Not all operating systems support AF hard drives. When it comes to Windows, only the latest versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 support it natively. Some hard disk manufacturers like Western Digital are offering software tools for operating systems like Windows XP to make their AF hard drives compatible with the operating system as well. (I suggest you check the Exploring WD’s Advanced Format HD Technology over at Hot Hardware and Dell’s Are you ready for Advanced Format (AF) Hard Drives for additional information).

The post on the Dell community blog lists one of the issues that users can run into when working with AF hard drives.

With previous (512B) drives the physical and logical sector size was always 512 bytes. Now with the physical sector being 4K and the emulated logical sector still being 512 bytes, you encounter performance issues if the start of the logical partitions don’t line up with the boundaries of the physical sectors. Proper alignment will be dependent on the deployment methodology and tools that you use.

How can you find out if your AF hard drive has performance issues? Easy, you rum the Disk Alignment Test freeware. Just download and run the program on your Windows PC. The program checks for AF hard drives that are connected to the system. It displays all drives in its interface and uses colors to indicate AF drives with volumes that are not aligned.

The program itself will not fix alignments that reduce the performance of the drive. The developer links to tools that disk manufacturers like Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba and Samsung have created to align the sectors properly. (A universal tool is Paragon’s Alignment Tool)

The program is made available as a command line utility and version with graphical user interface. The portable software is compatible with all Microsoft windows versions from Windows 2000 to the very latest version. Please note that it may require administrator rights to function correctly.

Moore’s Law states that the amount of transistors that can be placed on a circuit will double every two years. Intel’s announcement means they’re going to be able to keep developing technology that proves the law. Previously, transistors were placed on a circuit on a flat surface. This new technology means that is no longer the case. Therefore, there can be more transistors on each circuit.

Intel says that the costs should be minimal, both in terms of production and in terms of operation. The chips won’t cost much more to make than they currently do, and the heat production should not be all that much higher than it is with current chip technology.

The minimal costs in terms of production are outweighed by the benefits of this technology. The chips made using the new 22NM process and the 3d transistor technology will have lower voltage, lower leakage and more speed.

These chips will be used in desktops and laptops to begin with, probably in early 2012. They will increase performance even in larger data centers. But the real benefit of this technology will be in the mobile market. That is where Intel really needs to make strides if it wants to stay relevant. This technology will do it for them. It will mean a lot more power in the smaller footprint of mobile phones and tablets.

Seagate is also putting more power in a smaller package. They are now able to put one TB per platter in a 3.5 inch hard drive. This means that the hard drives have an impressive capacity of 625 GB per square inch. Within a few months you will be able to buy a 3.5” 3 TB hard drive. You can back up all of your data onto small hard drives that will fit just about anywhere.

You will be able to get the new drives in 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 TB sizes. Seagate has not yet released pricing on the drives.

Seagate and Intel are both thinking that smaller is better. This is because the trend to smaller and more mobile technologies is driving the industry as consumers become more likely to spend their money on laptops than desktops. Tablets and smartphones are becoming ever more commonplace. These two advancements show that companies are aware of the fact that people want to fit more power into smaller packages.

How have your computing habits changed in the last while? Are you going smaller? Do you find yourself using mobile devices to do tasks that you used to do on a desktop? Do you use a desktop or a laptop as your main computer?

While it is not a problem for tech savvy users like you and me to encrypt a disk drive with encryption software, it may very well be one for normal computer users.

But even with encryption there is the chance that third parties may find ways to access the data on the hard drive, for instance by brute forcing the password or placing a trojan or other malicious code on a system.

Toshiba recently announced a new generation of self-encrypting drives with several advanced features that offer more than hardware data encryption.

The drives can be configured to only work on known host systems. Any attempt to connect them to an unknown host would automatically render the data on the drives useless.

The drives have been specifically designed to “address the increasing need for IT departments to comply with privacy laws and regulations governing data security” and are “ideally suited for PC, copier and multi-function printer, and point of sale systems used in government, financial, medial or similar environments”.

