Zero-Power Optical Disc Drive is part of the SATA 6GB/s specification (to be precise SATA revision 3.1). To support the new power saving feature of the latest SATA revision, the computer system and operating system need to support it. If your computer does not support Sata 6GB/s connections you cannot make use of the power saving feature.

Zero-Power ODD is enabled by default in the Windows 8 operating system. Windows 8 will recognize compatible drives automatically and use the feature to save power. This basically means that the optical drive does not need power at all if it is idle.

While unlikely you may encounter situations where the new feature acts up, or where you under no circumstances want to save power using that feature.

Windows 8 comes with an option to disable Zero-Power ODD. In the developer preview edition you need to change the value of a Registry key for that.

Open the Windows Registry editor first. You need to bring up the run box with the shortcut Windows-r, type in regedit and hit enter. This displays a prompt for elevation which you need to accept.

Navigate to the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\cdrom\parameters\ and locate the parameter ZeroPowerODDenabled on the right side. It is likely that you only see the parameter if your computer supports the feature.

Double-click the value and change it to 0. You then need to restart your computer before the changes become active. You can at any time enable the feature again by repeating the steps. The only difference is that you need to set the value to 1 instead of 0 to enable it. (via)

The recall is to fix a problem with the Series 6 chipset, used in all Sandy Bridge systems.  The company says that  the SATA ports within the chipset could degrade over time.  This would impact the performance and functionality of any SATA-attached device such as hard disks and optical drives.

The recall, which Intel claims will cost the company around $1 billion is being organised with OEMs  and it will affect computers that have literally only just been delivered, as the Sandy Bridge chips have only recently come on the market.

An Intel spokesperson told PC Promagazine that arojnd 5% of the SATA components were likely to fail with the failure rate rising to 15% for heavy users.  They went on to say that while 8 million Sandy Bridge chips had been sold, only a small number had been delivered to consumers.

While the company has rectified the problem, the new motherboards won’t start arriving at OEMs until the end of February.  Full volume production has also been halted until April.  It’s not all bad news for Intel though as the Sandy Bridge processors are bound to be successful anyway and are streets ahead of the power currently offered by AMD chips.

• STOP 0×0000007A
• STOP 0×00000077
• STOP 0×000000F4

The cause for those error messages are SATA hard drives that require more than 10 seconds. The timeout of the SATA driver in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is set to ten seconds and the error message is produced as a result of this timeout.

Only large SATA hard drives are affected according to Microsoft. Large hard drives seem to be those with a capacity of 1 Terabyte or larger.

Consider the following scenario:

* You have a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
* The computer has a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard disk.
* The size of the SATA hard disk is large. For example, the size of the SATA hard disk is 1 terabyte (TB).
* You put the computer into the Sleep state or into the Hibernate state.
* You try to resume the computer.

In this scenario, you receive one of the following Stop error messages:

*
STOP 0x0000007A
*
STOP 0×00000077
*
STOP 0x000000F4

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 users who are experiencing these difficulties are asked to install the patch that Microsoft has released on their support website.

Other users do not need to install this patch which will be integrated into Windows 7 Service Pack 1 which Microsoft aims to release in 2010.

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.

USB Safely Remove is a USB device manager that can be run on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. USB devices like removable hard drives, memory sticks or even connected digital cameras become increasingly common but Microsoft failed to add the means to manage the devices effectively. The software program works basically with any hot-plug devices like USB, SATA, Firewire or PCMCIA devices.

One of the problems that Windows users might encounter is that most devices that get connected to the computer will use the name USB mass storage device. That makes it difficulty to safely unplug a specific device from the computer system. There is also no option to hide important devices that (never) get disconnected from the system.

USB Safely Remove provides an easier way to manage the devices in Windows. It uses and displays the actual device names & icons and offers ways to rename devices, change device icons and hide devices from the removal menu. A single hotkey can be used to navigate the menu and safely remove or open the device.

This is however just one function of the software. Another annoying Windows feature is that every card reader slot will be assigned to a drive letter which can easily mean that four or even more device letters are taken by card reader slots that are rarely if any in use. USB Safely Remove can be used to hide empty card reader slots automatically. There is also the option to eject cards directly from a card reader. Any process that would lock the card would be displayed so that it could be taken care of.

