Western Digital

News analysis

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Short takes. Yesterday was a newsworthy day in technology, and I’m sure there’s going to be a ton of misinformation about it eminating from both coasts, so we might as well set the record straight.
Poor quality control drives IBM from the hard drive business! Yeah, whatever. IBM makes one questionable model (and many GXP failures sounded more like power supply failures than hard drive failures), and suddenly everything they’ve ever made is crap. Guess what? Seven years ago you couldn’t give me a Seagate drive, because the drives they were making back then were so slow and unreliable. Maxtors were worse–and my boss at the time, who has a very long memory, nearly disciplined me a couple of years ago for specifying a Maxtor drive in an upgrade. But he’s a reasonable man and saw that the drive held up and performed well. Western Digital has been so hit and miss I still don’t want to buy any of their drives. Though their drives started to look better after they licensed some technology from… Old Big Black and Blue.

And the truth about GXPs: Regardless of how true the quality control allegations are, the drives themselves are the most innovative and advanced IDE devices ever commercially marketed. The platters are made using different materials and processes than conventional discs, which was supposed to make them more reliable. Expect that technology to come of age in a generation or two. The drives even include SCSI-like command queueing (the newest version of Linux’s hdparm allows you to turn this feature on; I have no idea if Windows switches it on by default). The successor to the 60GXP is going to be worth a second and a third look.

Wanna know what’s really going on? Hard drives aren’t very profitable. IBM has a history of spinning off questionable divisions to see if they can survive as smaller, more independent entities. The most famous recent example of this is Lexmark. That’s what’s going on here. IBM and Hitachi spin off and merge their storage divisions, and each company takes a stake in it. If the company mops up the floor with the competition, IBM and Hitachi make lots of money. If the company continues to bleed cash, IBM and Hitachi get nice tax write-offs. Either way, the shareholders are happy.

A number of years ago, IBM was a large producer of memory chips as well. In fact, you can open up a Mac manufactured in the mid-1990s, and chances are you’ll find an IBM-manufactured PowerPC CPU, one or more IBM-manufactured DIMMs, and an IBM SCSI hard drive. Making memory had its ups and downs, and during one of the many downturns in the 90s, IBM got out of the business. There was a time when Intel and AMD were in that business too (I have some old AMD DRAM chips on an expansion card somewhere, and I’ve seen Intel DRAMs but I don’t know if I’ve ever owned any).

This news is a little bit surprising, but hardly shocking. IBM’s making tons of money selling software and services, they’re not making money selling hard drives, and they’ve got a new CEO and nervous investors. This is a way for them to hedge their bets.

And you can expect them to possibly start getting more aggressive about marketing their technologies to other drive manufacturers as well now. Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Fujitsu and Samsung have just changed from competitors into potential customers. Expect disk performance to increase and price to continue to decrease as a result.

How to gauge hard drive reliability. This isn’t exactly news but it seems very relevant. Professional writers don’t see a lot of drives. They can recommend based on their own experience, but their recent experience is going to be limited to a few dozen drives. Message boards are very hit and miss. You have no way of knowing whether it’s a book author hiding behind that handle or a clueless 12-year-old kid. Find an experienced technician who’s still practicing as a technician (I’m not a very good example; at this stage of my career I no longer deal with large numbers of desktop systems–I deal with a handful of servers and my own desktop machine and that’s it) and ask what hard drives they’ve seen fail. When I was doing desktop support regularly, I could tell you almost the exact number of drives I’d seen fail in the past year, and I could tell you the brands. I’d prefer to talk to someone who fixes computers for a large company rather than a computer store tech (since his employer is in the business of selling things, he’s under pressure to recommend what’s in stock), but I’ll still trust a computer store tech over some anonymous user on Usenet or a message board, as well as over a published author. Myself included.

AMD withdraws from the consumer market! AMD mentioned in a conference call yesterday that it plans to discontinue the Duron processor line this year. It makes sense. Fab 25 in Austin is being re-tooled to make flash memory, leaving the Duron without a home. But beyond that, AMD’s new 64-bit Hammer chip is going to hit the market later this year. So they can sell a slightly crippled K7 core as their low-end chip, or they can make their high-end K7 core into the low-end chip and sell the Hammer as a high-end chip. This strategy makes more sense. Clock for clock, the Athlon is still a better chip than the P4. Hammer scales better and performs better. So AMD can pit the Athlon against the Celeron and give P4 performance at a Celeron price, and the Hammer against the P4, which will give P4 clock rates and deliver better performance for 32-bit apps, along with a 64-bit future. There’s not much room in that strategy for the Duron. AMD would rather cede the $35 CPU business to VIA.

