Data Recovery Blog

Seagate And Samsung Announce Agreement To Jointly Develop Controller Technology For SSDs

Articles / 2010-08-12

August 12, 2010 – Seagate Technology and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., announced that they have entered into a joint development and licensing agreement.

Under the agreement, the two companies will jointly develop and cross-license related controller technologies for solid state drive (“SSD“) storage devices to attain the high levels of performance, reliability and endurance demanded by enterprise storage applications.

The joint development effort builds on the existing SSD capabilities of each company while combining Seagate’s leadership in enterprise storage technology with Samsung’s flash memory technology specific to 30 nanometer-class MLC NAND. The jointly developed controller will be utilized in Seagate’s enterprise-class SSDs.

“Seagate has long recognized that solid state technology has an important role to play in the comprehensive solutions the storage industry will deliver today and in the future, particularly in the enterprise market, today’s agreement with Samsung will help us bring a compelling set of SSD innovations to the enterprise storage market, with benefits that range from enhanced performance, endurance and reliability to cost and capacity improvements. Overall, this agreement with Samsung strengthens our SSD solutions strategy, and positions Seagate well as global demand for storage continues on its strong growth path.” – said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

“We are pleased to be jointly developing a high-performance SSD controller with Seagate for the enterprise storage market, our green memory solution is designed to enable more energy-efficient server applications, which is expected to increase the use of NAND-based SSD storage in enterprise applications.” – said Dr. Changhyun Kim, senior vice president and Samsung Fellow, Memory product planning & application engineering, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics.

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Glossary of Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (Letter J,K,L)

Articles / 2010-08-11

jumper
An electrically-conductive component placed over pairs of pins extending from the circuit board on the hard drive jumper block to connect them electronically. Jumper placement is one method of designating a hard drive as Master or Slave.

KB
Kilobyte. Usually, this is a unit of 1000 bytes. In computer memory, which is partitioned into sizes that are a power of 2, a kilobyte is equal to 2¹⁰ or 1024 bytes.

LAN
Local area network. A system in which computer users in the same company or organization are linked to each other and often to centrally-stored collections of data in LAN servers.

landing zone
A location on the inner part of a disk to which heads move when commanded or when powered off. User data is not stored in the landing zone.

laser textured media
A treatment that minimizes friction and wear on a hard drive. The precision and consistency of this process contributes to the robustness of WD drives.

latency
The period of time that read/write heads wait for a disk to rotate to the correct position for accessing requested data. For a disk rotating at 5200 RPM, average latency is 5.8 milliseconds (one-half the revolution period).

LBA
Logical block addressing. A method of addressing sectors on a drive as a single group of logical block numbers rather than cylinder, head, and sector addressing (CHS). LBA allows accessing larger drives than is normally possible with CHS addressing.

LED
Light Emitting Diode. An electronic device that lights up when electricity is passed through it.

logical address
A storage address, which may not describe the physical location, for requesting data retrieval. A controller converts a request from a logical to a physical address and is able to retrieve data.

logical drive
A section of a hard disk that appears to be a separate drive in a directory structure. Up to 23 logical drives can be created on an extended partition of a hard disk, using letters A-Z with three reserved: A and B for diskette drives, and C for the first primary DOS partition. Logical drives are commonly used for group directories and files.

low-level formatting
A process, also called initialization, that prepares a hard drive to store data. Low-level formatting sets up the locations of sectors so that user data can be stored in them. Low-level formatting is performed at the WD factory; users need not perform low-level formatting on a WD drive.

LUL
See Ramp Load/Unload

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Data Recovery Training Courses

Articles / 2010-08-09

Though the hard disk drive just crashed, the data might not be lost. Even though the Window’s explorer can’t find the file, most files remain on a computer until written over with new files. There are data recovery specialists who can recover lost data through a variety of mishaps. With a data recovery training course, you can become one of those experts.

Features
Data recovery training courses instruct students on how to revive dead hard drives and extract data from drives that are irreparable. These courses also instruct students on how to recover RAID arrays, flash drives, zip drives and exchange servers.