The reason if a device cannot be stopped on the computer system will be displayed by USB Safely Remove. It will display the running processes that lock the device so that it cannot be stopped or disabled.

It is probably a good time to explain the differences between stopping and disabling a device. Some devices cannot be stopped but only disabled in the hardware manager. USB Safely Remove automatically detects the type of drive and will stop or disable the device without making the user think about the type of device. It can also enable a disabled device at the next start of the computer system.

Programs can be started after a device gets connected to the computer and before a device gets disconnected or stopped again. One possible use for that feature would be to run the encryption software True Crypt to mount and dismount the encrypted container.

A command line version of the software program is provided as well which can be integrated in batch scripts or simply run from the command line.

One of the most interesting features of USB Safely Remove is the ability to start a stopped device. Without the software one would have to unplug the cable of the device and plug it back in so that Windows recognized it again. With USB Safely Remove it is just a matter of selecting the feature in the right-click menu of the application.

The USB software manager comes with several additional features like the ability to mount storage devices as NTFS folders, managing of drive letters or preventing Windows from assigning specific drive letters to devices.

The software developer created a unique url which can be used to request a serial number for the software program. This url is good for today only which is why we decided to publish the Giveaway right now and not at the usual time.

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.

I had recently purchased parts to build a new PC and had encountered a Dicken’s of a time getting it to install at all. Now here’s the whacked out part: I followed the advice from online that Intel recommends I set the BIOS to RAID versus leaving it at SATA. This is because once the OS is installed, it can’t be changed without blue screens of death.

After selecting RAID, I tried to install Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit. It won’t recognize the SATA drives. It sees them, even formats them. But won’t install to them.

When I put in a PATA drive, Vista all of the sudden let’s me install onto the SATA drives. But when I remove the PATA drive, Vista doesn’t recognize the SATA’s again. I wound up installing Vista on the PATA and using the SATA as program and data drives, respectively.

Parts:

Motherboard: ECS Elitegoup’s GF7100PVT-M3 with built-in nVidia 7100 VGA/DVI 256meg video.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M
RAM: 2x G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 PC2 6400 (4 gig total)
HD: 2x 500gig Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS SATA II drives
DVD-R/W: Lite-On LH-20A1S SATA

I’am now going to introduce two freewares that emulate floppy drives and are able to copy and run the bootdisk from USB. The first freeware is called Bootdisk to Bootstick, it makes it possible to copy the contents of a floppy disk or virtual floppy image to an USB stick. The USB stick remains bootable just like the floppy disk would be. This is great if you do not have a floppy drive anymore but need to boot from floppy because your manufacturer is offering the tool / driver only as a bootable floppy disk.

Virtual Floppy drive is used to emulate a floppy drive making it possible to create bootable floppy disks without having a floppy drive connected to your computer. I still remember the old days when a program would only create a bootdisk if a floppy drive was present. If you did not have a floppy drive or disk inside it would not create the much needed bootdisk. This belongs to the past now.

Update: The website and download is no longer available. Alternatives are available here.

Run silent drive after unzipping the 18K freeware to a location on your hard drive. It should automatically detect your IDE drives and display the drives current setting, it will most likely be disabled. To silence your hard drive you would select the
leise (silent) switch, mittel (medium) means a balance between performance and noise and laut (noisy) means maximum performance but more noise. Click on seek-test after you changed the setting to hear how noisy your hard drive is.

You can change the settings back to default of course and everything will be as it was. The settings you make are saved by the hard drive itself. It might be that your bios is reverting the changes on every start. This would mean that your only option would be to add silent drive to your autostart.

The parameter would look the following:

SlilentDrive -d0 -mo

with -d0 to -d3 identifying the hard drive and -m0 (off), -mm (medium) and -mq (silent)

An alternative that also works with SATA hard drives is Hitachis Feature tool that is also working with most hard drives out there. Hitachi provides a download of a boot disk or iso image of the tool which you have to boot from to use. The great thing about this is that users that are not using Windows XP or 2000 will be able to change the settings with the boot disks.