Everything You Need to Know about Hybrid Drives

We live in the world where our digital stuff gets compact but their capabilities seems improved over a time as well as several advancements were made to make it superior in performance, have high usability and acceptance rate, deliver best value for money etc. Same case were applies to our conventional hard drives which now comes in variety of higher storage capacity and sizes which gets reduced to its lowest, merely 2.5 or 3.5 Inch for Ultrabook or tablet PC's. Many other improvements were made to deliver higher performance rate, reduced time for starting PC or opening applications etc.

One major change took place that is instead of using platter for storing your digital information, many modern drives (commonly known as solid state drives and hybrid hard drives) uses flash chip based storing area, that reduces duration to copy or move data, boot Windows or initialize heavy applications/games.

This all becomes possible only after creating the caching algorithm (an inbuilt mechanism comes in devices firmware) which generally stores information about recently used applications, boot history and registry details. So, the system won't need to look for those specific details and instead, they only initialize the caching files and fetch all the details which the system requires to boot and start Windows as well as immediately start all the startup applications. As results, you can boot system and initialize applications faster.

However, because of using flash chips and modern firmware, solid state drives costs were so high that it hardly meets the budget of normal home PC user such as normal 128 GB SSD costs you around $135 or so, whereas a 2 TB of traditional hard drive would be purchased in the same cost. So if you're a computer warrior and needs high storage capacity wishes to have high PC speed, you can use hybrid hard drives (combination of both SSD and traditional HDD) to store all your documents and digital media files in hard drive and install applications as well as Windows on SSD area. 

How Hybrid Drive exactly works?

The way hybrid drives operate is pretty simple and easy to understand. It has no spindle motor and platter at rest most of the time which saves lot of power and produce much less heat as compare to mechanical hard drives, and thus heavily increases its life. As hybrid drives uses flash memory's buffer (not volatile in nature) to store data, there is no risk of loosing your valuable data when power failure strikes or system suddenly restarts.

Every time you access data from the platter, some extra amount of data is fetched and stored in the buffer. This is done in hope of future data requirements and providing fast availability for further requests, thus ultimately improves booting speed and keeps it reducing for further boot ups. The system speed will get increased to 4 times higher than it was before.

What so special about Hybrid Drives?

Seagate, the giant hard drive manufacturers, in 2007 introduced first flash chip based hard drive created by physically integrating both SSD and HDD, entitled Solid State Hybrid hard drives (SSHD) a.k.a. Hybrid drives. Though, Seagate announced their first hybrid drives release for public use in later 2010 named Momentus XT 7200 RPM.

Later, Western Digital and SanDisk join the trend and collectively introduced their first hybrid hard drives in the summer 2013, most thinly hard drive in history, named WD Blue. As like Momentus hybrid drive from Seagate, WD Blue uses the same small amount of NAND flash memory to boost performance and gives the same capacity to store large files. It'll available in various sizes from 8 GB to 24 GB of NAND flash memory and somewhere around 500 GB of hard disk drive capacity.

However, instead of using caching through firmware as in Seagate Momentus, WD uses driver software which is more relevant to computer operating system and readily improves PC speed even further as time passes on. However, this would suppose to be more prone to fail even by a low level of corruption to computer system and thus, your whole system might becomes unbootable.

This way, you can increase speed of using your PC up to 4 times. PC World experts has performed worldbench7 test on the Seagate 750 GB hybrid drives and found it little faster than the mechanical hard drives though much slower than the original solid state drives.

Comparing capabilities of SSD, HDD & Hybrid Drives

Which one will best fits you or which is better among hard drive, solid state drives and hybrid drives? This is a quite typical question though, but fairly easy if you've a clear picture of what exactly you need either speed or performance or both.