Time Frame
Data recovery is not an overwhelmingly difficult skill to acquire. Therefore, training courses only require that students attend 5-day training courses. These courses have regularly scheduled courses where students can have face-to-face hands-on training. Students also have access to online training at any time and companies can schedule data recovery training programs for their workers.

Skills Covered
Training courses teach students how to diagnose physical recovery needs, clicking noises and the data structures as analyzed using a Hex editor. These training courses give students skills such as file format recognition, actuator unlocking, single and multi-platter swaps, SMART values, damaged sector solutions, reverse scanning, SID protected folder capturing and password clearing. Students also learn how to replace the damaged hardware parts of the device on which the data was stored.

Classroom
Data recovery training courses are conducted like typical classrooms with lectures, training exercises and textbooks that are covered by the fee. Students are free to ask questions and receive data recovery software once the course is completed. Students also receive certifications for passing the data recovery exam.

Warning
Not everyone can attend a data recovery training course. Students are expected to have proficient knowledge of the Windows operating system and computer hardware, since these are not introductory courses. Students are also supposed to have positions in software or computer hardware companies.

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Glossary of Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (Letter I)

Articles / 2010-08-05

I/O
Input/Output. An operation, program, or device that that transfers data to or from a computer or other device.

IcePack™
3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps the 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor extra cool when installed in a 3.5-inch drive bay.

IDE
Integrated drive electronics. A technology in which interface controller electronics are incorporated into the design of the hard drive rather than into a separate controller. See also PATA.

index pulse signal
A digital pulse signal indicating the beginning of a disk revolution. An embedded servo pattern or other prerecorded information is present on the disk following the index.

initialization
See low-level formatting.

initiator
A device in control of a SCSI bus that sends commands to a target. Most SCSI devices have a fixed role as either initiator or target; however, some devices can assume both roles.

input
Incoming data that a computer processes, such as user-issued commands.

IntelliPark™
Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

IntelliPower™
A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.

IntelliSeek™
WD AV feature that optimizes seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.

interface
A hardware or software protocol to manage the exchange of data between a device and a computer; the most common ones are PATA (also known as EIDE), SATA, and SCSI.

interface controller
A chip or circuit that translates computer data and commands into a form usable by a hard drive and that controls data transfers between buffer and host. See also disk controller and disk drive controller.

interleave
The arrangement of sectors on a track.

interrupt
A signal sent by a subsystem to the CPU when a process either was completed or could not be completed.

IP
Internet Protocol. A system that controls how data messages are separated into packets, routed from the sender, and reassembled at the destination.

IP address
A 32-bit, binary number that uniquely identifies a computer connected to the Internet.

ISA
Industry Standard Architecture. The standard 16-bit AT bus for the PC/AT system. ISA was the only industry standard bus for PCs until the recent release of Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI).

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Glossary of Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (Letter H)

Articles / 2010-08-02

half-duplex
A communication protocol that permits transmission in both directions but in only one direction at a time.

hard drive
An electromechanical device for information storage and retrieval, incorporating one or more rotating disks on which data is magnetically recorded, stored, and read. The principal products of WD.

hard error
An error that is repeated every time the same area on a disk is accessed.

hard sectored
A technique that uses a digital signal to indicate the beginning of a sector on a track.

HDA
Head disk assembly. The mechanical components of a hard drive, including disks, heads, spindle motor, and actuator.

head
Also known as a read/write head. An electromagnetic coil and metal pole that read/write magnetic patterns on a disk. A drive with several disk surfaces or platters has a separate head for each data surface. See also MR head.

head actuator
A motor that moves the head stack assembly in a hard drive to align read/write heads with magnetic tracks on the disks.

head crash
The damage incurred to a read/write head when the head comes into contact with a disk surface. A head crash may be caused by severe shock, dust, fingerprints, or smoke, and may damage the disk surface and/or head.

head loading zone
The area on a disk reserved for heads to take off or land when power to the drive is turned on or off. No data is stored in the head loading zone.

head stack assembly
An electromechanical component containing read/write heads and their supporting devices.

headerless format
The lack of headers or ID fields (track format). This format enables greater efficiency and increased user capacity.