Drives can be configured to deny access or erase sensitive data if the authentication process fails. This would for instance be the case if someone connected the hard drive to an unauthorized computer system.

The hard drives will be offered with capacities between 160 Gigabytes and 640 Gigabytes, 7200 RPM, 16 Megabyte buffer and a Serial ATA 3,0 Gbps interface. All drives use the AES 256 encryption algorithm to protect data from unauthorized access.

The drives will be made available in the coming months, and will be first made available to OEMs and ISVs. The press release is available here.

These high capacity hard drives will work fine for users running Windows Vista, Windows 7 or a Windows Server 2008 operating system. Windows XP users will however notice that they cannot use all of the space of the hard drive. Why? Because the operating system cannot address disk space beyond the 2 Terabyte limit. That’s roughly one third of space that cannot be used.

An alternative is an advanced partitioning scheme like GUID Partition Table (GPT) which can support 3TB volumes. The problem however is that GPT is not supported by Windows XP.

Paragon however came up with a solution. They basically create a specially signed driver to make Windows XP compatible with the GPT partitioning scheme. With this in place, Windows XP users can utilize the full storage of 3TB hard drives.

There are a few limitations though, but the solution nevertheless is the only available one to use all 3 Terabytes of hard drive space on Windows XP. The major limitation of this method is that the 3TB hard drive cannot be the system partition. The full 3 Terabytes are only available if the hard drive is installed as a secondary drive. Other limitations include incompatibility with RAID setups and external 3TB hard drives.

After installation and reboot of the system the GPT partitioning scheme needs to be created on the 3 Terabyte drive. This is done by clicking on Hard Disk in the menubar and selecting Convert to GPT hard disk from the context menu.

Full access to all 3 Terabytes is provided afterwards. It is then possible to use Windows tools to manage the hard drive, or the Paragon GPT Disk Manager. The disk manager offers options to partition the hard drive among other features.

Paragon GPT Loader Download and Compatibility

Paragon GTP Loader is currently available free of charge as part of Paragon’s Early Adopter program. The program has been developed for Windows XP, and users of other Microsoft operating systems have no benefit of running the software (as their systems support 3TB drives). The Paragon GTP Loader download link will be sent to the email address used in the registration for the early adopters program. The same email contains a link to the product guide in pdf format.

The program displays different options on the startup window, and in three other tabs. In the drive security tab it is possible to hide drives from the computer, lock drives and disallow autorun for specific drive letters. Autorun can also be disabled for drive types, with individual options available for USB Flash Disk / floppy disk, hdd hard disk drives, CD and DVD drives and RAM disks.

It is for instance possible to hide drive a from being displayed in Windows, especially if that drive is not even available in the operating system. Note, Windows 7 does that automatically as it hides drives without medium automatically.

drive security

The drive substitution tab offers to set drive letters to folders of the operating system with the option to perform the operation on every start of the system. It performs the same operation as the subst command line tool.

disk management

Drive monitoring supposedly allows a user to monitor selected drives. This threw some error messages on our Windows 7 64-bit test system. It may be incompatible with 64-bit systems and work fine with 32-bit systems. We had to kill the Drive-Thru process though because the monitoring could not be stopped, even though the controls to cancel and stop were displayed on the screen.

The final tab offers several features on one page. It can be used to configure drive labels and icons, display drive related information, convert drives to the NTFS file format, define if and how the drive letter shall be displayed, enable write protection for removable drives and select the drives that are accessible in drive explorer on the computer desktop.

Drive-Thru is an interesting portable program for Windows, that can aid the user in configuring various drive related settings. We would recommend to stay away from the drive monitoring feature though, as it seems to be buggy at this time. There are other programs that work better and without errors. (via JKWebTalks)

The software program displays a list of all devices that are currently connected to the local computer system. The display is very informative and it is possible to get an overview of all the connected drives in a few seconds. Information like the drive letter, label, type, size, vendor or format are displayed. It is furthermore possible to filter the list to hide certain types of drives like those that are not mounted at the moment or network drives.

