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The difference between WD Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives

Articles / 2010-06-15

Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically as a stand-alone drive, or in a multi-drive RAID environment.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

Note: There are a few cases where the manufacturer of the RAID controller have designed their drives to work with specific model Desktop drives. If this is the case you would need to contact the manufacturer of that enclosure for any support on that drive while it is used in a RAID environment.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array. While TLER is designed for RAID environments, a drive with TLER enabled will work with no performance decrease when used in non-RAID environments.

The difference between WD Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives Read More »

Data recovery companies in Australia

Articles / 2010-06-10

1. PAYAM Data Recovery Pty Ltd
http://www.payam.com.au
Data recovery services for faulty hard disk drives in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.
Level 10, 379 Queen Street, Brisbane, QLD, 4000.
Phone: (07) 3221 5988

2. Technetics Data Recovery
http://www.techneticsdata.com.au
The data recovery labs in Australia with many years of experience in the industry.
Level 1, 71 Palmerston Crescent
South Melbourne VIC 3205
Melbourne Australia
Phone: 1300 853 453

3. DATA DETECT Pty Ltd
http://www.datadetect.com.au
Recovers data from hard disk drives, digital media and RAID systems in Australia.
Suite 5, Level 6
144-148 Pacific Highway
North Sydney
Phone: (02) 9929 4822

4. Sydney Data Recovery
http://www.sydneydatarecovery.com.au
2A 6-8 Herbert Street
St Leonards NSW
Australia 2065
Phone: (02) 9437 5755

Data From Data Recovery Union: Australia data recovery directory

Data recovery companies in Australia Read More »

Why is Drive Translation necessary?

Articles / 2010-06-09 / 1 Comment

DOS and DOS based programs like Windows 3.x and Windows 95 cannot access drives over 1024 cylinders on their own, but require third party assistance to use large hard drives. SCSI drives handle this with drivers built in to the SCSI controller, so we will limit this discussion to ATA hard drives. There are several methods used to overcome the cylinder limitation, and all of them involve translation.

A translation scheme converts information from one form to another and back again. Think of it like this: If you go to a foreign country to conduct business and you don’t speak the language, you need a translator. The translator’s job is to convert information from one party into a language the other party can understand and vice versa. Without the services of a translator, the two parties have a limited exchange of information. A smile, a nod, and a mispronounced and grammatically incorrect “How are you?” is about all that is possible.

The types of translation support are as follows:

1. An ATA (IDE) host adapter with a BIOS that provides large drive support.

2. Third party software like EZ-Drive® and DiscWizard Starter Edition.

3. A motherboard BIOS that provides large drive support. Some of the terminology is as follows:

Logical Block Addressing (LBA)
Large
Extended Cylinder, Head, Sector (E-CHS)
Sector Translation
Sector or Track Mapping

These support features are the “language” translators that allow your operating system and hardware to speak two different “languages” and still interact successfully with one another.

All of the BIOS options, once installed, are transparent to the user. EZ-Drive and DiscWizard Starter Edition are not. In addition, there is one issue that both share — special procedures are needed to boot to a diskette when installing new software.

Dynamic Drive Overlay software like EZ-Drive and DiscWizard Starter Edition use similar techniques, at first glance, to overcome the 1024 cylinder limitation. Both programs load proprietary translation information on the boot hard drive that identifies which drive is using the program and gives the operating system access to the area of the drive over 1024 cylinders. Without this proprietary translation code loaded, the drive using EZ-Drive or DiscWizard Starter Edition is unrecognizable to the operating system. If the hard drive is using translating software, and you try to boot with an unmodified diskette in the floppy drive, the translating software does not get a chance to load, thereby rendering the hard drive unreadable. This is generally only a problem if the diskette is infected with a virus. Simply remove the diskette and reboot. The hard drive should boot normally.

Why is Drive Translation necessary? Read More »

Are Seagate and Maxtor External drives hot swappable?