Hard drive is a default storage device and used since decades ago.  It delivers the maximum storage capacity you need to keep you thousands of songs or even hundreds of movies. However, traditional storage technologies were failed to deliver the performance especially when the sizes filled with user data. Solid state devices were created to deliver the speed but limited in capacity and have high prices than hard drive. All the said devices are limited somewhere and won't provide all the benefits that is speed, performance and capacity.

To overcome these challenges, Seagate in conjunction with Samsung introduced the concept of hybrid drives by combining all the benefits of solid state drives and hard disk drives. This way, user will get the desired storage capacity and have enough capability to deliver the desired speed. Hybrid drives were specially created to overcome with failing or damaging problems and to be considered as very less frequent in dying or giving data loss phases throughout their life.

This article clearly explains points about the available high capacitive storage media's for current and upcoming generation. You can take joys of high speed environment while giving extra layer of protection to your highly sensitive data with these mightiest storage devices.

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Speeding up an old Mac with hard drive defragmentation

The speed up Mac tool cleans up clutter, unwanted applications, & junk data from the boot/volumes to fasten a sluggish Mac. But, this is not the case always as plenty of Apple threads, Mac forums & blogs are found overflowing with the queries of painful slow Mac OS X even after getting the hard drive cleaned with the best of speed up Mac utility. So, shall we conclude that the utility which we ran to clean the Mac is just an under-achiever? To some cases you may trust this fact but other cases of slow Mac have included a badly fragmented OS X hard drive. The old Apple machines (their hard drives) had been through infinite numbers of data 'read' and 'write' processes. Such read/write operations done on daily basis for years and so on causes the data to scatter all over the places on the Mac hard drive. This dissipated data then makes the 'head' of the hard drive to jump all those locations to return the required information and execute user’s request.

Trust this, abrupt behavior of the 'head' component accumulates more risks to the hard drives health and ascertains a possible hard drive failure.

Frequent 'Read/Write' also causes the creation of slack spaces on hard drive. Slacks are the free space that gets located between different file locations. These free spaces (slacks) remains unused by the OS to save any sort of information or files, resulting in poor Mac performance. With the passage of time & hard drive usage, more & more slacks are created almost making the hard drive go out of space even though it has free space available in the form of slacks. The treatment of slacks might not required to defrag the entire hard drive, but yes it has to be optimized with the help of a third party tool. 

If there is an external hard drive available then user don't require to get a defrag cum optimize utility to remove fragments & slacks. Simply copy the entire Mac hard drive data to the external hard drive. Format/Erase the Mac hard drive or volumes. Now copy back the data from external hard drive to original Macintosh HD. This process makes the files go back and occupy the sequentially free available space & defragmenting the entire drives content.

Else, if user don't have an external HD & no further plans to buy one then choosing a defrag Mac software is best suited and will also be a cheap affair in comparison to buying an external HD.

Some measures one must apply pre & post defragmentation:

1. Use uninterrupted power supply so that no sudden event can disrupt the defragmentation process. Power supply to the desktop, notebook Macs should be up to the mark. A power interrupt can shut down the Mac & invite a bigger problem in the name of data loss while defragging the drive.


2. Though hard drive defragmentation is a normal process but one must appropriately back up everything or at least the most needed data. Software vendors will assure to scan a healthy hard drive but in case of presence of bad sectors or other hard drive issues no one can make a guarantee. Due to presence of any hard drive issue the defrag utility may not be able to do the complete scan of the drive resulting in closing the process in mid-way.


3. If no circumstances whatsoever, never attempt to defrag a SSD connected with the Mac. In any case you proceed with defragmentation; it will shorten the life span of the solid state drive.


4. Without a bootable DVD of the OS X, you won't be able to defrag the system start-up volume. 

Make sure your Mac doesn't have a fragmented hard drive or volumes which is causing miserable experience with your Mac system. In case you have then do arrange your resource (an external HD or a Mac defrag tool, which one is available) to kill the fragments and add hard drives life to many more years. 

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Causes, Fixes & Prevention of Bad Sectors in Your Hard Drive?