The header of the application contains links to several functions and options that can be used to manage the drives. It is for example possible to explore the drives, look at their properties and smart values (for hard drives), run check disk, hide them from the system or use the subst command to substitute drive letters.

Additional options are provided in the main menu that include benchmarking a drive, defragmenting it, ejecting CD or DVD drives or mapping network drives.

Drive Manager is a free and portable computer program for the Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

OverDisk is one of these software programs. It generates an interesting looking chart after analysing a hard drives contents. The chart displays the root level, the folders on that level and most of the subfolders with the size on the chart reflecting the percentage of disk usage on the selected hard drive. Additional information are displayed when hovering the mouse over one of the elements of the chart including the name of the folder, the total number of files and folders as well as the size occupied on the hard drive. A click on an element will center the visualization on that folder and build a new chart that display the different folder levels starting with that folder in root. This is an easy and convenient way to browse through the folder structure of the selected hard drive.

Several statistical information are provided in the toolbar menu. Interesting and unusual is the cluster information dialog that displays various cluster sizes and their implication on the used and wasted space on the hard drive.

Another option is to run queries to find the largest files, longest or deepest path names, directories with most file entries or bytes and those with greatest wasted space. OverDisk is an interesting software program to visualize the space utilization of selected hard drives.

Update: The Overdisk website is no longer available. It returns a 404 error. You can download the latest Overdisk program version with a click on this link: Overdisk (78)

Their biggest downfall besides the price is the write speed which can be low. So low that it will slow down the computer system when data is written on that drive. Many programs, including web browsers, email programs, editors but also the operating system itself cache data on the hard drive or use the hard drive to store temporary data. That’s a problem if the cache folder of that application is located on the Solid State.

What can be done to speed up the overall computer system?

• Move the temp folders of the operating system to another hard drive.
• Move the pagefile and System Restore locations to another hard drive
• Move the cache of applications to another hard drive, e.g. web browsers, email clients.
• Disable programs that access the hard drive and that are not needed, like Windows Indexing Service
• Upgrade the computer memory of the computer system (only makes sense if sub 4 Gigabybtes on a 32-bit system)

Most of these tips center around moving the cache to a new hard drive and disabling features that slow down the computer system. If you cannot install a second hard drive to the computer system you might consider adding a fast external device that can be used for caching. The downside of this method is that you need to have it near the computer system all the time which can be annoying if the system is mostly used on the road.

Newer Solid State Drives (check the OCZ Vertex review for instance) are slowly introduced that beat conventional hard drives fair and square both in write and read performance. They come at a price though but this is going to change in the future. Prices will drop, capacities increase and the slower SSD will slowly cease to exist.

This in effect means that all methods of overwriting free space are not sufficient for erasing the data securely on those drives. This also means as well that it is not possible to erase specific files securely on the SSD. Users who want to delete data securely on SSDs have therefor the following options at hand:

• Encryption
• Format
• Filling the Drive

Encryption is surely the best method of ensuring that the data on a SSD is secure as it cannot be accessed without decryption. Formatting the drive on the other hand is only reasonable if no data on that drive is needed anymore. It would otherwise require extensive backup and restoration procedures. Filling the drive with data might work as well as it would overwrite anything on the drive as well.

OCZ on the other hand seems to be one of the driving forces in SSD technology at this point in time. Their OCZ Vertex drives look really promising in both read and write performance. Old Solid State Drives usually excelled in read performance but lacked the necessary write performance.

Their latest hardware that was first shown at the Cebit in Germany is the OCZ Z-Drive. This piece of computer hardware is connected via PCI Express to a computer system taking up two slots because of its dimensions. It is made up of four 256 Gigabyte MLC-based OCZ Solid State Drives and 256 Megabytes of ECC DDR2 RAM. This adds up to a total storage capacity of 1 Terabyte and promises maximum read rates of 600 MB/s and read rates of 500 MB/s. The sustained write speed is said to be 400 MB/s.

