2060-701596-001 WD PCB Circuit Board

HDD Printed circuit board (PCB) with board number 2060-701596-001 is usually used on these Western Digital hard disk drives: WD1600AAJB-00J3A0, DCM EGRNHTJAEN, Western Digital 160GB IDE 3.5 Hard Drive; WD800AAJB-00J3A0, DCM HBNCHT2AHN, Western Digital 80GB IDE 3.5 Hard Drive; WD5000AAKB-00H8A0, DCM DANNHV2MGB, Western Digital 500GB IDE 3.5 Hard Drive; WD1600AAJB-00J3A0, DCM HBRCHTJCHN, Western Digital 160GB…

Read More

Hard drive diagnostic software: WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics CD/Floppy Disk

Data Lifeguard Diagnostics CD/Floppy disk

The Data Lifeguard Diagnostic softwares are used primarily for determining the physical condition of your hard drive. If you are having computer problems which you suspect are hard drive related, you can test your drive with this software. This diagnostic software is designed for hard drives larger than 8.4 GB with the model number starting with WDxxx.

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (CD)

  • Version: Version 5.04f
  • Publish Date: Oct, 2008
  • Supported OS: Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic download

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Options:

  • SELECT DRIVE – Always choose this option first, as it determines which drive you will be working on.
  • QUICK TEST – This option tests your drive quickly for any major physical problems. (Please note: Although this option is safe and does not alter the data on your hard drive, Western Digital recommends that you have a current backup of your data).
  • EXTENDED TEST – This option checks your drive thoroughly and it can repair any correctable errors. (Please note: Although this option is safe and does not alter the data on your hard drive, some data loss may occur, depending on the errors found and the errors corrected. Western Digital recommends that you have a current backup of your data).
  • WRITE ZEROS TO DRIVE – The Write Zeros option, wipes any and all data off your drive. This option used when your data is no longer usable or recoverable. If you no longer need any data from your drive and would like to start over, run this option to set your drive to an as new condition. NOTE: Please make sure that you have selected the correct drive to perform this function on as once ran, no data will be recoverable.
  • VIEW TEST RESULTS – You can see the results of the test you just performed
  • PRINT TEST RESULTS – Test results can be printed with this option. USB printers are not supported
  • LOG FILE OPEN/CLOSE – You can access the log file which is generated automatically
  • ENTER AND PRINT RMA INFORMATION – Information pertaining to each drive tested can be customized and printed with this option.
  • HELP – Brief descriptions of each option in addition to explanations of error codes are available in this option.
  • QUIT – Reboot your system once you have completed the selected tasks
Read More

RAID 6 Areca ARC-1120

areca-card-pers

Fierce competition dominates the market for professionally-equipped Serial ATA RAID controllers. Shortly after manufacturers HighPoint and Promise became the first to launch their PCI-based products on the market, more well-known names like Adaptec and LSI Logic followed suit. A year ago, RAIDCore and NetCell also debuted their products, and made a good impression from the word go.

All of these manufacturers concentrated primarily on making their products better suited to the professional market, and are focusing particularly on offering devices on the PCI-X interface . Now, Taiwanese manufacturer Areca hopes to go them one better by supporting RAID 6.

RAID controllers are used most often in business settings, particularly for servers. The point of RAID is to increase the performance of the storage subsystem when using numerous hard drives simultaneously, and also protecting against data loss due to hard drive crashes. Even if regular backups are used, constant availability of storage systems is invaluable for business workflows, and this is what RAID provides.

A RAID Level 5 array is a common type, used in most normal business situations. In this arrangement, when data is written to the array, it is distributed to all drives but one. The controller generates a checksum (parity information) for the data set written, and writes the checksum to the final hard drive. This can be used to reconstruct the data if any one drive is lost. At the same time, performance is improved because data is being written to (or read from) many drives in parallel.

In RAID5, the drive chosen for the checksum changes for each data block written. Thus, it is an enhancement of RAID3, where a single dedicated drive is used for all checksums. RAID5 improves performance because in RAID3 the dedicated parity drive can create a bottleneck.