Look for the Hammer to gain widespread use in the Linux server market, especially among smaller companies. The Athlon already has an audience there (in spite of some pundits calling AMD-based systems “toys,” you see far more ads for AMD-based servers in Linux Journal than you see for Intel boxes), but the Hammer will become the poor man’s Alpha.

Minesweeper is murder.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,
Minesweeper is murder.

Minesweeper is murder. An activist group is asserting that the Windows game Minesweeper is disrespectful of victims of land mines and should be removed and replaced with a game about flowers. I have no idea if these guys are serious or not. I never liked the game anyway and just always wanted an excuse to say “Minesweeper is murder.” So now I’ve said it three times. I’m happy.

Read more

04/04/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

A great hardware site. I found this yesterday when I was searching in hopes of remembering a long-departed name of a hard drive manufacturer. The name I couldn’t put my finger on was Miniscribe. The great site, http://www.redhill.net.au, is a hardware guide, written by an experienced Australian clone shop, that’s unusually straight-shooting. It’s the only mention I’ve seen on a hardware site of the Gigabyte 7IXE4, a low-end Duron/Athlon board that sells for about 80 bucks.

Especially interesting to me is the history. They discuss drives in detail, and though it’s hardly a complete memoir of every drive that was ever on the market, it hits the common ones. Want to know where Western Digital got its sterling (and not very deserved) reputation? Read on. I’m not so sure of their statement that Maxtor was bought out by Hyundai (Maxtor certainly never mentions that), but their history seems about as complete and accurate as any other I’ve seen, and it’s interesting to read the reviews of ancient hard drives. At least to me.

Motherboards and CPUs get a similar treatment. Good stuff.

Monitors. My NEC FE950 finally came in yesterday. It’s gorgeous, and takes up the same amount of desk space that early 17-inchers took. Mine looks like it got pretty banged up either in manufacturing or shipping though, so I’ll have to arrange an RMA. I hate to be picky, but after spending $400 on a monitor, I don’t want something with a beat-up case. It could be a cosmetic flaw, or it could be an indication that this monitor had an incident with a forklift. I’m not taking that chance.

The vendor will advance me a replacement, which is good. I’ll probably opt for that. I hope I don’t get nailed for shipping, but I suspect I probably will. Lesson learned: Order from Staples.

As for the monitor, I can’t tell much difference between it and a Trinitron. I’m not sure if it’s using a Mitsubishi DiamondTron tube or something of NEC’s design (NEC and Mitsubishi merged their monitor operations last year), but whatever it is, I like it. Fabulous monitor, and great value for the money. As far as I can tell, it’s indistinguishable from the FP series other than the FP’s higher maximum resolution, which isn’t comfortable for the monitor’s size anyway. The only fault I can find with this FE is what appears to be an incident with a forklift or some other heavy machinery.

Once again I should emphasize this point: never ever scrimp on a monitor. It might be tempting to get a no-name monitor so you can afford more memory or a faster CPU, but memory and CPU prices drop much faster than monitor prices, and they always have. Plus, their useful life is much shorter. A good monitor can outlive two or three computers, so in the long run, you save money with a premium monitor.

Why was I stumbling over the name Miniscribe? I was recalling my first-ever building of a PC. I was salvaging parts from a 286 with a blown power supply. I couldn’t get a replacement power supply because it was a Samsung PC, largely proprietary. The power supply had cooked itself because a poorly placed IDE cable totally blocked its vents, so it never had proper cooling. This was 1993, my first year of college. The PC was owned by my fraternity. We went and bought a barebones 386DX-25–just a motherboard in a case–and went to work. The video card and floppy drives and I/O cards moved without a hitch. But the Miniscribe 40-meg IDE drive gave us problems. I couldn’t get it to work, and I doubted I had much future building PCs. I took it into the shop, and they couldn’t make any sense of it either. Their most experienced tech remembered that Miniscribe had been bought out by Maxtor, so he called a contact at Maxtor. The drive turned out to be an 8-bit IDE drive that worked on some 286s but would never work in a 386 or better. They took the drive in trade for a used 40-meg IDE drive using the more conventional 16-bit interface and transferred the data for us. We got a couple of years out of that PC, though it was never a speed demon. But it was functional and cheap.

Of course I recovered from those early stumbles. Within a couple months I was selling PCs, and a couple of months after that I was working as a tech myself.

The wages of spam. And finally, I saw yesterday that Nasdaq suspended trading of PSInet and the company is considering bankruptcy. Excellent. During its not-troubled-enough life, PSInet was frequently accused of operating a safe harbor for spammers, and back in the days when I bothered to try tracking down spammers, I traced large percentages of it to PSInet.