Articles / 2010-06-09

Yes, with the following recommendations:

Never unplug any eSATA, 1394, or USB device that is being actively accessed by the operating system (such as during a file copy).

Unplugging a device while it is being used may result in a system crash and the loss of the ability to recover the data already written to the drive.
For Macintosh – If you want to unplug an External Drive you must first drag the mounted drive icon to the trash to dismount it. After the drive is dismounted then it can be unplugged.
For Windows – If you wish to disconnect an External Drive, you must use the “Safely Remove” or “Unplug and Eject Hardware” utility located in the Windows Task Bar ( identified by the Green Arrow Icon located close to the clock on your desktop).

Are Seagate and Maxtor External drives hot swappable? Read More »

FireWire Cables

Articles / 2010-06-09

FireWire Cables

FireWire cable link homes in three (3) different variations:

FireWire 9-pin-to-9-pin Cables – also known as a Beta Cable. This cable is he used to connect a FireWire 800 device to a FireWire 800 interface port found on either a FireWire 800 onboard/PCI controller or a FireWire 800 CardBus (PCMCIA) adapter. You would find this type of cable included with your Maxtor OneTouch II FireWire 800 external storage hard drive.
FireWire 6-pin-to-6-pin Cables – This cable is he used to connect a FireWire 400 device to a FireWire 400 interface port found on either a FireWire 400 onboard/PCI controller or a FireWire 400 CardBus (PCMCIA) adapter. You would find this type of cable included with your Maxtor OneTouch/OneTouch II external storage hard drive that includes a FireWire interface port.
FireWire 4-pin-to-6-pin Cables – also known as a DV Cable. This cable is he used to connect a FireWire 400 device to a FireWire 400 interface port found on either a FireWire 400 onboard/PCI controller or a FireWire 400 CardBus (PCMCIA) adapter. This type a cable is usually included with digital cameras/digital video cameras to utilize the FireWire interface.

Bilingual Cables

FireWire Bilingual Cables enable you to connect a FireWire 800 Drive directly to a FireWire 400 (4 or a 6 Pin) Interface Port. A bilingual cable can be used to allow a FireWire 800 device to connect to a system that only has a FireWire 400 interface port. There are two (2) different bilingual cable variations:

FireWire 4-pin-to-9-pin Cables – this cable allows you to connect a FireWire 800 external device to a 4 Pin, FireWire 400 interface port found on either a computer’s onboard/PCI controller or through a CardBus (PCMCIA) adapter card.
FireWire 6-pin-to-9-pin Cables – this cable allows you to connect a FireWire 800 external device to a 6 Pin, FireWire 400 interface port found on either a computer’s onboard/PCI controller or through a CardBus (PCMCIA) adapter card.

Note: When connecting a FireWire 800 external device to a bilingual cable, you will be limited to a maximum transfer rate of 400 Mb/second.

FireWire Cables Read More »

System BIOS and Hard Drive Related FAQs (Part I)

Articles / 2010-06-07

The most commonly asked questions about the system BIOS and its relationship to hard drives. The following will provide you with basic information beginning with the definition of a BIOS, to identifying key features found in various BIOS’s. The purpose of this document is to aid you in solving minor difficulties you may be currently experiencing.

1. What is Logical Block Addressing (LBA)?

LBA is a mathematical scheme for addressing sectors, beginning at cylinder 0, head 0 and sector 1, which is equal to LBA 1. This scheme linearly maps the drive until the final physical sector is reached. LBA is efficient because it reduces some system overhead by not having to convert the operating system’s LBA to the BIOS CHS and then back to drive LBA.

2. What is CHS?

CHS stands for Cylinders, Heads and Sectors, this is the conventional means for BIOS to communicate to the drive. CHS has a limitation of 1,024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors per track resulting in a maximum capacity of 504 MB.

3. What is the difference between Normal, LBA or Large mode?

Normal mode is the standard BIOS translation scheme. This mode does not support drives greater than 504 MB. Large mode is a generic translation scheme used by some BIOS’s to access drives up to 1 GB. Logical Block Addressing (LBA) mode is a more advanced method of translation than Large mode. LBA mode is a somewhat faster and can see drives up to 8 GB.

