Adtron Hard Disks

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Solid state hard disks can now replace the rotating drives and parts that have comprised the hard disk market for the last decade. The latest technology in hard disk production is currently being used in a number of industrial and defense applications. Solid state provides the highest possible degree of performance and reliability. The moving parts of the ordinary IDE hard disks are virtually the weakest link of the entire medium because it is prone to tremendous strain and friction. The solid state hard disk is basically lightweight, it needs less power to run than the common 2.5″ and 3.5″ hard drives, and it has no acoustic signature. While the latest technology is enjoying great support from the market, it is not without its weak points too. The only major flaw that needs to be taken care of a solid state hard disk when used into the everyday stresses of computing, is its durability. Thats why, Adtron Hard Disks came up with their latest product release. The latest in solid state hard disk technology. It is capable of withstanding the strain of pressure. It offers exceptional write durability in I/O applications, it can sustain the best read and write rates without using up precious cache memory as a buffer of the host and media.

How Hard Disk Works

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Your hard drive has a number of magnetized platters. The spindle spins the platters at a very fast speed while a read/write head scans over them both looking for reading and writing information. The effectiveness of your hard drive depends on how much of its capacity remains unused, fragmentation and its data transfer rate, which in turn is dependent on its connection type and the drive’s spin rate. In buying a hard drive, you may want to compare the prices of say a 160GB drive against two 80 GB drives. The thing with 2 hard drives is that, If one drive fails all is not lost. Although today’s hard disks are durable pieces of hardware, so long as you do not abuse them, it can provide you a long time of hassle free data storage.

The IDE Hardisk

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Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) hard disks have been around for quite a few years.  Prior to these drives, hard disks were interfaced to a PC motherboard via an extension board known as a hard disk controller.  The drive did most of the mechanical stuff and performed essential electronic/servo functions; the controller told it in detail what to do.  The development of the IDE hard moved most of the electronics and firmware (low-level software on a chip) from the controller to a printed circuit board on the drive itself.  In the process, a buffer/cache’ memory was added to the electronics to speed-up the process of reading and writing hard disk drive data.  The drive got “smarter.”  Overall costs went down and performance went up.
A much simpler board, usually identified as an IDE Controller, interfaced the IDE hard disk to the motherboard bus.  The term IDE Controller is a misnomer.  It is really nothing more than a bus interface and an interface and connector for the IDE cable going to the drive.  The actual controller is on the drive.  

Secure Erase Program

If the user is smart enough to go through the Storage Bits it is safe to them to play along with the Secure Erase program safe. In this program, secure erase, it overwrites ivery single block on the hard drive. Even those data on the bad blocks are being overwritten. The information left at the end is partly overwritten directories and blocks. Remember there is no data recovery from Secure Erase!

The National Security Agency together with the National Institue for Standards and Testing gave the Secure Erase, complying with legal requirements, a higher Security rating than external block overwrite software that is available anywhere in the market.

Know the Measurement Jargon

Somebody once told me that a man�s thing is proportional to the size of his hard disk. That�s totally untrue but it is definitely true that size does matter. Sometimes, during some intellectual boastful conversation, one may actually say a quarter of terabyte instead of 250 gigabytes to make it sound more size-monster.

The capacity of early hard disks is quoted as megabytes. A megabyte can store up to 1,048,576 or 2²⁰ bytes. Today, hard disks are commonly in gigabytes. Gigabytes is equal to 1,073,741,824 or 2³⁰ bytes of computer storage. Byte, on the other hand is equal to eight bits. A bit is a binary digit, taking up the values of either 1 or 0.

A hard drive and media player in one?

Have you ever thought of bringing a portable video player on the road? Of course, you may think I might be talking about portable DVDs, but no. If you have a wide collection of movies at home, will you bring your CDs with you to your destination? Of course not! That would be too much of a hassle.

To the movie buffs, here’s a treat for you. Chinavasion is again trying to catch up with the big names in the hard drive industry as they have come up with a portable external hard drive that can be used a media player. The player has a 120GB capacity and a 2.5 inches wide screen for viewing. It also has an earphone jack, so you can basically bring it everywhere you go—even in places that value silence.

Photo taken from http://chinavasion.manufacturer.globalsources.com

Hard drive dock and more.

Look at your workplace. Have you ever wondered how you can get rid of all those wires hanging around? No, I am not saying that you must go wireless with all your things as you might spend a lot of money on buying new gadgets when in fact the old ones are still working. You just have to be a little organized about your home wiring system as this may cause a lot of accidents. But believe me, even if you decided not to go wireless, your workplace can still be as organized as you can imagine.

How about getting some of those docks made by Unitek? They are currently selling in the market a dock wherein a lot of computer gadgets can be connected. Aside from the 4 card reader slots and the 2 USB ports available, you can even insert an external hard drive in it.

Photo taken from http://usb.brando.com.hk

Going all the way in protecting your files.

If you have very important documents or files in your current hard drive, have you ever wondered how you can really “protect” your files from being destroyed? Of course, there are a lot of ways on how you can protect the files inside such as encrypting the drive with a password or buying one of those hard drives with fingerprint recognition. However, having these can only protect what’s on the inside. Have you ever thought of protecting the outside?

Sentry(R)Safe cared so much about protecting your precious files that they made a gadget that is both water and fire proof. The hard drive has a 160GB capacity and was given a lot of awards by some of the most known companies and critics in the world of technology.

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Fusion F2 is now 1TB.

Those who are in the media industry should definitely invest on hard drives since they store their creations in them. Hard drives with large capacities are also needed to store full length movie masterpieces or numerous video clips for later viewing or editing. Sonnet has hit the hearts of the media gurus, manufacturing a high quality, high capacity piece of gadget: their Fusion F2 portable RAID solution. It is light weight, weighing only about 1.22 pounds, and since the hard drive has a RAID capable, you won’t be needing a drive C, D, E, or F on your computer anymore; the Fusion F2 can pretty much store as much data as you can imagine.

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Feeling a little unsecure?

If your business or job calls for secrecy, then you might want to store your documents in a safe place. Of course, our generation has already given up on manual storage and we let have let computers do this tedious task for us. However, there are some security risks when we store soft copies of our documents in a hard drive. First off, you must create backup copies of your documents. We will never know when your hard drive will fail you. Second, you might want to invest on hard drive security. Chinavasion has made a step towards this kind of security. They made a hard drive that can only be accessed with fingerprint recognition. The hard drive can recognize as much as 10 fingerprints, and so you can actually limit the access of your files. Fingerprint recognition can in fact be more secure than password encryption because hackers nowadays are becoming more ingenious.

Photo taken from http://www.portablegadget.com