How to screwup your HDD in three easy steps

[xFROSTx]

i agree with you completely. the only thing that doesnt make sense is why they arent selling drives at full capacity... if 200gb sata drives can store 500gb of data, why the heck arent they selling 500gb drives for ridiculous amounts of $$$? sure they wouldnt be the top seller, but each and every one they sold would be major profit if it is indeed the same product as the 200gb drive. there HAS to be some type of catch, i am having serious trouble swallowing this.

This is going out to all the pople that are commenting on this making similar comments about this.


This is basic economics here. It is cheaper for a company for a company to make one or two product lines and build on them, rather than having 4. For those of you that remember we saw this before with the geforce ti200 and ti500's. I will use PNY as an example. PNY would make one model, the geforece ti500. Now, not everyone wants a geforece ti500, many people were happy with just a ti200. Insted of reworking the product a simple firmware hack would reduce the core and memory clocks as well as disabling 4 of the 8 piplelines. You can't saturate a market with only one product line. For the people that want the best they can charge a premium on it which they did for the ti500. Now for the majority of users a ti200 was all they need. They don't see a reason to shell out 400 for a new video card, so PNY releases the ti200 which was identical to the ti550 except for the firmware that crippled it slightly and charged 250 for it. Its all about market saturation and demand vs. supply. I am using this example because I know this is true tight here, I bought a PNY ti200 and used a firmware hack and made it into a gefore ti500. You people all assume that if a company charges 500 for a video card that it cost them 450 give or take to make it. This is not true, it may very well only cost them 200 to make that 500 dollar vido card. They will get a premium price out of those who are willing to shell out for it and they will make a smaller profit from everyone else. The same ideas can be applied to hard drive manufactures. They make a bunch of 80 gig drives and just lock most of them down to 40 gigs. Now I'm not saying everyone does this, they do whatever will yeild them the most money, wether its creating a different product or crippling a faster product. I believe that what we are seeign here is just a glitch and not unlockign hidden space. My point is that some companies do do this and it's not just soem "conspiriacy theory"

 

[pArTy]

I can't make a definitive argument without a greater understanding of how hard drive technology is developed, but the following is based on the assumption that hard drive manufacturers need only develop one technology, which they can then apply to multiple drive models (different capacities).

A hard drive manufacturer doesn't necessarily have to design every drive model from the ground up just because it's a different capacity, does it? For example, once WD has the technology to create a 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB drive, then it follows that they'll easily be able to create a 40GB, 60GB, 80GB and 100GB variation of those drives without having to completely design the thing from the ground up, correct? If that's true, why would they manufacture 80GB drives, then "disable" 40 gigs and market it as a 40GB drive? Their profit margins would be far lower than if they just manufacturered a regular 40 gig drive.

Again, that's based on my limited comprehension of the hard drive manufacturing process. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Actualy your wrong. They only make lower amounts of hard drives because no1 will buy a single hard drive thats 2 TBs and cost 2000$. My step dad works for microsoft and knows people that test hardware configuration. They get 2 gigs of ram on a single stick. They also get special motherboards all the time. The only problem why they dont release these to the public is because it cost so much to buy and no1 would buy it.

EDITED: Also what happend to all the people that were going to "test" this. They never posted back.

 

[Talonz]

This is going out to all the pople that are commenting on this making similar comments about this.


This is basic economics here. It is cheaper for a company for a company to make one or two product lines and build on them, rather than having 4. For those of you that remember we saw this before with the geforce ti200 and ti500's. I will use PNY as an example. PNY would make one model, the geforece ti500. Now, not everyone wants a geforece ti500, many people were happy with just a ti200. Insted of reworking the product a simple firmware hack would reduce the core and memory clocks as well as disabling 4 of the 8 piplelines. You can't saturate a market with only one product line. For the people that want the best they can charge a premium on it which they did for the ti500. Now for the majority of users a ti200 was all they need. They don't see a reason to shell out 400 for a new video card, so PNY releases the ti200 which was identical to the ti550 except for the firmware that crippled it slightly and charged 250 for it. Its all about market saturation and demand vs. supply. I am using this example because I know this is true tight here, I bought a PNY ti200 and used a firmware hack and made it into a gefore ti500. You people all assume that if a company charges 500 for a video card that it cost them 450 give or take to make it. This is not true, it may very well only cost them 200 to make that 500 dollar vido card. They will get a premium price out of those who are willing to shell out for it and they will make a smaller profit from everyone else. The same ideas can be applied to hard drive manufactures. They make a bunch of 80 gig drives and just lock most of them down to 40 gigs. Now I'm not saying everyone does this, they do whatever will yeild them the most money, wether its creating a different product or crippling a faster product. I believe that what we are seeign here is just a glitch and not unlockign hidden space. My point is that some companies do do this and it's not just soem "conspiriacy theory"

