GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Western Digital claims its newly-announced 2.5 TB and 3 TB Caviar Green hard drives are the largest capacity SATA drives on the market. But WD admits that these bigger drives need a little bit of help working on older systems.

“Drives with capacities in excess of 2.19 TB currently present barriers for PC hardware, firmware and software,” according to WD’s press release. To get around these barriers, WD is bundling its new drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which will pair legacy operating systems with a driver than can support bigger drives.

The 2.19 TB limit isn’t a problem for 64-bit versions of Windows 7 or Vista, OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, or many versions of Linux. Really, the problem is Windows XP.

XP (whether in 32- or 64-bit) runs into problems because of its legacy BIOS and Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table, which it in turn carried over from earlier versions of Windows. These allow XP to address a maximum only 2^32 logical blocks at 512 bytes each — for an upper bound of 2.19 TB.

Any 32-bit system (even one as new as Windows 7) has trouble booting into a drive with a capacity over 2.19 TB, but they can work around that limitation for a secondary internal drive. XP can only use these large drives as external drives with special USB firmware that either presents it as a single drive using larger sector sizes or as more than one smaller drives to the host (this is how Seagate’s 3 TB external drive works) — or using an internal HBA card, which does basically the same thing.

Still confused? WD has a complete list of operating systems, motherboards and USB bridges that it supports for its new large-capacity drives. Meanwhile, if you’re ready to roll and the old 2TB drives just weren’t enough storage, the new drives are available now. The 2.5 TB is $189 and the 3 TB hard drive is $239.00.

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Computer servers in data centers could be doing more than responding to requests from millions of internet users.

IBM researchers have patented a technique that analyzes data generated by vibration sensors within hard disk drives of rack-mounted servers to generate detailed information about earthquakes and predict tsunamis.

“Almost all hard drives have an accelerometer built into them and all of that data is network accessible,” says Bob Friedlander, master inventor at IBM. “If we can reach in, grab the data, clean it, network it and analyze it, we can provide very fine grain pictures of what’s happening in an earthquake.”

The aim is to accurately predict the location and timing of catastrophic events and improve the natural disaster warning system. Seismographs that are widely used currently do not provide fine-grained data about where emergency response is needed, say the researchers.

IBM’s research is not the first time scientists have tried to use the sensors in computers to detect earthquakes. In 2008, seismologists at the University of California at Riverside and Stanford University created the Quake Catcher Network. The idea was to use the accelerometers in laptops to detect movement. But wading through mounds of data from laptops to accurately point to information that might indicate seismic activity is not easy. For instance, how do you tell if the vibrations in a laptop accelerometer are the result of a seismic activity and not a big rig truck rolling by.

That’s why IBM researchers Friedlander and James Kraemer decided to focus on using rack-mounted servers.

“When you are looking at data from a rack that’s bolted to the floor it’s not the same as what you get from a laptop,” says Kraemer. “Laptops produce too much data and it’s liable to have a lot of noise.”

Servers in data centers can help researchers get detailed information because they know the machine’s orientation, its environmental conditions are much better controlled and the noise generated by the device tends to be predictable.

“The servers in data centers are the best place you can these machines for our software,” says Friedlander. “We know their location, they are on 24 x 7,” he says. “You know what floor they are in the building, what their orientation is. In case of an earthquake, you can calculate the shape of the motion so it tells you about the force the structure is going to be subjected to.”

To generate reliable data, the servers have to be spread across an area. And the number of computers participating can be anywhere from a 100 to a few thousand.

The servers would have to run a small piece of software that the searchers say is “incredibly light.”

The hard drive sensor data collected from a grid of servers is transmitted via high speed networking to a data processing center, which can help classify the events in real time.

That means, researchers say they can tell exactly when an earthquake started, how long it lasted, its intensity, frequency of motion and direction of motion.

IBM researchers hope companies with big data centers will participate in the project. “It would give them an advantage,” says Friedlander. “It would tell them about their company, their machines and help their people.”

Over the next few months, IBM hopes to start a pilot project using its own data centers and later invite other companies to join in.

Photo: A seismographic record of a 2007 earthquake in Japan (Macten/Flickr)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Yanko Design’s hanger would make carrying an external hard drive along with your laptop a little less impractical.

The concept design is quite simple: You’d clip an enclosure onto a
laptop screen, which would hold a 2.5-inch drive. Of course, just how
well this would work depends on the weight of your drive.

Nonetheless, a pretty cool idea, seeing as external drives, though compact, only add clutter to your work space. 

Hanging Hard Drives [Yanko Design via Techmeme]

Photo: Yanko Design

Posted under Gadget Reviews