATA drives are becoming more prevalent.  Most motherboards now come standard with at least two SATA connectors, most power supplies have SATA power connectors built in, and SATA hard drives are becoming cheaper and more available.  SATA I (SATA 150) has been around for a while, and now SATA II (SATA 300) is becoming prevalent, but SATA in general has lately come into much wider use.  While PATA has not been entirely phased out, SATA has begun its takeover.  This article will explain the differences between parallel and serial technology and show you the features SATA has to offer.  It will also show you what is to come in the SATA world

SATA: A Brief History
SATA, or Serial ATA, has been around for some time.  While you may have only noticed it in the past few years, the Serial ATA 1.0 Working Group was formed in February 2000 to design SATA for desktops.  Then, in 2002, the Serial ATA II Working Group was established to work with SATA on servers and networks and to create the next generation of transfer speeds.  In July 2004, the SATA International Organization (SATA-IO) was officially formed.   SATA-IO “provides the industry with guidance and support for implementing the SATA specification,” according to their website. (http://www.sata-io.org)

Parallel vs. Serial To truly understand the power of Serial ATA, we must first understand its predecessor, Parallel ATA.  Parallel ATA (PATA) has been the standard for quite some time now, but has many problems.  First, IDE cables, as you have surely noticed, are large and very hard to arrange in cases.  SATA cables are much easier to use and arrange in cases because they are very small and take up very little space.  SATA cables have only seven wires (compared to 40 wires with PATA), making them smaller and thus easier to use.  This is due to the way SATA transfers data.  In a method called serializing, SATA divides up the bits in a byte and sends them one at a time.  This seems like a slower way of doing things, but since SATA cables are shielded, they suffer from very little interference.  Because there is very little interference, serial cables (like Ethernet cables) can travel very long distances with little speed drop.   As you can see SATA has a great advantage over PATA.  However, the list of advantages does not stop here.  Keep reading to find out what else SATA has to offer.

 Advantages of SATA
As mentioned before, there are many advantages of SATA.  The most prominent being speed.  PATA has a max burst speed of only 133MB/sec.  SATA I has speeds of about 150MB/sec, not much faster, but SATA II has speeds of close to 300MB/sec.  That is over double of the fastest PATA drives.  SATA is clearly faster than PATA, but there are a few more benefits of SATA.

As said before, SATA cables have only seven wires.  This makes them much easier to work with when wiring computer cases.  Having less space taken up by cables makes it easier to have more hard drives.  Also, airflow is improved because there is less air being blocked by the drive cables.

Another advantage is that SATA is that it is backwards compatible (so is PATA, but that’s not what we’re here for).  So if you have a SATA II hard drive and a SATA I motherboard, you can use them together.  However, you will only get speeds of SATA I.  The same is true for the reverse.  If you have a SATA I hard drive and a SATA II motherboard, you will still only reach speeds of SATA I.  

Other advantages include no tiny jumpers that you have to configure for your drives to work right.  SATA has no master/slave configuration which makes for easier setup.  SATA cables can also reach up to one meter (3ft.), which gives builders a lot more freedom for cable management and drive placement.

Disadvantages of SATA
There are very few disadvantages of SATA.  The main disadvantage, however, is cost.  As with any new technology, SATA costs slightly more then its predecessor.  While the costs are becoming closer and closer by the day, SATA still has a bit of a higher price tag.

What’s to Come?
SATA has certainly become a standard in modern computers, exceeding the speeds of its predecessor, PATA, twofold.  SATA also looks like it will have promising future in the computer industry.  Word has it that by 2007, SATA III will be released.  It is expected to have speeds around 600MB/sec.  Most likely, the price will be fairly high, but with speeds like that, many will go for the 3rd generation of SATA.

Optical storage has come a long way in the past few years. CD Burners were all the rage, and burn speeds went through the roof. But we soon realized that 700MB was not nearly enough room for all the data we had. Enter the DVD. DVD Burners, like their CD ancestors started out expensive and slow. But today we have faster burners for much lower prices. Today I am going to take a look at one of these new DVD burners, the ASUS DRW-1608P2. I’d like to give a big thanks to Directron.com / AxionTech.com for sponsoring this review and sending the drive.

Specifications and Software

Before I put the burner to work, let’s check out what it can do. This internal DVD burner boasts the following burn speeds:

• DVD±R up to 16x


• DVD+RW up to 8x


• DVD-RW up to 6x


• DVD±R Dual Layer up to 8x


• CD-R up to 40x


• CD-RW up to 32x

The burner can also:

• Read DVDROM Single Layer up to16x


• Read DVDROM Dual Layer up to 12x


• Read CDROM up to 40x


• Read DVDRAM up to 2x


• The drive claims access times are 130ms for DVDs and 120ms for CDs. The Buffer is 2MB.

Asus includes a large bundle of software in the box: Nero 6 OEM Suite and Ulead Movie Factory 4.0 Suite SE. The complete package of software includes:

• Nero Cover Designer


• Nero VisionExpress (Editing movies with menus and effects)


• Nero Media Player


• Nero Express


• Nero CD DVD Speed (Testing speeds)


• Nero DriveSpeed (Controlling spin down and read speeds)


• Nero InfoTool (Find Drive and System Information)


• Nero StartSmart (The full burning program)


• ASUSTeK Asus DVD (Watching DVDs)


• Ulead Movie Suite contains tools for burning, copying, erasing, authoring, shrinking and capture recording.