Your point is wrong in this case, simply because binned cores such as processors and GPUs can exceed spec because they are physically the same. It costs the same to make a ti200 core as it does a ti500 to the manufacturer (before the process of binning). Hard drive platters are delicate, not exactly cheap to manufacture. Since hard drive platters and heads determine the physical capabilities, the hard drive companies will limit their products this way. Since cpu/gpu companies bin their products from the exact same line, they have no way of reducing costs for their lower end. Simple economics.

 

[xFROSTx]

Your point is wrong in this case, simply because binned cores such as processors and GPUs can exceed spec because they are physically the same. It costs the same to make a ti200 core as it does a ti500 to the manufacturer (before the process of binning). Hard drive platters are delicate, not exactly cheap to manufacture. Since hard drive platters and heads determine the physical capabilities, the hard drive companies will limit their products this way. Since cpu/gpu companies bin their products from the exact same line, they have no way of reducing costs for their lower end. Simple economics.

Did you not read the line

"Now I'm not saying everyone does this, they do whatever will yeild them the most money, wether its creating a different product or crippling a faster product."

In the case of a hard drive it is then cheaper to make a whole new product. I am not an expert on the ways to make a hard drive. What I was saying is that crippling products DOES happen, and I was trying to explain why companies do this to the people that were asking. Reading comprehension is your friend.

 

[Ice Czar]

Actualy your wrong. They only make lower amounts of hard drives because no1 will buy a single hard drive thats 2 TBs and cost 2000$. My step dad works for microsoft and knows people that test hardware configuration. They get 2 gigs of ram on a single stick. They also get special motherboards all the time. The only problem why they dont release these to the public is because it cost so much to buy and no1 would buy it.

EDITED: Also what happend to all the people that were going to "test" this. They never posted back.

the reason is its bullshit
and you can buy a 2GB stick of RAM from any major manufacturer
of course youd need a board that supports registered and ECC RAM
(and generally one that supports more than 4GB otherwise why pay the $$$)
you rarely if ever see unbuffered 2GB sticks

my board will support 16GB of RAM
its putting it to use thats the trick and why the general public doesnt employ it
unless they have a server farm in the basement that is
you also need an OS that can employ more than 4GB of RAM

 

[MeanieMan]

Hey guys, I was reading your interesting posts and talked to a friend of mine about the issue. He's a hardware engineer and he tells me that the hard drive manufacturer's put a cap on the hard drives to save money.

You may wonder how this may save them money. Well, think about it like this...if each hard drive a company produced needed to be made with different a capacity, the company would need about 10 different production lines for each different disk capacity. Instead, they produce all the disks at maximum capacity and simply set a cap on the lower model disks. This way, they only need one production line for 10 different models.

Apparently you guys have unlocked this secret and so you can now buy the lowest model in a series of hard drives and still get the capacity of the highest model.

You sir will forever in my books be titled a grave digger. This thread was dead, buried, dug up, killed again....THEN you dug it up again.

 

[Ice Czar]

You sir will forever in my books be titled a grave digger. This thread was dead, buried, dug up, killed again....THEN you dug it up again.

agreed this is a dead subject
"ghost" space that doesnt really exist

there are spare replacement sectors in all drives (unless they use them up)
and there are destroked drives
but there isnt double the space on a HDD to be had with this hack

 

[pArTy]

the reason is its bullshit
and you can buy a 2GB stick of RAM from any major manufacturer
of course youd need a board that supports registered and ECC RAM
(and generally one that supports more than 4GB otherwise why pay the $$$)
you rarely if ever see unbuffered 2GB sticks

my board will support 16GB of RAM
its putting it to use thats the trick and why the general public doesnt employ it
unless they have a server farm in the basement that is
you also need an OS that can employ more than 4GB of RAM

I have never ever seen a single stick of 2 gig ram.