But there are also cases in which higher reliability is needed than can be met by RAID 5. Areca addresses this by offering the option of setting up a RAID 6 array. RAID 6 is like RAID 5 but uses two drives for parity data, which means two drives can fail without data loss. Naturally, this requires another hard drive to be put in the array. We took a close look at how well this RAID level functions, and how well it performs.

Read More

Causes Of Data Loss

Survey data from companies that specialize in data recovery may be used to investigate the primary causes for how data actually gets lost.

Hard drive failure is the most common cause of data loss, accounting for 38 percent of data loss incidents.

Drive read instability includes occasions where media corruption or degradation prevents access to the data on a disk. This explains 30% of lost data.

Software corruption, which might include damages caused by system software or other program (e.g., a virus attack), accounts for 13 percent of data loss incidents.

User error accounts for 12 percent of data loss episodes. This includes the accidental deletion of data as well as incorrectly partitioning the hard drive.

The relative magnitudes of the different types of data loss are illustrated as bellow. (This analysis ignores data loss due to theft, an increasing problem given the growth in use of laptops).

Causes Of Data Loss

Causes of Data Loss: (Source: A survey of 50 data recovery firms across 14 countries.)

Read More

Seagate Introduces the world’s First 1.5TB Portable External Drive

New FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Ultra-Portable External Drive Packs a Punch with Unprecedented Amount of Storage, Blazingly Fast USB 3.0 Connection and Pre-loaded Films.

September 21, 2010 – Seagate launched the world’s first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external hard drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent® GoFlex™ ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help store, share and enjoy libraries of digital content in one’s preferred medium—whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or countless hours of digital music.

This ultra–upgradable, ultra–portable hard drive makes it ultra–easy for you to store, backup, encrypt and access your files anytime, anywhere.

Seagate introduces the world’s first 1.5TB portable, external hard drive with a Blazingly Fast USB 3.0 Connection and Pre-loaded Films.

“Today’s announcement is a ‘triple-crown’ of consumer technology—packaging record breaking capacity, blazingly fast USB 3.0 connectivity and the bonus of movie entertainment—making the 1.5TB GoFlex™ ultra-portable drive an unprecedented and innovative solution, bringing this solution to market on the heels of our 3TB GoFlex™ Desk drive and the Momentus® XT solid state hybrid drive is proof of Seagate’s continuing technology leadership and tradition of setting storage industry milestones.” – said Darcy Clarkson, vice president of Global Retail Sales and Marketing for Seagate.

Shipping now in the United States and rolling out globally later this year, all 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives¹ will ship with a USB 3.0 interface cable, accelerating the transfer speed of a drive up to 10x when connected to a USB 3.0 port, when compared to a USB 2.0 port. For example, a drive using a USB 3.0 connection can transfer a 25GB file in under five minutes versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive². In addition, all GoFlex ultra portable drives will now also ship with the new Superspeed USB 3.0 cable, which will still continue to work with existing USB 2.0 ports.

“Consumers continue to push the growth of digital music, photos, and video content, and increasingly want access to this content from a variety of CE devices, including a PC, higher capacity disk drives in combination with higher bandwidth interfaces like USB 3.0 will help to make a greater number of large multimedia files more accessible from multiple devices in the home.” – says John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives.

A key addition to the GoFlex™ family, the new 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive delivers ultimate flexibility in how people collect, protect, share and enjoy their digital libraries, all in a convenient compact package. In addition to coming bundled with USB 3.0 connectivity, the drive can be used with an array of add-on cables and accessories such as the GoFlex™ Net media sharing device and the GoFlex™ TV HD media player, that provide the flexibility to enjoy your content on a TV, a network, using a mobile device, or via the Internet.

All 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives are compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® OS X computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the hard drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver is simply installed once on the Mac® OS X computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted³ drive.

The 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive with USB 3.0 adapter is available in black and can be purchased on Seagate.com and through select retailers for $249.99.

Read More