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Samsung, Samsung, and more Samsung

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 19, 2011apple, samsung, toshiba, Western Digital

Well, that certainly didn’t take long. Yesterday Samsung announced its hard disk business was for sale. Today it announced Seagate was buying it for $1.375 billion in cash and stock, a slight discount from the asking price.

So after the deals finish shaking down, Seagate and Western Digital will each have somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the market, and Toshiba around 10 percent.
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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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And then there were three

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 18, 2011April 18, 2011IBM, intel, samsung, survivors, toshiba, Western Digital

I see reports today that Samsung is looking to sell its hard drive business. Samsung is one of four companies left that manufacture computer hard drives, the others being Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.

Hard drives aren’t a growth market any more, so the most likely suitors are one of the remaining three. Since Western Digital just bought Hitachi’s drive business, it probably won’t be them. They may not have the cashflow, and they probably don’t want the regulatory scrutiny that would go along with two acquisitions in rapid succession that make them suddenly nearly twice the size of Seagate. It’s more likely to be Seagate or Toshiba. I’d expect Seagate.
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Dave Farquhar

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Android-ified.

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 12, 2011amiga, amiga os, android, Angry Birds, AT&T, dell, hp, samsung, verizon, VOIP, wi-fi

After agonizing for a few weeks, I bought an Android phone. Specifically, a Samsung Galaxy S 4G. Being a T-Mobile phone, it’s a potential dead end, but I opted to do it for a few reasons.

Why? I’m sick of not being able to play Angry Birds. Not really, but I like seeing people’s reaction when I say that.

Dave Farquhar

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Tame your USB multi-card reader

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 10, 2011

If you have a USB multi-card reader and don’t like how each slot takes up a separate drive letter, the venerable Uwe Sieber has a utility for that: USB Drive Letter Manager.

Dave Farquhar

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Flaky networking? Suspect cheap NICs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Servers and Networking April 3, 2011March 2, 20223com, Broadcom, d-link, hp, intel, netgear

It was 1998. I was getting ready to network my two PCs, so I asked my friendly neighborhood networking professional what to buy. He didn’t hesitate. “Intel or 3Com,” he said. “Cheap NICs will talk, but they’ll start acting flaky after a while, dropping packets in the middle of transfers, stuff like that.”

I couldn’t afford 3Com or Intel at the time, so I bought a cheap “SOHOware” brand bundle that included two 10/100 NICs, a hub, and cables for around $150. A comparable first-tier setup would have run me twice that. The hub died after a couple of years. The cards fared better. “After a while” took 11 years or so to come, and I finally got sick enough of it to retire my last one.

Dave Farquhar

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Intel’s and Sandforce’s AES-128 encryption is useful, but not for what you think

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security April 2, 2011April 3, 2025AES, anandtech, intel, ocz, passwords, TrueCrypt

I spent some time this week with a coworker looking into the AES-128 encryption in current Sandforce and upcoming Intel 320 SSDs, and we’ve concluded it’s no substitute for software full-drive encryption.

This is important, so we’ll talk about it further.

Dave Farquhar

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Can you set an HP slimline computer on its side?

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 30, 2011March 1, 20221980s, 1990s, hp

Here’s a question that came up the other day. Can you set an HP slimline computer on its side?

Yes.

How anticlimactic of me.

Dave Farquhar

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SSDs and built-in encryption–and how to enable it

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security March 28, 2011April 3, 2025AES, anandtech, intel, passwords, performance penalty, Top Secret

Update: This entry was based on preliminary information that turned out to be incorrect. Please see the following update.

One of the last knocks on SSD performance is that they don’t perform well with full-drive encryption. But on Sandforce 1200- and 2200-based drives, and the next-generation Intel 320 drives introduced today, that’s not an issue anymore. Encryption happens on the drive, in hardware, with no performance penalty.

The problem was that nobody talked about how it works. I found the details buried in Anandtech‘s review of the Intel 320 drive. The takeaway is this: If you set your BIOS password, the drive will be unreadable if you remove it and put it in another system. Update: No it won’t. But you can add ATA password support, under some circumstances.
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Dave Farquhar

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Is it OK to paint an AC adapter?

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 23, 2011July 16, 2017

I got a weird question the other day. Is it OK to paint an AC adapter? Or: Can you paint an AC adapter?

I wouldn’t. For a couple of reasons. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Upgrade and repair diary: IBM Thinkpad T30

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 20, 2011December 27, 2015CA, IBM, thinkpad, Western Digital, windows 7, Windows XP

I picked up an IBM Thinkpad T30 this week. People ask me occasionally to keep an eye out for an inexpensive used laptop, and Thinkpads from 2005 or earlier are a good choice because they’re generally well built, easy to find, and most importantly, parts and information for them are plentiful if anything goes wrong.

In the case of this particular model, that’s a good thing.

Dave Farquhar

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