IDE External Enclosure

With the growing popularity of portable devices, IDE hard drives are also following suit. With the development of External Hard Drive Enclosures, anyone can carry around his hard drive and have the capability of connecting it to any computer system via the Universal Serial Bus (USB) port. This type of enclosure is compatible with USB 2.0 as well as the USB 1.1 standard. Major operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Mac are compatible with the device which allows for easy identification and integration. The enclosure is capable of transferring data with speeds of as high as 480 Mbps and can accommodate all 3.5” types of hard disks. This device is also fitted with an LED indicator to help the user monitor hard disk activity.

Epson QX-10 IDE Drive

There was a development undertaken a few years back that was geared towards creating a control chip to be utilized by system independent IDE host adapters. The Epson QX-10 was one of the devices used in this experimentation wherein it was fitted with an IDE hard drive. The developed interfaces were primarily simple in order to make some minor BIOS setting changes easy. A Western Digital WD1002-HDO was used with 95% of its driver routines being able to correctly control the function of the hard drive. The minor revisions done included the addition of a single sector number to the IDE where it starts at sector 1 instead of the default sector 0.

IDE Hard Disk: Why Such a Name?

Every hard disk is interfaced in the motherboard through a disk controller. This disk controller is the one that plays bridge between the hard disk and the operating system. For the user to access data from the hard disk, there is a data bus connecting the hard disk and the motherboard. The data bus is like a pipe where bytes of data are being transmitted.

There are two kinds of data buses, Serial ATA and Parallel ATA, which are used in SATA hard disk and IDE hard disk respectively.
IDE is the abbreviation of Integrated Device Electronics. The Parallel ATA was earlier called IDE. That�s why hard disks that use Parallel ATA are called IDE hard disks.

Hard Drive Fact

The normal process of the platters is to spin up once the hard disk is started and keep spinning. The spinning course is the most tiring part on the spindle motor of the hard disk. A lot less effort is require maintaining the speed of the spindle. To get the maximum performance of the hard disk is the keep it on spinning. Before the hard disk can read or write it need to spin up on full speed.

When the hard drive is spinning down it doesn’t only reduce power consumption at the same time it reduces the thermal output. Thus, spinning down the spindle increases the longevity of the hard disk.

Disk Formatting

All magnetic hard drives are formatted in the same way, or divided into different parts known as tracks, sectors and cylinders.

The formatting method sets up a method of allocating addresses with the different fields. Formatting also make up a region for maintaining the list of addresses. The only way to know what happened with the data inside the hard disk is thru formatting. Take it for example a library. Imagine a library where your pages were tearing off from the books and scattered everywhere in the room. Getting the together the pages back to the book is almost impossible thing. The concept of formatting is to allow you to use the space while still being able to find things.

Hard Drive Myths part 3

The truth is current design of hard disk’s head actuators are not power-driven by any motor. Previous design of the head actuators are actually powered by a stepper motor. But currently head actuators use the voice coil instrument that uses electromagnetic power to stir the heads. In short, head actuators don’t have a motor to fail and not powered by any mechanical motor.

In addition, take note that head actuators’ automatically when there are power cuts meaning it is not an active process. Head actuator uses spring to park itself. The spring retracts the actuators when the power is cut while it moved against the spring tension when active.

Hard Drive Myths part 2

Bad sectors of the hard disk will not cause by insufficient power of power cuts. The head actuators automatically park the heads on every occasion there is power cuts so that the platters won’t crashed to head actuators. There is no way that power cuts will cause your hard disk bad sectors but having a bad power supply can fail your hard drive because it will surge the circuit board of it and may fry the motor.

A cheap power supplies do not kill hard drive even slowly killing it. That is a myth. Like any other power supply, when it send and surge the hard disk the disk will be instantly kill.

Hard Drive Myths part 1

One sign of the hard disk’s calibration process is the spin-up and spin –down events. The hard disk recalibrates itself to balance the changes in temperature which is also adjusting the position of data on the platter surface and when the hard disk can not scan the data properly. As a result, if the hard disk recalibrates a lot it might be a symptom of a failing hard disk.

However, take note that there is hard disk that programmed to saves power. In order to saves power the hard disk spin down and when there’s work to be done that’s the time to spin-up again.

MTBF – Meaure of Reliability

Mean-Time-Between-Failure or MTBF is a term used to describe the reliability of the parts of a computer system from a technical standpoint describing reliability and is measured in hours. The higher this number the more reliable a computer part is. with respect to hard disk drives, particularly IDE drives this denotes the number of hours before it fails or parts of the electronics, motors and bearings can last without any failure. This is an older measure used by the computing industry when hard drives were still quite steeply priced with the best ones reserved fro use on servers and other high demand uses. Ide has long been replaced by the SATA standard which eliminates the thick IDE cable that blocks airflow within a computer’s casing preventing proper cooling.
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The IDE Hardisk

Image source: www.flickr.com
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.