Archive for the 'Storage' category

Manufacturers of DRAM chips and NAND Flash modules still see the market as one long nightmare they cannot wake up from. There is a permanent oversupply that does not seem to be reduced by the end-of-the-year purchases. Taiwan DRAM makers are worried because they do not even see a reason why this should improve in the coming weeks.

This means that if you need either DRAM modules to upgrade your computer or Flash memory cards, you are both quite alone on this market and prices should be nice to you.

Tom’s Hardware just compared 7 online services for online storage of data.

Take your storage online

Today is Blog Action Day: The day that bloggers chose to try and help save the planet from the impact of Human activity. For my own part, I decided to collect a few ideas to save energy in your computer usage:

• Upgrade your gear
• Dim your screen
• Consolidate and virtualize computers
• Turn off peripherals
• Kill unnecessary processes
• Get a smart power switch
• Enable energy saver settings
• Unplug energy vampires
• Spin down your hard drive
• Shut down the computer

Another trick: Power saving remote computing.

We are told that the newest version of Nero 8, the disc burner software for CD and DVD (I love that silly “Nero: Burning ROM” tag line), is available. It does everything, but aren’t we still left wondering whether it’s not a little too expensive when we could download it for free (but legally)?

For some time already, I have been recommending CDBurnerXP, free software program that I found always able to do all the burning tasks I threw at it. CDBurnerXP just received an upgrade (download CDBurnerXP 4):

• Support for burning Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and Double layer DVDs
• Support for FLAC audio files
• Disc to Disc copy for audio and data
• Save discs and compilations as ISO files
• Support for WPL playlists

But there is even more freedom: InfraRecorder is not only free but also open source. It runs under Windows and can be downloaded freely.

Stop looking for a pirated version of Nero 8. Download it for free, just better: free and legal.

Microsoft would have us believing that the hybrid disk drives (containing a standard magnetic disc drive, some Flash memory and the usual cache memory) are the solution to all world’s problems (including hunger and poverty), the culmination of technology finally allowed by Windows Vista.

The basic principle of adding Flash memory to a disk drive is to provide some kind of cache memory buried less deeply into the disk system and that the Operating System (Windows Vista) would be able to use at will to improve disk system performance.

Thanks! But no thanks! It increase the cost and the complexity of the whole PC system. Where cache memory was a simple mean for the disk sub-system to optimize its operation without asking anything from the Operating System (it only sees a slightly faster drive), Flash memory of hybrid disks add one more task to Windows. Even worse, Windows already use several cache systems to optimize disk susb-systems. They all rely on the DRAM central memory of your PC; They are able to adapt to the size of the memory, to the user behaviour, to the list of active tasks/programs. But here, without even removing any of that feature (which is easily forgotten because it is nicely embedded) another layer is added.

Seriously, rather than buying a hybrid disk drive with all its added costs, I recommend that you go and invest into some more central PC memory. A little more SDRAM is what has the best impact on your PC performance (including the visible performance of the hard disk drive).

Last minute: Now, disk manufacturers are willing to explain that this is not because of thechnology that the hybrid disks are not more common. It’s merely that Flash memory prices are too high (!) and you should put more than the ususal 256MB usually found nowadays in hybrid models currently on the shelves [1].

RAID storage is a good way to ensure a good security for your data: Two or more discs are used to give some redundancy and be sure that in case of a single drive failure you can still access your files (it will not protect you against deleting the files, though). However, the problem is often that RAID storage is very expensive or very complex (buying an expensive appliance, setting up a complex PC configuration). So much so that a normal user (a photographer willing to protect her zillions of digital images, a student willing to give reliability to his MP3 and DivX files, etc.) will not do it.

Now, Iomega is proposing a solution for an external RAID at a bargain price (It’s available in a 500 GB model with street pricing as low as $240). Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder is giving it a run and tells us all about it: Tiny Terabyte RAID: Iomega 1 TB StorCenter Network Hard Drive Review.

Strange coincidence in the recent press releases about DVD discs.

For the first time, the industry group that manages the licenses for the DVD format (the DVD 6C Licensing Group or DVD 6C) decided to revoque the DVD patent agreement of Chinese manufacturer Chaoyue (Jiangsu) Digital [1]. They must have been doing really ugly things to loose even the right to try and manufacture DVD players.