4. What if the BIOS does not support the full capacity of the drive?

There are three possible answers to this question:

Upgrade the BIOS for the computers motherboard or replace the motherboard.
Add an Enhanced IDE card that has its own BIOS that provides support for large hard drives.
Install a translation software product such as Maxtor’s MaxBlast software, they’re latest version is 9.06M.

System BIOS and Hard Drive Related FAQs (Part I) Read More »

System BIOS and Hard Drive Related FAQs (Part II)

Articles / 2010-06-07

5. Why use software for translation?

Software translation is an effective, although non-conventional, means of translating large capacity hard drives so they can be utilized on older systems with older motherboards and BIOS’s. We use Maxtor hard drives almost exclusively, and they (Maxtor) furnish a driver made by StorageSoft, which is called MaxBlast. Instead of loading a driver in the start-up files, MaxBlast loads drivers before the operating system is loaded.

6. Can a hard drive be transferred to another computer without losing data?

Generally speaking no, but there are exceptions to everything. Usually there are no guarantees that a new motherboard’s BIOS will use the same translation scheme as its predecessor. We recommend that you back up your data prior to making any system changes. We also recommend that the hard drive be re-partitioned and reformatted once installed in the new system.

7. Can the translation mode or parameters in the BIOS be changed?

When a drive is partitioned, the operating system interprets the size of the drive via information provided by the BIOS. Changing the translation can cause permanent data corruption. If the original parameters are changed, they usually cannot be recovered without specialized drive manipulation software. If you do not have this software, we recommend that the hard drive be re-partitioned and reformatted.

System BIOS and Hard Drive Related FAQs (Part II) Read More »

Partition Record Technical Details

Articles / 2010-06-07

Different operating systems have different Partition Type bytes. The most common DOS partition type is 6h, which is used for Primary DOS partitions greater than 32 Mbytes.

Here is a list of known (and suspected) partition type bytes:

00 Not Occupied
01 DOS, Primary Partition (12-bit FAT, <16MB)
02 XENIX root
03 XENIX usr
04 DOS, Primary Partition (16-bit FAT, >=16MB and <32MB)
05 DOS, Extended Partition
06 DOS, Primary Partition (16-bit FAT, >32MB)
07 OS/2 HPFS, Win NTFS, QNX ver 2, or Adv UNIX
08 AIX – boot
09 AIX – data, Coherent
0A OS/2 BtMgr
0B PRI DOS 512 Mbytes – 2 Tbytes FAT32 Win95, OSR2 & 98
0C EXT DOS 512 Mbytes – 2 Tbytes FAT32 Win95, OSR2 & 98
0E PRI DOS 32 Mbytes-2 Gbytes FAT16 Windows 95 & 98
0F EXT DOS 0-2 Gbytes Windows 95 & 98
10 OPUS
12 Compaq diagnostics partition
40 VENIX 80286
50 DiscWizard Starter Edition read only DOS partition
51 DiscWizard Starter Edition read/write DOS partition
52 CPM, Microport System V/386
54 DiscWizard Starter Edition non-DOS partition
55 Micro House EZ-Drive ® non-DOS partition
56 Golden Bow Vfeature partition
61 Storage Dimensions SpeedStor partition
63 UNIX – AT&T System V/386
64 Novell NetWare 286
65 Novell NetWare 386
75 PC/IX IBM
77 QNX POSIX partition
78 QNX POSIX partition (secondary)
79 QNX POSIX partition (secondary)
80 Minix (v1.4a and earlier)
81 Minix (v1.4b and later), Linux
82 Linux swap partition
83 Linux native file system
93 Amoeba file system
94 Amoeba bad block table?
DB Digital Research CPM-86, Concurrent DOS
E1 SpeedStor 12-bit FAT extended partition
E3 DOS read-only
E4 SpeedStor 16-bit FAT extended partition
F2 2nd DOS partition, some OEM customized DOS
F4 SpeedStor, large partitions
FE Lan Step, SpeedStor (partitions over 1024 cyl?)
FF UNIX bad block table partition

Related link: SCSI Sense Key Chart

Partition Record Technical Details Read More »

What is the length of cable that I can use with a Serial ATA drive?