Test Setup

For all of my tests, the drive was installed as a slave to my Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM drive in my test machine:

• CPU: Athlon 64 3200+


• RAM: 1GB PC3200 DDR


• Hard Drive: Western Digital 80GB


• Operating System: Windows XP Professional

I used the following media throughout my testing:

• Verbatim DVD+R 16x


• Verbatim DVD-R 16x


• Verbatim DVD+R DL 2.4x (Approved for High Speed Burning at 4x)


• TDK DVD+RW 4x


• TDK DVD-RW 4x


• Generic CD-Rs

Tests
For all of my burn tests, the data will come from a disc image ripped to my hard drive. Using Nero, I ripped the image from a single layer DVD disc that totaled 4.29GB.

For my tests, I will burn each type of media, test CD and DVD read speeds using Nero’s own Speed Tool and test ripping speed for both CDs and DVDs. Finally, as the drive supports high speed burning, as well as Over-Speed Burning, I will also test if my 2.4x and 4x media will burn at higher speeds.

As fate has it, you wake up one morning to discover your machine will not boot. “Of course this can’t happen to me, it only happens to ‘other people’.” No matter what you think, hard drive failures can happen to anyone. You. Me. The neighbor down the street. The business owner downtown. It doesn’t matter. It happens eventually. Whether your system cost $500 or $5,000, a drive failure can really put a crimp on your plans. After all, the most valuable portion of your system is usually the data contained on the drive.

When you encounter a hard drive failure and/or data loss, your first thought is, “Do I have backups?” It is most often the case that backups of your data are non-existent, or if they are, they are severely outdated copies, which have been heavily modified on the now-faulty drive. What this guide is going to do is try to help you, the panicked user, to recover data off of that hard drive. Sometimes data can be recovered, sometimes not, but these tips will increase your chances of doing so.

First off, an operating system that will not boot is sometimes mistakenly recognized as hard drive failure. Viruses, spyware, corrupted installations/uninstallations, or any kind of tomfoolery within the operating system may render it non-bootable. However, this is usually the easiest situation where data can be recovered.

If you actually want the operating system working again, that’s a whole other story, and more than what will be covered here. There can be any number of problems or combinations of problems occurring that cause some sort of boot failure. Either a Google search or a visit to the PCMech Forums may prove useful in repairing the operating system.

So, what exactly is in a hard drive? Basically, you have a stack of platters onto which data is written. There is an actuator arm affixed with magnetic “heads” which read and write data on the drive’s platters. The actuator arm sweeps back and forth along the radius of the platters, while the platters are spun at a constant speed. Operating in this fashion, the heads can have access to the platters in their entirety. The data is written by the heads on each of the platters at a microscopic level where each bit is either a 1 or 0, depending on which way the bit is flipped. A bit is composed of two bands of magnetic iron particles, which can be represented as polar rods. Seeing as the heads are electromagnetic in nature, these bands can be flipped one way or the other, thus producing a “1” or a “0”, referred to as a “bit”. Eight of these bits used together is a byte, and depending on the way the disk is formatted, there is a specified number of bytes assigned to a sector. Then, an assigned number of sectors are grouped into clusters. Usually the smaller the cluster size, the more efficiently the space is used. On the other hand, the larger the cluster size, the more wasted space there is, but generally produces a slight increase in performance. Either way, the most efficient cluster size is set automatically with a default setting when you format your drive, depending on its capacity and file system used. Most of this probably sounds ambiguous, but it’s only to give general idea of how the hard drive operates and to make sense of some of the references later on in the article.

Needless to say, the important concept in data recovery is not how the hard drive actually works, although it helps to have a general understanding of it. Should you want to recover something that has been deleted, it is more important to understand how deleted files are handled.

There is where RAID comes in. Individually, most hard drives today are too slow. Regardless of how fast they are designed to be, with the speed of today\’s processor and other system components, hard drives today are a source of incredible bottleneck for a system. With RAID, we can blend the power of two or more hard drives together to accomplish great things.

What is it?

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. This is actually a great name for it. And with the price decreasing like never before, the \”Inexpensive\” part of the name is now becoming a reality. Depending on the setup you choose for your RAID array, it can offer you increased performance by using the power of two hard drives as a single volume or simply using the redundancy of a second drive for increased data security. Just like designers do in mission-critical machines (building redundant systems in case of the failure of one), a RAID array can provide increased security in the event of the failure of one of the drives. I will get into the RAID types in a minute, but any good RAID array will use mirroring technology, meaning that whenever you write something to your primary drive, the RAID setup will simultaneously write the same info to the secondary disk, meaning you always have a duplicate copy. In the event one drive fails, you have an exact, working copy of your entire system on the second disk.

The word \”array\” usually implies a series of elements, each of a similar size and nature. Well, RAID is no different. The optmimum setup for a RAID array employs two identical hard drives. If one of your drives is a 7200 RPM drive, then its best to be sure the other one is also a 7200 RPM drive. The same goes for capacity. If you have one 20 gig drive and the other is a 10 gig drive, your 20 gig drive will only operate on the RAID array as a 10 gig drive. In the example preceding, that RAID array would operate at 5400 RPM if you had a 5,400 RPM drive paired up with the 7200 RPM drive. Summing up, your RAID array will always operate at the speed or capacity of the weakest or smallest drive. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So, obviously, if you\’re looking to set up a RAID setup, buy two identical drives.

As you might guess, you need a special controller to set up a RAID array. The controller handles the task of managing read/write requests to both drives, managing the mirroring, etc. On some operating systems, namely NT Server or Win2000, you can use the OS itself as a software-based controller. But, it is always better to install a separate, hardware-based PCI controller. The PCI controller handles all the work onboard, saving the CPU cycles that a software controller would use. Controller cards also come with software to allow you to monitor the status of the array.