Imation will soon be making the industry’s first terabyte-plus raw capacity tape, in the LTO-5 format, with delivery in early 2010. However are tape formats drinking in the “last chance saloon”?
The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium has three technology-providing members: HP, IBM and Quantum and these licensed manufacturers continue to supply tape media and build drives. External drive data recovery when performed on these tapes i also extremely tough.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Will the new tape formats be the last generation?
Thursday, December 17th, 2009How reliable are the new generation multi terabyte hard disk drives?
Thursday, December 17th, 2009As we come to the end of the year, 2010 is going to be the age of multi-terabyte storage, with many manufacturers introducing 2TB hard drives. But how reliable will they be?
A new manufacturing process that will put 640GB on a single HDD platter, has allowed manufacturers to dramatically increase storage capacities drastically. As the 3.5-inch drives used in desktop PCs typically hold four or five platters, that suggests a whopping 3.2TB hard disk space of storage on a single drive. Looking at the likely timing, the new manufacturing technology could put the giant drives in shops as early as February next year.
Don’t be fooled by External Hard Drives
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009It’s an unfortunate fact that hard disk drives are rather slow at storing and retrieving data. Due to their mechanical nature they can only retrieve and send data to the controller at a certain speed. Many users now opt for an external hard drive as a supplement – big mistake if you are storing a lot of critical data, such as client files etc.
Hard disks are mechanical devices with moving parts, and as such will break down eventually, compromising any data stored on them that is not backed up. External drives are likely to break down much quicker. One technology that was developed to deal specifically with this issue and deal with this is a RAID data recovery drive (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).
Common data backup problems
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009Many businesses copy their critical data to the same USB memory stick or other media without realising that should the copy fail you could find yourself with no backup at all. This puts them at risk for needing data recovery in the future.
It is recommended that you back up your data daily and keep a minimum of 5 sets of backup media. Rotate the backup sets so that on each new backup the oldest previous backup is overwritten. Be aware that if you are only using 1 backup set, which could be a streamer tape, hard disk device, or even a USB stick, when the backup is running, you effectively do not have a backup in the period of time between the backup starting and its completion – you are overwriting an old file with a new file and if for any reason the backup failed the partially written files cannot normally be used.
Secrets of Partitioning
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009Whether you use your PC for work or play (or both), partitioning your hard drives appropriately can help you keep organized. It will also protect your work from disappearing should the first physical disk fail and the need for a hard drive data recovery arise. Lastly it is good practice to keep cache and log files separate from other files which can change size dynamically and rapidly, potentially making a file system full.
Protect your System from E-Crime!
Friday, April 24th, 2009Virus Attacks. These are only too easy to pick up from the internet. Change your Windows settings so that you can see the true file extensions. Never click on a file that ends in .exe or .pif or .vbs as these are files that launch programs and do not open any file attachments from people you don’t know. This could result in the complete loss of data and the need to perform a data recovery.
Diagnosing Hard Drive Problems
Friday, April 24th, 2009In this article we examine typical symptoms of hard drive failure and possible causes. We will identify issues that will prevent you from having to perform a hard drive data recovery.
What are the signs to look out for? While there are few sure-fire signs of impending disk failure there are some warning signals that give us the hint. Watch out for: disappearing files, very long wait while accessing files, files/folders whose contents appear to be strangely scrambled; reoccurring error messages while moving/copying/ deleting/creating files, and strange but frequent crashes of your OS.
My Book is Not Being Seen by Windows
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
My Book is Not Being Seen by Windows
OK, so the most popular external drives on the market have to be the My Book and The Passport. I get a ton of calls every week about them, and I don’t believe it is because it is not a good product but more because they are being SO widely used. So lets start with the main problem I get called about which is that Windows is not seeing the drive at all when it is plugged in. The customer does not even receive the BONG noise that a USB drive has been hooked up. Now in most cases the device seems to still be getting power.
WD external hard drives growing up!
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
western digital external hard drives
WESTERN Digital has upgraded its My Book Studio Edition, My Book Home Edition and My Book Essential Edition 2TB external hard drives, and the My Book Mac Edition 2TB drive series of external hard drive to 2TB of storage. The new external hard drives will cost around £375 and are available to consumers now.
Firmware what is it?
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Firmware what is it?
Lets take a look at the PCB there are often several chips on a PCB but what do they do? Do they contain the firmware or is that resident on the hard drive? The IC chips on the logic card are nothing more than empty chips, they have to be programmed to deliver their functions and complete the circuit. Originally all hard drives stored firmware in the ROM, unfortunately this limited the code and functions of the hard drive. Currently the firmware is stored in the SA Service Area of the hard drive known to the manufacturer as a reserved area. The firmware is organized into modules and controlled by the manufacturers own operating system. The ROM chip nowadays contains minimal amount of code, some companies now have nothing more than the loader on the ROM chip.
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