A sector in a hard drive platter is a small cluster or area where actual data is stored. Normal hard drive can have from 1 to 6 platters and a single platter can have over millions of sectors. Including platter, any hard drive will also have heads, spindle motor, firmware, PCB etc. responsible for its smooth functioning. However, being an electronic device, hard drive may have one or more failing mechanical equipments which gives birth to data inaccessibility, permanent hard drive failure or system startup failure etc. After which, one may not able to retrieve the stored content as well as permanently looses accessibility to their system.

Bad sectors on the hard drive platter could be developed throughout its lifespan which may make OS unable to read or write information on that particular section. Moreover, bad sector would stress the read/write head of hard drive and causes subsequent delays in accessing the memory/information. As a result, hard drive will start failing, throwing system freezes or sometime gives black or blue screen of death (BSOD).

What causes bad sectors?

Sector is usually a block of information stored on the hard disk and having standard size of 512 bytes. These sectors can easily become bad due to imperfections of this real world. Though, you can found some most common causes which contributes heavily towards building bad sectors and blocks on the hard drive platter,

1. System infected with Virus / Trojan / Malware â€" Any malicious computer program can physically harm your computer and damage surfaces of the platter or inject wrong information on the sector. However, Some DOS attacks were used to misguide operating system to treat sector as bad even if they weren't.
2. Abnormal Shutdown: Not properly shutting down the PC may results in wrong positioning of read/write head which tends to move around the platters when system is running. Sometime, sudden system shutdown due to power failure could make platters to get in contact with the read/write arm and damage that area called sectors.
3. Power Surge: Improper power supply or not using the reliable electricity medium causes hard drive equipments to be overheated sometime and thus, damages the magnetic area around the hard drive platter.
4. Aging Equipments: Being an electronic device, hard drive equipments may start wearing out and bad sectors were created over time. As this process seems bit natural and depends on the overall hard drive age, these cases are least considered but worth checking.
5. Faulty Heads: Heads plays crucial role in retrieving or storing information on/from the platter. It keeps rotating over platter without making contacts to the platter but when it does, produces bad sectors. Shaking or moving hard drive while any ongoing operation could make the head to get in contact with the platter and again, produces bad sectors.
6. Manufacturer faults: Bad supplier or low quality manufacturer could deliver hard drive with poor quality equipments which reduces overall lifespan of your hard drive. Bad sectors were developed quite frequently on hard drive with bad equipments. Most often, bad sectors were already created when the drive is first manufactured.

Once the bad sector is developed, it starts damaging nearby sectors and soon make your whole hard drive with thousands of bad sectors. You can use various hard disk checker utility like S.M.A.R.T. To check hard drive for bad sectors as well as other crucial parameters like spin rotation, heat, equipments status and many more.

Type of Bad Sectors
There are usually two types of bad sectors took place in modern as well as traditional hard drives:

Hard or Mechanical or Physical are the one caused by heads after coming in contact with platter surface of the hard drive. For ex, if the computer is bumped or dropped while reading/writing data from/to the disk would make hard drive heads to crash or damage the area. Extreme heat, faulty heads, dust or other ageing equipments could also contributes heavily towards hard bad sectors.

Once the hard bad sectors is created, it can only be prevented, neither removed or reformed. Best bet is copy/save all your important stuff into another hard drive and replace the drive as soon as possible to stay away from various catastrophic data loss situations.

Though, if your hard drive fails due to hard bad sectors and you've lost any or all your important data, using data recovery services would be the last hope. Highly cleaned room with skilled equipments where special treatments were used to carefully open hard drive equipments and recover data from the storage area.

Soft or logical bad sectors are less drastic and delivers minimum harm to your PC or the stored data. It is created when an error correction code of a sector can't verify the content of the same sector due to virus/threats injection on the BIOS section, improper system shutdown or directory structure corruption.    