Articles / 2010-06-07

Serial ATA cables are available in many lengths up to 1 meter. Minimum cable length is 12 inches, using shorter cables can cause timing, or noise interference on the cable. The same conditions apply to cables that are too long. Though the Serial ATA specification calls out supporting cable lengths up to 1 meter or 39.37 inches, PCB traces from the cable connection to the host and drive controllers ASIC, adds length to the bus.

Example: SATA drive installed with a 40 inch cable. PCB trace from Serial host connector to the serial hosts ASIC = 3 inches. The same 3 inch PCB trace applies to the hard disk. This configuration gives you a bus length of about 46 inches. If you are having performance or data corruption issues, try using a shorter cable or different manufacturer of cable. Cable quality can vary between vendors.

What is the length of cable that I can use with a Serial ATA drive? Read More »

Tips for upgrading drive in Macintosh computer

Articles / 2010-06-04

To upgrade the drive in your Macintosh computer, the first thing to consider is do you want to upgrade the internal drive or do you just want to add additional storage with an external drive?

Internal Drive vs. External Drive

An internal drive will generally provide much better performance on the computer and can be used to store programs and data. An external drive will be slower and suited for data only, however it provides portability and an easier installation.

Internal storage considerations

Internal drives come in several interfaces, Serial ATA (SATA), ATA/IDE (PATA), and SCSI.

Most newer Apple desktop computers use SATA interface. Below is a list of popular Apples and the interfaces used.

Desktops – Desktop systems use 3.5″ drives.
Mac Pro – SATA
G5 – SATA
G4 – ATA (most of these systems are limited to 128GB capacity, see Apple Care document #86178 for details)

Laptops – Laptops use 2.5″ drives. Due to the complexity of installations in laptops professional installation should be considered.

Mac mini – Not user serviceable, see external drives below for additional storage.

G5 and MacPro computers include the cable and rails needed to connect the drive, so no accessories should be needed, just a Phillips screw driver.

G4 computers may require an UltraATA cable with 3 connectors if you are adding a second drive to the computer. A Phillips screw driver would also be required for this installation.

External storage considerations.

External drives come in several interfaces, USB 2.0, IEEE 1394a, IEEE 1394b and eSATA.

Most Apple computers have a 1394 port which will provide enough performance for data backups, but many not provide enough speed for day to day use. For higher speed check if your computer has any IEEE 1394b ports. 1394b offers much higher transfer rates, this interface is offered on our Maxtor line of external drives.

Most older Apple computer G4 and prior used USB 1.1 which is very slow and would not be acceptable for backing up large amounts of data or for day to day use. USB is very popular for PC use, so these drives are the most common, but may not be a good match for an older Macintosh. Newer G5 and Mac Pro computers have USB 2.0 which would provide similar performance to 1394a and should be fine for backup usage. When looking at different external drives, check if the bundled software is compatible with MacOS. Some Seagate and Maxtor product lines are specialized for different markets, so not all drive features will work on a Macintosh if the drive was designed for a Windows PC market. Seagate and Maxtor drives that have a 1394b interface tend to be customized for the Macintosh users.

eSATA offers the best transfer rates for an external drive, however at this time eSATA is not a standard interface on Macintosh computers. So, eSATA would not be a good choice for use with your Apple.

External cables: USB drives include a USB cable so the box should have everything needed to connect the drive as long as the computer has an open USB port. Most 1394a kits include a 6 pin to 6 pin cable which works for desktop computers, but a 4 pin to 6 pin cable may be required for use with a laptop. Most 1394b drives include the 1394b cable, but be sure to check the listing of contents on the box to be sure.

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