Apparently without any link, we also learn that researchers from the Tsinghua University of Beijing created a new high definition DVD disc format. Quite similar to HD-DVD, its name will be CH-DVD (China DVD?) and it will contain some specifically Chinese patents and IP. But this is not the first time Chinese authorities tried to start a new format in direct competition with an international standard. The most recent being the EVD that roared to replace the DVD [2].

A few days ago, it has been released publicly that a new Flash memory card format is arriving. I can see the John “Consumer” Doe thrilled in anticipation of yet another new card format: UFS. I can imagine that it will solve all existing issues with dozens of previously existing -and incompatible- memory cards.

This is going to offer a vastly improved speed for the users. To quote from the press release: “Today, users experience a three-minute access time for a 90-minute (4 Gigabyte) high-definition movie; with the new standard, this would be reduced to a few seconds.” Do we care? Will the movie run faster?

Of course, it is touted by its promoters as a giant leap in technology and the universal memory solution (do I hear “snake oil”?) I need a little more than a long list of supporters to jump and shout joyfully…

The race for larger hard drives does nto slow down. Today, it is quite easy to find 500GB disks at a very reasonable cost (and remember that this is no less than half a tera-byte of data!)

I recently observed several interesting comparisons about this issue:

• In English: Tom’s Hardware (external disks)
• In French: Hardware.fr (internal SATA disks)

Acronis True Image is one of the best disk utilities of the market: Like Norton Ghost it allows to make a full-image copy of one hard disk drive and to restore it later in one pass. Unfortunately, up to now, it was a little expensive at $49.95.

did you know that a lot of us can have it for free? And legally, too? You just have to be the happy owner of a Seagate (I have several of them) or Maxtor disk drive. Seagate’s Disc Wizard and Maxtor’s Max Blast actually contain a very extensive OEM version of the original software from Acronis. Why not use it?

• Seagate downloads
• Maxtor downloads

Source: The Inquirer.

Some time ago, I had spoken here of SequoiaView, a Windows utility to visualize the space used by files on a hard disk drive (a great way to prepare for freeing space on a hard drive choking full of hundreds of GB of data).

Today, I found a free utility doing about the same task on a Mac: GrandPerspective. Recommended.

Source: LifeHacker.

We have well progressed into the building of our two Summer PCs. But we still need to add a hard disk drive and a DVD drive. The later is no problem. the choice is huge and product differences are minor. Since I love the Pioneer drives (they are really reliable and used by other companies who just add their name stickers to the Pioneer drives), I selected the Pioneer DVR 112D drive. But honestly, there are many more that you can chose from with very similar characteristics. Both PCs will have one (Gran Turismo as well as Easy Penny).

I also love the Seagate-branded hard disk drives for their solid reliability (not only on specification documents), for their good prices, for their welcome silence and for their neat performance. Gran Turismo will like to hold a 320GB disk such as a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 – 320GB of SATA 300 ncq interface with a cache of 16MB (ref# ST3320620as). But Easy Penny will receive a smaller one -always thinking of keeping costs low- with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB of SATA-II interface with a cache of 8MB (ref# ST3160811as).

The less expensive PC could receive a slightly more expensive and bigger disk but its utility stays limited while its owner does not use it to store large amounts of videos or to install big software applications (but they are themselves often too expensive for a limited budget).

Samsung could also be an option to ponder about if you look for even better noise elvels. The small Samsung SpinPoint series has a very good fame here.

The USB interfaces of both PC allow to connect USB memory keys. For the digital photo amateur a useful 10€ or 15€ addition would be a Flash card memory reader compatible with Flash SD or Compact Flash (or a 13-in-1 reader, or the integrated Flash card reader of a high-end LCD monitor).

We will add more to the configuration in future posts, but we currently have:

• Gran Turismo: 32€ for a Pioneer DVR 112D drive and 79€ for a 320GB Seagate disk drive (current total: 919€)
• Easy Penny: 32€ for a Pioneer DVR 112D drive and 62€ for a 320GB Seagate disk drive (current total: 411€)

All prices are the best we could find in France at writing time.

It’s often (but not often enough) repeated: data backup is a critical element of the security of your data. Too often, we frget about it because of a lack of tools easy enough to support it without significant user involvement.

