Recent content by AlienTech

Mostly I think the protection circuit would short and you can remove the 2 chips for the 2 volatges 5V and 12V and get them working again. These would be the 2 large chips close to the power connector. Just clip the leads so they dont short out the power supply. You can check it with a meter...

NTFS will write data inside its own cluster if its small enough to fit so you dont waste space so that migtht be the descrepency. If I create a cluster with like 64 or 128K then files amller than those wont take up extra space on the drive with the file name and attributes etc.. And after 80%...

The drive was working fine and I have handled a lot of drives. So if any other condition I would know. And yes I know it rarely happens. But it did.. So for errors to develop in an arc shape would mean either the drive beign dropped and head scratching or the platter losing its sync marks caused...

I have stacked 100's of 3'5 and even 5 and 12 inch drives without noticing any problems. But the other day I moved 2 2'5 inch drives for cloning to use on a laptop and media device and since capacity was different I wanted to make sure they were the same physical size. So All I did was align...

I dont have a 4TB drive but everything in between upto 8TB.. But from what I understand the 4TB Seagates are now very reliable. They are often faster and use less power than the 5TB which are often based on the same electronics and chasis. I get the 5TB because for the same space you get a...

That is strange.. I have 2 relocated sectors which were caused by a power surge that fired the mother baord. And after checking the drive it started working again, total I have like almost 70TB and over 50% life left.. And it has been working fine for an year.. I think there might be other...

Seatools has low level format routines that remap bad sectors and the like. It takes a long time to scan each sector and wipe it though. Since the time it takes to wipe each sector is a constant, You have to use the dos version though. There are many programs that does wipes but seatools is the...

Yes since platter density is like 1TB per disk for 6 years.. My 2TB 2 platter seagate gives like 205MB.sec while my 5TB 5 platter Toshiba gives 225MB/sec.. So Toshiba must be using tracks more towards the edge than seagate. All higher density platters seems to be SMR. But I saw some info on...

Toshiba drives are noisier than others I have noticed, they are 7200 RPM and the fastest drives I seen.I was getting like 225MB speeds on them. Now there is no clicking but I have a seagate which does click when writing or when doing nothing at all and scares the hell out of me. Sometimes it...

I should also mention that you can not pull these drives out of their USB box and use them with a sata port to extract data if the USB interface dies. Seagate uses their own format which converts the Advanced 4K sectors into 512bytes then into 4K fat32 sectors. In essence you can have a 16TB...

Huge difference between WDC and Seagate 8TB drives. 10TB seagate drives use cross licensed WDC 8TB drives. Which has 8 platters of 1TB each in the WDC and 1/2TB shingled disks in the seagate. The 7200RPM seagate 8TB drives also have 8 platters and does not use shingled platters but the hitachi...

Does HGST report relocated sectors? I have a couple of HGST drives which even when abused dont show any bad sectors. Ofcourse I dont drop them to see if it actually works. But other drives with such abuse would get errors now and then. In fact the HGST drives never shows any errors for anything...

I have a seagate 2TB HD that now has like 32000 relocated sectors. For a while thee the number was going up by the hundreds every week but then it stopped. I used it for a year before swapping it out and just using it as a backup drive. Although nothing shows an error. The files on it seem...

I thought that was Microsoft.. Who before had the key inside as well.. But this is not encryption but actual code. That can download modules via the internet even if you have no OS installed. And I knew of the drive thing as I have done it for specific embedded systems and that someone was doing...

Is this a joke? I know they played with adding in code to execute hooks to install software that can monitor your system and they have this even in CPU's now. In fact this is not very hard to do at all.. The company found out one of the employees added such code and removed it. No connection was...