I do not like green eggs and spam. I do not like them, Sam I am.

Hopefully this is the start of a trend. I’ve seen estimates that the traffic generated by spammers increases the costs you and I pay for Internet service by a full $2 per month. That’s just the infrastructure costs our ISPs have to bear and pass on to us. And of course it’s a huge waste of time.

Secrets about hard drive recovery and wiping

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Recovery. I found this link while messing around: 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive. I’ve used some of these methods myself in the past. I imagine I’ll get to use more of them in the future.

Wiping. I needed a program yesterday to securely wipe out a hard drive. I was just going to low-level format it, but Western Digital’s drive suite, whatever it’s called, refused to do anything to the drive because it was returning an error code of 0207. The drive still worked, but according to my Web search, an 0207 means imminent failure. Hey, that’s why I needed to low-level the drive–we got a replacement for it and had to send this one back, but the drive was in an executive’s computer and probably had sensitive data on it.

Incidentally, if you’re getting an 0207 and you’re here because you want to know what to do about it, back up your data immediately and get it replaced under warranty. No, it’s not practical to fix it. If it’s out of warranty, I’m sorry. Sadly, it happens.

But I digress. How do you wipe the drive to ensure no one’s reading your sensitive data? I found some DOS freeware to do it at my usual sources, but one of them wouldn’t run under Win9x’s DOS, and the drive is too big to be recognized under 6.22. Another one wouldn’t handle drives bigger than 2 gig. Another one seemed to work, but seemed awfully fast.

Disk wiping isn’t a terribly complicated thing, so maybe I should just write a program myself to do it. It’s been forever since I programmed, and I do kind of enjoy doing that… once a year. Or every couple of years.

12/18/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Fixing a troublesome hard drive. Some time ago, one of my church’s staffers handed me a 10-gig Western Digital hard drive he couldn’t get working. “When you have time,” he said. I took it home, set it on my desk and promptly forgot about it, until yesterday, when I was helping someone out with setting jumpers a WD drive and I remembered I had a recent WD drive…

So I threw it in my Dual Celeron-366, which has sort of become my testbed system, to see what I could get from it. The system detected it fine. Good. Try booting… I find that EZ-Drive utility that everyone installs, even though with a plug-in UDMA card (and I know they use those) there’s no need for it. With a recent BIOS there shouldn’t be any need for it, unless you’ve got flaky BIOSes like me. But we won’t go there. But it doesn’t boot. Boot off a floppy, run FDISK, and I find a 9.7 GB non-DOS partition.

I call to verify whether the drive has any valuable data on it. None? Low-level format time.  I download Western Digital’s utility suite and run its quick test. It passes with flying colors. WD doesn’t offer a true low-level format, but the utilities can zero out the drive. Close enough. That’ll get rid of EZ-Drive.

And now, an editorial statement, if I may. Western Digital makes the most overrated hard drives in existance. I’ll daresay Western Digital hard drives are the most overrated piece of computer hardware, period. In my experience, I’ve found Quantums and Maxtors and IBMs to be faster, and I’ve had less trouble with them.

And speaking of EZ-Drive, do the manuals that come with new retail-packaged hard drives tell you you have to install it? I confess, I usually buy bare OEM drives since they’re cheaper, and the last couple of times I’ve bought retail kits for work, I did the stereotypical male thing and didn’t read the instructions. Seeing as I could have written the instructions, I didn’t see the need. Come to think of it, I almost never read the instructions unless I’m just totally out of my league (like when I was learning Linux). I learn more that way.

As I was writing this, the zeroing finished, no bad sectors, and I partitioned the drive and SYSed it. Good deal.

Optimizing Windows. Curtis Horn writes in that Amazon’s selling it (to him at least) for $7.50. No one’s making any money at that price, but hey. It might be Amazon experimenting with supply and demand again, who knows. But if you’ve been putting it off, now’s a good time to get it (assuming the price is still good and shipping doesn’t end up being 20 bucks). The link’s to the left, as always.

Computer Shopper UK. Chris Miller warns me that features don’t stay up there forever, so if you want the first installment of the “Optimise Your PC” series, I suggest you get over there quickly and print yourself a copy.