The only drawback is the hefty price tag which is expected to be between $1500 and $2000. The OCZ Z-Drive is expected to be available in April 2009 with additional models following later this year.

There are however cases where the controller supports hot swap but the driver has not implemented it. This is where the computer software Hot Swap comes into play. The portable software program will add the functionality to the operating system so that the SATA drives can be safely removed from the running computer system.

The software comes as a 32-bit and 64-bit edition. Both become available after unpacking the software on the local system. Executing either version will place a new icon in the Windows system tray that can be used to configure and work with the software.

A left-click on the icon will display options to remove selected devices safely from the computer. A right-click opens the configuration menu where the type of supported devices can be configured. By default only fixed disk drives are scanned and offered as an option which can be expanded to include CD and DVD drives, removable disk drives, safely removable devices and non hotswap devices.

The same menu contains options to scan for new hardware, to uninstall the program or to change the language from English to German or French.

Hot Swap is an excellent solution for users with external SATA devices who would like to use the hot swap option of their drives.

This is even more important if a Windows operating system has been installed on the Solid State Drive. (It is basically the same deal for Linux users who should think about moving all write intensive tasks to other drives)

Three different types of tweaks can be applied. Tweaks that are applied directly to the hardware device in Windows, tweaks to the Windows operating system and tweaks to applications.

Hardware Tweaks:

• PIO Mode

Make sure the SSD is not running in PIO mode. To verify that go into the Device Manager, open IDE ATA / ATAPI controllers and double-click all Primary and Secondary IDE Channels.

Verify that there are no signs of PIO Mode under the Current Transfer Mode entry in Advanced Settings. It should list Ultra DMA Mode 5 there.

• Enable Write Caching

Click on Disk Drives in the Device Manager and locate the Solid State Drive. Double-click it and open the Policies tab on top.

Select Optimize for performance and enable “Enable write caching on the disk”. There is no need for the quick removal option as the SSD will never be removed from the computer (like any other hard drive).

Windows Tweaks:

• Moving the Pagefile

Moving the pagefile to another hard drive has a positive effect on the performance of SSD drives.

Go back to System Properties. Click on the Advanced Tabm there on Settings under the Performance entry. Again on Advanced in the new window and finally on the Change button under the Virtual Memory entry.

The Virtual Memory window opens and it will display all drive partitions on top and the size of their paging files. Select the Solid State Drive and check the “No Paging File” entry. Click the Set button to set the new preferences.

Now select another hard drive and assign the pagefile to this drive.

• Move the temp files

The Advanced tab under System Properties has a button entitled Environment Variables. Click it and locate the temp and tmp variables for the user and the system. Change the path to another hard drive if they are located on the Solid State Drive.

• Disable the Indexing Service on the drive

Right-click on the drive letter of the SSD and select Properties from the menu. Locate the Allow Indexing Service to index the disk for fast file searching line and make sure it is disabled.

Application Tweaks:

Most application tweaks center around the idea of moving temporary files to another hard drive. Take the cache of web browsers or temp files during video production for example. Moving them to another hard drive will have an impact on the system’s performance.

Do you know of additional tweaks that might improve system performance of SSD drives?

The figure means that 66 used hard drives out of 100 sold would contain data data about the previous owner. Half of that number would still mean that every third used hard drive sold would contain personal data. The figures seem to grow worth instead of better with every passing year. Researchers seem to concentrate on hard drives but digital cameras or mobile phones might reveal the same amount of information including personal pictures, documents, contacts and even credit card or bank account information.

How can users protect themselves and their data? The easiest way would be to stop selling used hardware that contained data at one point. That solution is not always practicable though.

The user should make sure to make the data on the storage device unrecoverable. One of the best tools for that purpose is Eraser which can be used to clear the free disk space so that the files “underneath” cannot be recovered with file recovery software anymore.

Any tips that you might want to add? Let me know.

