3 questions

I'm not really up to date on SSD's so I'll only field the question about the Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB hack. That article is a piece of crap. They're basically short-stroking the hard drive in the firmware, which is totally unnecessary. You can short-stroke the drive via partitioning and get just as much performance without f**king up the firmware. Even though they say they're not "flashing" the firmware, they're still editing the capacity the drive shows to a host, which to me is f**king up the firmware. If you want to short-stroke, just do it with partitions and be done with it.

Better yet - get an SSD.

Just my $0.02.
 
I agree that the article is not going to do much for you. As to the SSD question I would steer clear of them as a main drive for little bit. The more I read up on them the more I am convinced they need some work.
 
Yep, get an SSD like epimetheus said.

I disagree with Clint in that the more I read on SSD disks and the more I use the one I have, the more I feel that this is the SSD age and you are foolish not to be taking advantage of this technology (if you can afford to) at this time. Don't get me wrong, I put all my long term storage data on old fashioned hard disks and backup all my important data on DVD's or off-site. But for an OS drive, the drive that gets read the most; well I come from the camp where your OS should be installed to its own drive / partition in the first place so that when a problem occurs your data is untouched and all you have to do is format / reinstall the OS, a few security updates, driver installs later and youre back right where you were. BUT this is the dawn of the gen 2 drives from intel with TRIM and wear leveling. I have far more confidence in the SSD from intel than my 74GB WD Raptor that it replaced which I could swear was starting to click.

3rd question, that is the new way Windows (ultimate / business) partitions your drive during the OS install. You have no say in it if you preform a default install, and in that 100mb hidden partition it stashes the bitlocker environment, backup boot data, as well as system recovery files to ease recovery should you have a catastrophic failure (you used to have to put the OS disk in the drive and boot from the disk to access the recovery utilities).

It is possible to install windows 7 without it creating this hidden partition, to do so you must partition the drive BEFORE you start the windows 7 setup.

Edit: I also just read that DURING windows 7 setup partitioning, you can proceed as normal to the point where it creates your two partitions (system reserved 100mb and your OS partition) then DELETE the OS partition, so you now have system reserved 100MB and unallocated X space, then EXTEND the system reserved partition from 100 MB to whatever, format it and then install the OS to it.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top