HFS
Hierarchical File System. File system developed by Apple Computer for use on computers running Mac OS.

high-level formatting
Formatting that erases all information on a hard drive and sets up the system for storing and retrieving files.

host
The computer to which other computers and peripherals connect. See also initiator.

host adapter
A plug-in board that acts as an interface between a computer system bus and a hard drive.

host interface
The point at which a host and a drive are connected to each other.

host transfer rate
The speed at which a host computer can transfer data across an interface.

hot plug
Act of swapping out a hard drive without having to power down the system or reboot. Hot plugging capability promotes system design flexibility, data availability, and serviceability.

hot swap
See hot plug.

HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Protocol used by the World Wide Web to transfer information between servers and browsers.

HTTPS
HTTPS (HTTP over SSL) is the use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) as a sub-layer under regular HTTP application layering. HTTPS encrypts and decrypts user page requests as well as the pages that are returned by the Web server.

hub
A multiple port connection point for network devices, often used to connect segments of a LAN.

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Glossary of Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (Letter G)

Articles / 2010-08-02

GB
Gigabyte. WD defines a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 (one billion) bytes or 1000 (one thousand) megabytes.

GMR
Giant magnetoresistive. An advanced form of head technology.

GPL
General Public License. Free software license which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the software which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright law.

GPS
Global positioning system. Provides specially coded satellite signals which can be processed in a GPS receiver to compute position, speed, and time.

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Glossary of Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (Letter F)

Articles / 2010-07-30

FAT
File allocation table. A data table stored at the beginning of each partition on a disk and used by the operating system to determine which sectors are allocated to each file and in which sequence.

FAT32
A file allocation table system with a maximum file transfer of 4 GB and a maximum partition size of 32 GB.

FC
Fibre channel. The general name given to an integrated set of standards being developed by an ANSI-approved X3 group. This set of standards defines new protocols for flexible information transfer. Fibre channel supports three topologies: point-to-point, arbitrated loop, and fabric.

FC-AL
Fibre channel-arbitrated loop. A serial storage interface designed for high-end applications. A subset of FC network systems interconnection.

FDB
Fluid dynamic bearings. A design that incorporates a layer of lubricant instead of ball bearings in a hard drive spindle motor, thus providing increased storage capacity, non-operational shock resistance, speed control, robust shipping and handling, and improved acoustics.

FDISK
A software utility that partitions a hard drive.

Femto slider
Form factor in which the read/write head is mounted on the small, lightweight femto slider which allows the head to move more quickly from track to track on the disk.

fetch
The process of retrieving data.

FFS
Free-fall sensor. As an added layer of protection, if the drive (or the system it’s in) is dropped while in use, WD’s free-fall sensor detects that the drive is falling and, in less than 200 milliseconds, parks the head off the disks to help prevent damage and data loss.

FireWire 400
FireWire400 supports data transfer rates up to 400 Mb/s.

FireWire 800
FireWire 800 has a maximum data transfer rate of 800Mb/s. It is backward-compatible with FireWire 400 using an optional adapter.

FireWire®
This high-speed serial bus, also known as IEEE 1394, provides a non-proprietary, high-performance method of interconnecting digital devices.

firmware
Permanent instructions and data programmed directly into the circuitry of read-only memory for controlling computer operations.

FIT
Functional integrity testing. A suite of tests WD performs on all its drive products to ensure compatibility with different hosts, operating systems, adapters, application programs, and peripherals. This testing is performed before a product is released to manufacturing.

flash drive
Compact, portable device that works in a similar way to a hard drive.

flash memory
A special type of portable electronic storage device used for easy and fast information storage in such devices as external hard drives and digital cameras. Examples of flash memory include PCMCIA cards and memory cards for video game consoles.

FlexPower™
Connector technology that accepts power from both industry-standard and new SATA power supplies.

flow control
is the process of managing the rate of data transmission between two nodes to prevent a fast sender from outrunning a slow receiver.

form factor
An industry standard term for the physical and external dimensions of a device.

format
A process that prepares a hard drive to store data.

formatted capacity
The actual capacity available to store data in a mass storage device. The formatted capacity is the gross capacity minus the capacity used by overhead (formatting).

FTP
File Transfer Protocol. A network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network. FTP is a popular choice for exchanging files independent of the operating systems involved.

full-duplex
A communication protocol that permits simultaneous transmission in both directions.