Here comes the main advantage of the excellent freeware tool for Windows: FileHamster from Mogware.

It automagically produces backup copies of your files any time you change them, immediately after you modify, copy or save the files. It merely opens a small window for a second to give you a chance to input some additional commands on the fly, but it is easily forgotten as less than annoying. And all the changes to your data are recorded as long as they are done on the disk drive.

I have been using at the office for the recent weeks and it is very efficient. Data restoration is even simplified by the fact that backup copies are stored as clear separated files the can be easily copied back in place (the file names use a naming convention easy to decode with the date of saving).

More details on their wiki.

Sources: Lifehacker.

July will be another month of price wars for Intel and AMD (after a very bumpy April). Both announced that they would shoot prices down once again in July trying to grab a larger market share (for AMD) or trying to asphyxiate the competition (for Intel). AMD will start at the beginning of the month. Intel will follow in the last week of July.

In this context, you should notice that analysts doubt that DRAM prices will grow again. It seems that they expect NAND Flash components to recover during Summer, but Vista -which was expected to help sales- does not appear to have a significant impact on DRAM (and graphics card) sales.

HardwareLogic offers to go much further than the usual defragmentation offered in standard by Microsoft. In a detailled article, they describe the use of Contig (a Microsoft tool with an indigent command-line interface) and Power Defragmenter GUI (a software application that provides exactly the right human-readable interface for the previous one). Two free tools that seem quite powerful.

This is the right question to ask. I waited quite some time before writing about a bizarre issue with Windows Vista. Initially I thought that it was a small bug to be quickly corrected by Microsoft: file copying, file deleting and file moving is apparently very slow in Vista. When we say slow, understand “10-50 times slower than in Windows XP”. Normally, this is a nearly impossible change between two versions of the same Operating System (XP and Vista) and such a bug should be corrected quite easily. But it seems that Microsoft is unable to explain what is happening (let alone correcting the issue).

This is so abnormal, that I start to kick the paranoid mode in. One of the explanations I heard is that if Microsoft is unable to go into details and does not bring a solution is because this is not a bug but a side-effect of an intended feature. The most probable thing coming to mind: Windows Vista includes an extension to the file system that allows to handle more directly Rights Management (DRM and similar). In order to do this, they have to pay a price in performance whenever we want to access to a file.

So, is the long-copy/long-delete bug actually an intended feature of an Operating System hiding more and more anti-user devices? It is the more possible if you remember that before Vista launch Microsoft touted the feature allowing to add a peremption date to files (”file auto-destruct on 31st December next year”) or to limit access to only a limited set of users.

See also: The Register.

When you look into the largest images accessible from the Internet, you MUST check Google maps and Google Earth (the application that allows you to navigate on the surface of the Earth globe from your desktop with the satellite images collected by Digital Globe and Google).

From its inception, Google Earth provided images of the Earth globe at a resolution of 15m/pixel (each pixel is a square of 15 meter by 15 meter). But from 23rd of March 2006, 20% of the emerged land mass (about 1/3 of the world population) is now covered by exclusive photos in the amazing résolution of 70cm/p (sometimes even down to 10cm/p, enough to recognize the plane model on an airport and to distinguish people in a house garden).

If we only keep the basic resolution, the Google Earth image amounts already to 2,111 giga-pixels. Impressive, but this is not all. If we include the high-resolution zones (let’s forget about the isolated 10cm/p zones), we must conclude that the Google Earth image is:

• 20% of land mass at 0.7m/p: 56,616 giga-pixels
• All the rest at 15m/p: 1,988 giga-pixels

A stagegring total of 58,604 giga-pixels! 58 T-pixel! We’re just switching to a different scale.

It will be difficult to make it bigger but Google is already working at it since the systematic movie to 0.7m/p for continental masses would lead to about 5 times this volume, and surfaces covered at 0.1m/p will simply blow the total up when it is no longer applied to isolated test examples (like the current example in part of Las Vegas city).

Let’s be clear and simple, the main limit will soon be (for Google): How to keep such a big amount of data accessible knowing that there is a constraint on access times (tens of thousands of simultaneous accesses from all over the world cannot be served by a mere big disk drive on the corner of a desk and keeping it up-to-date is not only a matter of cut’n paste anymore).