Sound card and hard drive troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sound card woes. Gatermann recently ran into some problems with sound cards forcing his Internet connection to drop. It had literally been six years since I’ve seen a problem like that before, but he kept running into it. Finally, it dawned on me: Try changing slots to force it to use a different interrupt. Therein was the silver bullet. The problem didn’t go away completely, but the culprit arose: the Sound Blaster 16 emulation. So I had him go into Device Manager and put the SB16 emulation on a different interrupt, and the problem went away.
It’s been forever since I’ve seen an honest-to-goodness interrupt conflict. This particular PC has every expansion slot filled with something or other, which is why he ran up against it. Keep that in mind: Just because we have PCI and plug and play these days, doesn’t mean you won’t ever see an interrupt conflict. On a well-expanded system, this ancient problem can occasionally rear its ugly head (while Microchannel required their cards to be capable of interrupt sharing; PCI only *recommends* it–so not every PCI device can share an interrupt, particularly if an ISA device has grabbed it. Alas, Microchannel fell victim to IBM’s greedy overly restrictive licensing terms and raw-dead-fish marketing, so as a result we have cheap PCs today but more headaches than we necessarily need. Speaking of raw-dead-fish marketing, I could mention that the Amiga’s Zorro bus had true plug and play and hundreds of interrupts from Day One in 1985, but nobody wants to hear that. Oops, I said it anyway.)

This problem used to happen all the time when people would put their modems on COM4 and a serial mouse on COM2 (or COM1 and 3). Since those ports by default shared interrupts with one another, you got goofy symptoms like your Internet connection dropping whenever you moved the mouse. People don’t configure their COM ports that way anymore, which is what’s made that problem so rare.

I think I finally got that G4 deployed. Wednesday it decided it didn’t want to shut down, and I had to reinstall the OS to fix it. Then on Thursday, it decided it didn’t want to recognize the mouse button anymore. I still don’t know what exactly I did to fix that–I booted off a spare MacOS 9 partition, ran a battery of disk repair tools and a defragmenter, and the problem went away. So while Mac users can snicker about interrupt problems, their machines aren’t exactly immune to weird problems either.

——-

From: “Gialluca, Tony”

question: RE Optimizing Windows and Temp files

Hi Mr. Farquhar,

In you book on page 112 you discuss placing temp files on a ramdisk. On this page you show an example where:

Set temp=ram disk letter:\temp Set tmp=ram disk letter:\temp

Shouldn’t you also include changing

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Volum eCaches\Temporary files\folder] to “ram disk letter:\temp” also ??

Per the description

([HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Volu meCaches\Temporary files\description]) says: “Programs sometimes store temporary information in a TEMP folder. Before a program closes, it usually deletes this information.\r\n\r\nYou can safely delete temporary files that have not been modified in over a week.” The only potential pitfall that I can think of is if windows or programs (say during installations) need this area to remain persistant through reboots, even though the files may be of
a temporary nature…

Your thoughts would be appreciated …

Respectfully,

Tony

———-

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know that registry key existed (nor did the book’s technical reviewers, evidently). That registry key, too, should be changed, yes. Thanks!

You are correct that if a program does a hard reboot (rather than just exiting to real mode and reloading Windows), you’ll lose the contents of the ramdisk and thus the temp folder. Fortunately, most programs seem to use the temp directory the way they’re supposed to–for temporary, fleeting things. Now if they’d just learn to clean up after themselves…

Of course, this also applies to my advice on creating a temp partition, on page 62.

Thanks much; this is very good information.

———-

From: “Gary M. Berg”

Subject: Maxtor hard drives

Since you’ve been talking about WD and Maxtor hard drives…

I heard rumors just after Win2K SP1 came out that the service pack had problems with machines with Maxtor hard drives. I’ve not been able to find much of anything else on this. What have you heard?

———-

That’s a new one to me. Maybe another reader has heard something, but it sure seems odd. I can’t imagine Microsoft didn’t test SP1 on the major drive manufactuers’ drives (Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital), and with Maxtor being one of the Big Two in retail….

Once I get my current big project off my back this weekend, I’m half-tempted to try it just to see. Unless someone already has…

Western Digital hard drives

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

Apparently it’s possible right now to get WD hard drives dirt cheap at certain warehouse clubs in St. Louis. How cheap? One person wrote in and told me $30 after rebates for a 10-gig drive. He asked me what I thought of the deal. It’s a great price, sure. My problem is, if I bought one, I’d be tempted to actually use it.
I’m very down on Western Digital. At my previous employer, we had about 600 PCs, with a variety of drives: a small number of Seagates, and roughly equal representation of IBM, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Quantum. We had maybe a drive a month go bad on us (ours was an aging fleet). I saw about as many Western Digitals go bad as all the rest–combined. I’ll buy an IBM, Maxtor, or Quantum drive without flinching, but I stay away from WD.