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Most Popular Internal Hard Drives on Amazon.com

Articles / 2010-07-29

A hard disk drive (hard disk, hard drive, HDD) is a non-volatile storage device for digital data. It features one or more rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a metal case. Data is encoded magnetically by read/write heads that float on a cushion of air above the platters.

Hard disk manufacturers quote disk capacity in SI-standard powers of 1000, wherein a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes and a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. With file systems that measure capacity in powers of 1024, available space appears somewhat less than advertised capacity.

The first HDD was invented by IBM in 1956. They have fallen in cost and physical size over the years while dramatically increasing capacity. Hard disk drives have been dominant device for secondary storage of data in general purpose computers since the early 1960s. They have maintained this position because advances in their areal recording density have kept pace with the requirements for secondary storage. Form factors have also evolved over time from large standalone boxes to today’s desktop systems mainly with standardized 3.5″ form factor drives, and mobile systems mainly using 2.5″ drives. Today’s HDDs operate on high-speed serial interfaces, i.e., Serial ATA (SATA) or Serial attached SCSI (SAS).

The presentation of an HDD to its host is determined by its controller. This may differ substantially from the HDDs native interface particularly in mainframes or servers.

Popular Manufacturers: Western Digital, Seagate

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	Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare DriveList Price: $199.99 Price on Amazon.com: $79.99 Shipping: FREE with Super Saver Shipping Model number: ST31500341AS
	Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVTList Price: $81.99 Price on Amazon.com: $54.99 Shipping: FREE with Super Saver Shipping Model number: WD5000BEVT
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	Seagate Barracuda 7200 1 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31000528AS-Bare DriveList Price: $135.99 Price on Amazon.com: $69.95 Shipping: FREE with Super Saver Shipping Model number: ST31000528AS

Deals of the Day: Hard Disk Drives

Articles / 2010-07-28

1. TOSHIBA MK3265GSX 320GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Model: MK3265GSX
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2. WD SiliconEdge Blue SSC-D0128SC-2100 2.5″ 128GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) – OEM

Model: SSC-D0128SC-2100
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3. WD SiliconEdge Blue SSC-D0064SC-2100 2.5″ 64GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) – OEM

Model: SSC-D0064SC-2100
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4. HITACHI HDS721050CLA362 (0F10381) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

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5. Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive -Bare Drive

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Glossary of Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (Letter E)

Articles / 2010-07-27

EasyLink™
A WD utility that allows users to locate and set up a drive as a local drive from any computer quickly and easily.

ECC
Error correction code. A mathematical algorithm that detects and corrects data errors.

ECC on the fly
A hardware correction technique that corrects errors in the read buffer before host transfer and without any performance penalties. These error corrections are invisible to the host system because they do not require assistance from drive firmware.

EESA
Enterprise extensions S.M.A.R.T. accessed. An expanded command set that provides SCSI-like control for server environments, optimizing operation and performance when drives are used in vibration-prone multidrive systems such as rack-mounted servers.

EIDE
Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics. See PATA

embedded servo control
A design that generates accurate feedback to the head position servo system without requiring a full data surface, because servo control data is stored on every surface (unlike dedicated servo control).

encoding
A process of modifying data patterns before writing them onto a disk surface.

enterprise
Series of computers employed largely in high-volume and multiuser environments such as servers or networking applications; may include single-user workstations required in demanding design, engineering, and audio/video applications.

error log
A record that contains error information.

error rate
The number of errors of a given type that occur when reading a specified number of bits.

ESD
Electrostatic Discharge. Rapid discharge of static electricity that can damage integrated circuits in computers and communications equipment. ESD prevention is aided by such items as ESD wrist straps and ESD hard drive bags.

Ethernet
A standard method of connecting computers to a Local Area Network (LAN) using coaxial cable, twisted pair, and fiber optic wiring standards.

extended partition
A partition on a disk where non-system files (other than DOS or operating system files) can be stored. Multiple partitions can be created on a hard disk: one primary partition and one or more extended partition(s). Operating system files must reside on the primary partition; logical drives can be created on an extended partition.

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