SpeedFan is well known program in the category of system monitoring. It is a very good tool for controlling CPU and case fans (kinda obvious from its name) and was mentioned here on ghacks numerous times. However it has an interesting secondary function of analyzing hard drive health by reading and processing SMART data.

SMART (short for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is set of values that roughly expresses the amount of working time, load and errors hard drives have experienced since leaving the factory. Unfortunately for humans SMART is bunch of hexadecimal numbers that are hard to read and even harder to understand. In addition drive manufacturers are using different attributes and values that are not helping either.

Without leaving interface SpeedFan can show (on SMART tab) the values themselves and is trying to mark meaningful ones and calculate two indexes – performance and fitness:

• failing performance index means drive no longer performs its best;
• failing fitness index means drive is preparing to die with all your data.

Since one of the attributes is drive temperature SpeeFan can tie (as it can other temperatures) it to case fans speed and control airflow depending on its value.

Deeper and better analysis is hidden behind the "Perform an in-depth online analysis of this hard disk" button. It unchains you from local interface and submits data of your drive to hddstatus online service. In seconds your browser is forwarded to an automated report on your drive.

Why the need for an online service at all? Big advantage is that the online tool has access to SMART data of all hard drives of all models ever submitted to it. Instead of vaguely guessing it compares your drive with numerous similar drives and gives evaluation that fits exactly the hard drive model.

The report itself is formatted using understandable words like "good" and "not good" plus nice graphical bars showing how far your drive's values are from optimal ones. Interesting extra is the number of drives of that model tested and min/max/average temperatures for them. Sample report.

The question however is if you want to shell out the extra bucks for that visible speed gain and I think it comes down to a discussion among video card enthusiasts. Some purchase the top product that produces a few additional frames but costs double the amount of the video card that computes less frames. Still both make the games playable.

It’s the same with the current generation of Solid State Drives except for a few scenarios where they really shine. They need less energy to run and are completely silent which makes them an ideal candidate for a notebook hard drive replacement. That’s in my opinion the number one reason to purchase a Solid State Drive, to place it in a mobile device or computer that is being used as a media player.

samsung hard drive benchmark

ocz core series ssd benchmark

samsung hd103uj benchmark

ocz core series ssd 64gb benchmark

Where operating systems and desktop computers are concerned I would probably wait for the next generation that surely sees another huge price drop and speed increase.

Don’t get me wrong.. The Solid State Drive is faster than my shiny new Samsung hard drive, it loads pretty much everything faster but some of its gains, the silence, can only be effective if I would remove the conventional hard drives and that is not possible until the flash drives come with sufficient storage space.

Conclusion:

You should consider buying a Solid State Drive if..

• You turn on and off the operating system regularly
• You load and close many applications and files during the computer uptime
• You do not need space but energy efficiency or silence
• You want bragging rights
• You got the money to buy one

Everyone else is better of waiting for the next generation of flash drives in my opinion.

The situation seems to be changing slowly with 64 Gigabyte SSD drives available in larger quantities and better prices. One SSD drive that I was looking forward to was the OCZ Core Series SSD drive with 64 Gigabyte capacity and the guys at Hot Hardware managed to get their hands on one of those drives and compared it to the ultra fast WD VelociRaptor hard disk.

While the OCZ Core Series SSD drive lacks behind in write speeds (tops 87 MB/s compared to 129 MB/s for the VelociRaptor) it managed to win the read speed benchmark (140 MB/s compared to 123 MB/s) and of course in random access times.

Far more impressive than those computed values are values from real applications, and those tests make a difference.

How about a Windows Vista startup of 51 MB/s compared to 15.6 MB/s for the conventional hard drive ? Similar results are available for gaming (77 MB/s vs. 12.5 MB/s), application loading (21 MB/s vs. 3.7 MB/s) and Windows Defender (66 MB/s vs. 19.8 MB/s). The SSD drive managed to beat the hard drive in every test which has to be attributed largely to the low random access time.