Soft bad sectors can be repaired by using low level formatting (quick format) or disk check/repair tools which fills zero's in all the soft bad sectors. Disk wiping process is pretty effective and completely removes soft bad sectors around the hard drive, however you might permanently lose the stored data and data recovery isn't possible even by using professional recovery program. 

How to repair bad sectors?
There are choices to repair bad sectors by using either inbuilt utility or software provided from third party. As there is no guarantee of repairing bad sectors, you can still try any of the options mentioned below.

Using Inbuilt Utility
Various inbuilt check disk utility is available to check hard drive health status or any running issues and repair them immediately. Microsoft provided this utility for free of cost with Windows to help troubleshoot file system errors, scan and fix bad sectors found around the hard drive.

                                           

Running check disk utility is completely safe and doesn't harm overall functioning of your PC. As check disk utility will perform scan and recovery concurrently, this process might takes time little longer than usual.

Here's how you can start check disk utility in your PC:

1. Double click on My Computer  from the desktop or press 'window button + 'E'.
2. Right click on the desired drive you want to check and choose properties. Note:You can't check and repair all the drive at once.
3. From the opened properties window, select Tools tab and click on Check Now.
4. Check disk box will open containing options like Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Mark both the options or can leave the first one only if you wants to check only hard drive for bad sectors and repair it.
5. Click on Start to initiate check disk operation.
6. Enter administrator password if requested and click OK.
7. Wait for sometime and then restart PC once the operation is completed successfully.

Using third party software

Spinrite is a professional hard disk check and repair utility suitable for all the latest Windows operating system and works effectively on FAT, NTFS and Linux formatted volume. The software is self explanatory and requires simple steps to boot from DOS environment and repair almost any kind of bad sectors.

            

Note: Spinrite could costs your around $ 89 USD.

Preventing bad sectors in future

Below are the precautions steps you could take to avoid bad sectors from being developed around your hard drive,

1. Use inbuilt disk defragmenter utility to stabilize operations and reduces stress from heads. Run this utility at least once or twice in a month or schedule it to run periodically. It also helps in managing disk spaces and thus, reducing overall burden from the heads.
2. Always use, professional and recommend anti virus software to keep your system clean and malware free.
3. Avoid bumping or throwing during ongoing operations.
4. Use system in cooled and dust free environment.
5. Use standard cables or connecting media for longer durability.
6. Use proper shutdown or standard way to turn your system off. Use UPS or similar power backup devices to make sure that you always have enough time to safely shutdown your PC when the power is absent.
7. Running OS repair utility could also shorten the occurrences of bad sectors around the hard drive.

Have you found bad sectors in your hard drive or planning to check, what utility you're using or the way you'll recommend to repair bad sectors? Don't forget sounds all this using the comment form below.

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Learn about OS X formats and NTFS compatibility for Macs

As a Mac user you must agree how crucial it is to get the hard drive formatted under correct format to run the Macintosh HD flawlessly on OS X. The disk utility gives us huge amount of authority to erase/format/partition a hard drive as per our need. The day a Mac user brings in a new external hard drive the first job is to get it formatted with the help of disk utility. If the hard drive is meant to be used only for Macs then formatting the drive under various Mac default format is most suited. Let us quickly look at those default formats included in the Disk Utility's Partition tab.  

• Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

• Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)

• Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive Journaled)

• Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive Journaled, Encrypted)

ExFAT

Now an obvious question arises, which format is best suited for a hard drive. A new Mac user will certainly fall into confusion which one to select. So, let's make thing easy by understanding each of them one-by-one.

1. Mac OS Extended (Journaled): - Do you know, all Mac's hard drives comes pre-formatted with Journaled and they exclusively are used only for Macs. So, please forget if you want to read Ex-FAT with this format. It won't. 


2. Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted): - The encrypted part included in this format tightens up the security of the hard drive & its data from an unauthorized user. It protects the hard drive by putting a password which is required to mount it every time. One must always remember this password to access the drive easily. If password is forgotten then the hard drive will remain in lock mode depriving you of all the data inside it. Though using a Mac data recovery tool will let you scan the hard drive (an unmounted drive) & recover all your files. This kind of format is mostly used by professionals who don’t compromise with their data & drive access with others.


3. Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive Journaled): - This format is least recommended for a user to format his/her hard drive. The reason behind this is, a normal Journaled format will analyze two files like 'xyz.jpg' and 'Xyz.jpg' present in the same folder as same. On the other hand, Case-Sensitive format will view both the files as different as the alphabets used to name the file are in lower & upper case respectively. This would result in many applications to a fail launch, hence not recommended to use.


4. FAT: - Now, this traditional format is used to format a hard drive which would make it run on both a Mac and PC. You can find numerous articles on how to format a hard drive for Mac & PC stating to use the FAT format. The only limitation with FAT is it won't allow a file to save which is larger than size 4GB. To overcome FAT limitations, Ex-fat is recommended which operates faster and does not limit to 4 GB limitations.


5. NTFS: - This format is not at all supported by a Mac, neither will you find in the menu. But, yes with the help of a professional non-Apple tool, user can run to read the NTFS formatted hard drive.

Why Macs don't care about NTFS file systems?

When you switch from a PC to Mac then this question strikes you at several interval trying to find out how you can run your PC hard drive formatted with NTFS on Mac OS X? To be candid, there is no inbuilt OS X mechanism available in Mac to run a hard drive formatted with New Technology File Systems. If you connect a NTFS formatted hard drive to Mac then it will show up but only in read-mode, OS X Mac will not write a piece of data onto it. Probably, you could have wished if both Apple and Microsoft have some common shared platform for their respective operating systems providing full opportunity to access applications within different file systems (say NTFS and HFS). Unfortunately both Macs and PCs are two different sides of the coin.

While Microsoft has licensed NTFS & no one else can use it for development of their OSs. Similarly, HFS+ is licensed by Apple and without the proper ownership of any of the technology it would certainly not be possible to work on it for both the computer giants.

Facts to know about NTFS on Macs?

• With bootcamp assistant, the Mac partition is formatted with the MS-DOS (FAT) file system and not with NTFS. Windows OS on Mac access only its drive (partition) and not the OS X.

• NTFS on Mac exists but only in extremely limited features. A Mac is able to read a NTFS formatted hard drive but write feature is unavailable to this date. Apple restricted itself to read mode although many speculated that write version to NTFS drive would be made in upcoming versions of the OS X. But this has never been officially announced or done by Apple Inc.

However, it did happened, NTFS was about to be officially a part of OS X Snow Leopard but again Apple decided to let off this feature. To my surprise, users can still access to the NTFS read-write facility without the help of any third party utility like NTFS 3G. This can be done by terminal commands. To go through the commands visit â€" MacForum Threads.

Tuxera for Mac is one such utility software that can write to a NTFS formatted hard drive device in the very simplest form. Downloading and installing this app is as simple as any other utility. The .PKG file is installed on your hard drive and it refreshes itself to locate mounted NTFS media devices. To launch the application, go to System Preferences and click on the Tuxera icon. Here is it's first screenshot

• By default these four options will be already selected. You can also Disable this app by clicking the Disable button. The GUI is made quite user friendly. For the less technical users, the first option which is “Enable File System Caching”, implies that Window OS by default saves the data that is read and write to-from a disk. Same would be done here in Mac too. By this option, the read-write operations will access the caches data from the OS X rather than from the disk.

• This option will enable user to view all mounted NTFS hard drives as well as devices.

Pros of this app â€" Genuine application to read/write a NTFS disk on Mac. Very user friendly, not at all confusing or technical. Affordable choice over Parallel for Macs.

Cons of this app â€" This useful software is available for 15 days free download period and cost $15 to use it for life-long.

Alternative app for Tuxera is NTFS 3G which costs free. But don't install and use both the apps simultaneously as both of them could collide.

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