At my current employer, we have fewer problems (newer equipment), but I still see about as many WDs go down as anything else. Here we have mostly WD, Samsung, IBM, and Seagate drives, since that’s what Micron tends to use. Again, I see about as many WDs go as all the others. The last WD to go out happened when I took a half-dozen PCs to a convention in New Orleans. It was the middle of registration, with tired travelers all around, and the machine kept locking up. Finally, one time the drive just didn’t come back. I located a computer store, paid an outrageous price for a drive (unfortunately, another WD because it was all they had), and managed to get the drive in with only a couple hours’ downtime. But after failing me when I most needed dependability, I vowed to never buy another WD. Whenever I spec a drive for work, I get a Maxtor. I find them more reliable, faster, and they’re just as easy to find as WDs. And the CompUSA down the street always has a good deal on them.

eMachine upgrade advice

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

I got some mail some time back about eMachine upgrades that I never got around to posting. I’ll just summarize because that’s easier (it keeps me off the mouse).
First off, definitely look into a new hard drive. You can pick up a 7200-rpm drive of decent size (10-15 gig) for under $100 these days. I’ve had trouble getting Western Digital drives to work with older disk controllers, but no problems with Maxtors, and I get better performance and reliability from Maxtors anyway.

Next, eMachines tend to have problems with their power supplies. Get a replacement from PC Power & Cooling. It’s $45. Cheap insurance. And chances are the hard drive will perform better, since the PCP&C box will actually be supplying the wattage it claims to supply (which may or may not be true of the factory box). And remember: low-cost PCs have always had skimpy power supplies. Commodore and Atari made great low-cost computers 20 years ago, but they had horrendous power supplies. Given a properly made third-party power supply, a Commodore or Atari could run for 10-15 years or more (and often did).

Finally, get 128 megs of RAM in the system somehow. If you’ve got 32, just go buy a 128-meg stick. If you’ve got 64, get a 64-meg stick or, if you can afford it, get a 128.

Since eMachines have pretty wimpy integrated video, you might also look into a PCI video card with a Matrox, nVidia or 3Dfx chipset. Matrox gives slightly better 2D display quality, while nVidia and 3Dfx give better speed with 3D games. If you’re into gaming, definitely look into a new card.

That’s the strategy I follow with any upgrade. Get a modern disk in there, then get more memory, and replace anything else that seems underpowered. Do the disk first, then deal with memory, then possibly the video. Then, and only then, do I start looking at CPU upgrades. I’ve turned 200-MHz junkers into very useful machines again just by adding memory and a fast disk. The CPU isn’t the bottleneck in most systems.

Optimizing Windows startup

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

Mail. More Windows optimization questions.

From: ChiefZeke
Subject: Re: Items to consider
To: Dave Farquhar

Dave,

Would things be a bit faster if the user opted to start programs via the ‘RUN’ function of the Registry rather than via the Startup folder? I have seen this option mentioned in a couple of magazine articles.

Jerry

I imagine they would be slightly faster, since the file and path names, etc. would be stored in registry keys all in one place as opposed to individual icons, one per program, scattered all over the place.

You might also use run= strings in win.ini instead–I suspect that technique would be faster still, being a flat text file rather than a convoluted database.

Now, whether doing this would make any noticeable difference on a modern PC is another question. We may be talking shaving fractions of a second off your boot time. I imagine the difference would be more noticeable on marginal machines (though I’m not very eager to re-commission my 486SX/20 to try it). I just saw a 486DX4/75 laptop today that takes 1.5 minutes to boot Windows even without any items in any of the startup places and a fully optimized msdos.sys–a decked-out modern system similarly configured could boot in about 15 seconds. I can’t imagine your system needing much more than 20 seconds to go from POST to desktop (I’m not familiar with modern Western Digital drives like you have but I imagine their performance must be comparable to the Quantums and Maxtors I use).

This trick dates back to the Win3.1 days, and it was a really good idea way back then–the startup group actually consumed system resources, plus valuable entries in the Windows directory, so eliminating startup and placing items in win.ini could seriously improve a system’s performance back then. Today, Win9x has much better resource management, hard drives and CPUs are much faster, so you don’t hear about it as much anymore.

Very little else for today. I found my copy of the Lost Treasures of Infocom (both volumes) this week, including Bureaucracy, a text adventure I was never able to beat. I found a walk-through that got me past the part that had me stuck.

It’s a whole lot faster on my PC than it was on my Commodore 128 (which was the machine I originally bought it for, what, 11 years ago?). Amazing how much fun a 12K executable paired up with a 240K data file can provide… (And I’m running this on a dual-processor machine with 96 MB RAM and an 8.4-gig hard drive, both due to be upgraded? Something’s wrong here…)