 

[Cryptic]

Hmm, when I first heard of this, my initial thoughts were it's a bug in the partition creation. What I mean is that I think that the partitions are being created, unaware of eachother and are "crosslinked" if you like.

My other explanation is this. We know that data can be written over (up to 11 times) and recovered. Well I know thats like the extreme data recovery. But what if one partition gets filled (full true disk capacity) and then you start to fill the other partition, I'm thinking that the data is being overwritten, but is still readable/recoverable since it's only being overwritten once or twice.

I find it hard to believe that by playing with partitions you can double your storage. Storage depends of physical capabilities different from processors and overclocking. I could understand if the spindle speed was reduced perhaps, or if the firmware controlled the head tighter.

I'm not totally up on hard drive physics, and I'll probably have to eat humble pie lol, but I don't see how this is safely possible

So does that mean if you write zeros to your drive just once its still recoverable untill you write zeros to your drive ten more times?

 

[Ice Czar]

I have never ever seen a single stick of 2 gig ram.

Pretty much just means you dont play with highend servers or workstations
Micron\Crucial $800 2GB PC2700
Corsair 2GB PC2700
Kingston $750 2GB PC2100
all are Registered and ECC
most boards wont support over 4GB (and they have 4 DIMM slots) most OS's cant use more than 4GB (XP64bit, W2003 server and many Linux OSs do), doubling up 2GB in one slot is as you can see very expensive, but actually putting it to use even more so

I have a single GB stick for each of the Channels for each processor
and Im hard pressed to employ it even with 3D animation
many aps are limited to a 2GB ceiling such as Photoshop

If I was made of money I could buy 8 sticks of 2GB RAM today
but about the only use wiould be for a multiuser environment server or a specially coded application that could employ it (which you do find in some scientific aps, rendering engines ect)

 

[Ice Czar]

So does that mean if you write zeros to your drive just once its still recoverable untill you write zeros to your drive ten more times?

if your made of money...yes
that is forensic recovery, where the magenetic strength of the individual bits is compared to determine their prior states and then utilizing alot of time, some very powerful cumputing power and $$$$$$$$, its recompiled. To do that you bust open the drive in a lab and remove the platters for examination

and even ten passes with multiple patterns doesnt gurantee that it cant be recovered
but you have too really piss someone off to make them want to recover that data
like the NAS

 

[LoneWolf]

You mean the NSA, Czar? I've never pissed off a Network Attached Storage device before.

As for this thread, I can't believe it was revived. Several major sites debunked this whole thing at least a year ago. You're risking your data by doing what the first post suggested; every site that I know of that tried it (and seriously tested afterwards by reading/writing rather than just showing reports by the OS) screwed up some data, usually through finding out that partitions overlapped. I don't think anyone managed to unlock the spare sector map of a drive in the process, but even if they did, the moment you got a bad sector on your disk, you'd be SOL as there'd be no sectors to remap and repair with.

Somebody ought to lock this thread so it will die and nobody will try this again. A few people trashed their data in the process, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a small risk of physical damage to your disk by doing this.

 

[insanarchist]

...He was never sure if we were being serious or just making fun of him, so he'd get frustrated trying to explain to us that you can't overclock a mouse. Good times...

Nuts to that! Usb mouse, maybe not, but I recall overclocking my ps/2 port a couple hz in order to make my mouse respond better! Not sure if it worked, but the f*cker was overclocked; that's all that matters.



edit: hah! http://www.tweak3d.net/tweak/mouse/2.shtml

 

[Ice Czar]

You mean the NSA, Czar? I've never pissed off a Network Attached Storage device before.

yes I did mean NSA
but I have pissed off a NAS

indeed its time to put this one to bed, locked to avoid the potential someone might actually take it seriously
with a title edit thrown in for good measure