This convinced me and I just ordered a OCZ Core Series SSD drive with 64 Gigabyte capacity for 200 Euros. Once I have that will do some tests with various operating systems and benchmarks.

This is where Dante stepped in and wrote an explanation on how to assign a specific drive letter to the USB drive.  He also mentioned that the tool would not work in Windows Vista and that the method using Disk Management would.

Right-click on the My Computer icon in Windows XP or on Computer in Windows Vista and select Manage form the menu. You can alternatively access it by entering compmgmt.msc in the run box or search box. Now select Disk Management in that menu and perform a right-click on the drive that you want to assign a specific driver letter to.

Now select Change Driver Letter and Path and assign the specific drive letter to the device.

Solid State Disks have no moving parts which means they make no noises whatsoever, have a largely reduced access time, are not prone to electro-magnetic failures, have a lower power consumption, no heat generator and a better ability to endure extreme shock.

Solid State Disks do have some limitations though. The most dominant ones are currently availability, pricing and capacity. The largest capacity of Solid State Disks is 128 Gigabytes at the moment which I have seen for sale for roughly $3800 (SUPER TALENT 2.5″ 128GB SATA Internal Solid state disk). More affordable units are 32 Gigabyte Solid State Disks (for instance the SAMSUNG 32GB IDE Internal Solid state disk) that retail for roughly $400 and 16 Gigabyte disks for $200.

My next computer that I will build next year will have one of those Solid State Disks as the main boot hard drive resulting in faster boot times of the operating system, lower noise level and faster response times. I will still use conventional hard drives for storage mainly because the pricing is currently way out of line. Reminds me of the good old days when a 10 Megabyte hard drive cost that much.

If the pricing drops to around $500 for 64 Gigabyte drives I would buy one of those instead but I’m perfectly fine with a 32 Gigabyte Solid State Disk as well. My current Windows partition has only 10 Gigabytes so even a 16 Gigabyte Solid State Disk would be fine.

This technology will be even more exciting for notebook owners. They could for instance replace their conventional hard drive with a solid state disk to reduce the noise level and speed up all processes.

I was thinking of something different though. What if I want to keep my hard drives for now but make sure that deleted data can’t be recovered by any means ? I tried and ran some file recovery programs such as Recuva and it showed thousands of files that were still referenced on my system although they have been deleted before. I think that this is a privacy problem and decided to look for a way to delete all file information on the unused part of my hard drives.

I decided to use Recuva first and see how many file information it would find. After that I would run a program named Eraser which I will use to clean the unused disk space of any deleted file information and finally run Recuva again to see if this reduced the amount of files that could be undeleted from my system.

Testing my Hard Drive with Recuva:

Recuva found 33720 files on my hard drive f: that could be undeleted. This is a large amount of files.

Running Eraser:

After right-clicking the central pane I was able to create a new task. The first option was unused space on drive which is the default option in the menu. I selected the f: hard drive from the list. Eraser was showing my newly selected task in the central pane and I had to right-click that task once again and select Run from the context menu. It took two and a half hours to overwrite all the data on my 100 gigabyte hard drive.

Testing the result with Recuva:

Recuva found one file on drive f: Everything else was not found anymore which leads to the conclusion that this is an excellent way to erase file information that exists on the unused space on your hard drives. This is probably not enough to erase it for the big boys if you know what I mean but every amateur should have problems getting information about those files.

So, open the Device Manger by either typing device in the search box of Windows Vista or typing devmgmt.msc from the command line. Go to the disk Drives tab and right-click the SATA drive and select Properties from the menu. Now select the Policies tab and check the box Enable Advanced Performance. You have to repeat the process if you have more than one SATA drive installed on your system

You have to perform almost the same steps to speed up usb drivers under Windows Vista. Open again the policies tab of the USB drive and select Optimize for Performance from the options there. This method has one little drawback, you need to Safely Remove the Hardware if you want to unplug the device from your system.

Both tips have been found at the How to Geek.