Archive for April, 2010

Monitoring your drives just got a little easier

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

With the release of Drive Genius 3 on the Mac, a new feature was added that makes monitoring your drives a lot easier: DrivePulse®! Using DrivePulse®, whenever the system is inactive for a period of time, it will check your drives for potential problems, making use of the S.M.A.R.T. technology in today’s drives (S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), as well as fragmentation status, temperature, and other items.

While this monitoring will not necessarily alert you exactly when your drive is about to fail (something that isn’t really possible anyway, just like predicting volcano eruptions or earthquakes: you know it will happen, but can’t be sure when), it gives you some good indicators about the health of the drive and when it might me a good idea for a backup.

If you have a Mac and are looking for a universal drive utility, check out the brand new Drive Genius 3.

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Data Recovery on an iPhone? Is it possible?

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

If you lost data on an iPhone, i.e. you deleted pictures by mistake that you didn’t sync yet with your computer, can those pictures be recovered? The answer is a clear “it depends”.

As the iPhone (and consequently the iPod Touch and now also the new iPad) are part of Apple’s closed ecosystem, you as the user don’t have full access to the file system and – more importantly – cannot read or write directly to the flash memory where all your information is stored. In addition, any app on your iPhone is “sandboxed” and doesn’t have full access to the file system, let alone direct flash memory access, and thus cannot check for your deleted data, which is why there cannot be a tool like Data Rescue (which we offer for the Mac or PC) on the iPhone.

What happens when you delete information on your iPhone (similar to a regular hard drive), the entry in the file system is removed and the part on the flash memory that holds the actual information is added to the pool of free space, ready to be overwritten again by any kind of data. So even normal use, for example if you browse the web on your iPhone with Safari, the temporary files that get generated could already irrevocably overwrite the data you would like to get back.

Does that mean no data recovery is possible on iPhones? If you have the iPhone 3GS with the latest software installed, sadly, there is currently no known way to recover that data. If you’re using an older iPhone or haven’t updated your 3GS to the latest software, it may be possible to perform a function called “jailbreaking”, which would allow us to install certain software that in turn gives us direct access to the flash memory, and thus potentially recover the data you are after.

Realistically, however, the chances of actually finding your deleted data is fairly slim, especially if your device is more or less full with your data (music, videos, photos), as the chances of your lost data not being overwritten through normal operation tend to become zero quite quickly.

As a rule of thumb (just like for any other data loss scenario): if you have deleted data on your iDevice that had not been backed up, stop using it immediately and give us a call, so we can assess the situation and review your options.

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The 4K Sector Transition

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A change is coming into the hard drive market place this year, after planning has been going on for about a decade or so. The change in question? Raising the size of hard drive sectors from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes, or 4KB. Why is this important, and why should you care?

First some background about what’s going on: the main reason for raising the amount of data a single sector can hold is to improve efficiency (and therefore speed), as well as support for even larger hard drives. You see, the storage capacity of hard drives has increased immensely year over year, but the way the data is organized on the platters has not kept pace. And there are good reasons why the organizational side hasn’t changed the same way, even though the manufacturers were aware that they would be running into issues eventually and needed to do something about it.

The problem with smaller sector sizes that basically every hard drive up to 2010 used is that they are increasingly inefficient. The data stored on hard disks isn’t just your actual data, but also overhead that enables important functionality like error correction, without which you couldn’t rely on your data being stored correctly. Going from 512 byte sectors to 4KB sectors allows better and more efficient error correction algorithms to be used, which will result in higher speeds, but also increases capacity of the drives, as more of the drive space can be used for user data, and less for error correction.

Now this all sounds very good and reasonable, but what’s the catch? As alluded to, some older OSes and applications cannot properly deal with these new 4K sector drives, the most popular one being Windows XP. So if you haven’t upgraded to Windows Vista or Windows 7 yet, you might want to avoid getting one of these new drives (Macintosh users running Tiger or higher are not affected). You can find some helpful general information from Western Digital about these new drives, or if you would like to get the nitty-gritty technical background, head on over to AnandTech.

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