Nearline Festplatten

Nearline-Festplatten für den Dauerbetrieb
Mehr Zuverlässigkeit gibt es erst mit Nearline-Festplatten, also Desktop-Laufwerken, die durch Änderungen in der Firmware und Hardware fit für den 24/7-Einsatz gemacht wurden. Bei solchen Laufwerken spielen die bei Desktop-Festplatten typischen Kaufkriterien wie Übertragungsgeschwindigkeit und Preis pro GB weiterhin eine wichtige Rolle, ebenso relevant sind nun aber auch Tugenden wie eine hohe Robustheit, eine geringe Wärmeentwicklung sowie ein niedriger Stromverbrauch. Nearline-Laufwerke setzen auf eine widerstandsfähigere und damit qualitativ höherwertige Mechanik als ihre Desktop-Kollegen und müssen außerdem mit den höheren thermischen Belastungen fertig werden, die während der wesentlich längeren Laufzeit entstehen. Für die Hersteller bedeutet das eine geringere Fertigungstoleranz und ausführlichere Belastungstests, alles in allem ein Mehraufwand, den sie preislich an den Endkunden weiterreichen. In den meisten Fällen dürfen sie sich dann aber auch über eine gegenüber den Standardmodellen höheren Garantiezeit freuen.
Für Enterprise- und Nearline-Storage-Aufgaben typische Laufwerksserien wie Hitachi Ultrastar, Seagate Constellation und Western Digital RE4 besitzen nicht selten bis zu 5 Platter und arbeiten mit 7.200 U/Min oder noch höheren Drehzahlen. Weil die Laufwerke für den Einsatz im Server-Rack mit zahlreichen anderen Festplatten ausgelegt sind, verwenden die genannten Serien aller drei Hersteller auch einen RV-Sensor (Rotational Vibration), der die Positionierung der Schreib-/Leseköpfe optimiert und damit verhindert, dass sich die Zugriffszeit durch Vibrationen benachbarter Laufwerke erhöht. Während Desktop-Festplatten einen typischen Power-On-Hours-Wert von 2400 Stunden pro Jahr erreichen (zum Beispiel die Seagate Barracuda 7200.14), sind es bei Nearline-Laufwerken bis zu 8760 Stunden pro Jahr, was umgerechnet einem 24/7-Betrieb entspricht.
NAS statt Desktop oder Nearline: WD Red
Die Western Digital Red ordnet sich genau zwischen solchen Festplatten ein, die für Desktop-spezifische Anforderungen ausgelegt sind, und den Nearline-Festplatten, die eher an Server-Aufgaben ausrichtet sind. Damit sitzt das Laufwerk zwischen den Stühlen, denn der Hersteller ordnet seine neue Festplatten-Modellreihe weder dem einen noch dem anderen Einsatzgebiet zu. WD visiert explizit eine dritte Klientel an, nämlich eine NAS-Kundschaft, die kein Profi-NAS im 19-Zoll-Server-Rack oder ähnlicher Größenordnung betreibt, sondern einen kleinen Netzwerkspeicher in den eigenen vier Wänden oder in einer Büroumgebung einsetzen will.
Herausgekommen ist ein Laufwerk, das sich in puncto Ausstattung aus beiden Lagern munter bedient. Seine Drehzahl von 5.400 U/Min spricht eher für ein Mainstreamlaufwerk, der 24/7-Betrieb und andere Enterprise-typische Merkmale dagegen für Nearline-Festplatten. Laut Western Digital ist diese Mischung aber ideal für kleinere Netzwerk-Speicher aus dem Heim- und SOHO-Bereich. Die WD Red ist in Kapazitäten von 1 TB, 2 TB und 3 TB erhältlich – die beiden größeren Ausgaben des SATA-6-Gb/s-Laufwerks haben wir im Testlabor unter die Lupe genommen.

Drive Manager

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If you have lots of drive letters of different types of drives, such as mapped network drives, thumb drive (USB memory sticks), smart media and compact flash, CD-ROM and DVD then this utility is perfect to help you manage them.
Using Drive Manager to identifying which drive is which.
Drive Manager helps you easily identify drives which are of the same type. As well as displaying the volume label it also displays vendor information so that multiply CD/DVD drives and removable drives such as USB thumb drives can be differentiated by their manufacturers name, version and revision date. Also the serial number can be seen as a unique ID for each drives.

ATA Passwords and Firmware Area

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Almost all laptops and some modern desktop computers have the ability to lock a hard disk drive with an ATA password so that hard drive remains inaccessible until correct password is entered. Manufacturers call this technology different ways, for example, HP calls it DriveLock, but it is all the same. The password is stored inside of the hard drive's Firmware Area (on the surface). Since the password is stored on the surface, it cannot be removed by swapping circuit boards. And, since the Firmware Area cannot be read with any widely available software, the password cannot be easily read or removed.

Repair Station has the ability to access the Firmware Area and reset the password, thus making your hard drive unlocked. Unlocking process is done automatically and takes just a few minutes.

Since Repair Station does not alter partitions or file systems, it is absolutely safe to your data.

What is Firmware Area

Firmware Area (or System Area) is a reserved space dedicated to hard drive's own needs, such as: storing SMART logs, defect reallocation tables, program code (overlays) and so on. Flash EEPROM chip contains only a little part of the Firmware; its primary role is to spin up the spindle and unpark heads so that the drive can read the rest of the firmware from surface.

Firmware Area is inaccessible with generic ATA commands; it cannot be read or written with any software since the fact that the protocol is vendor-unique, and hard drive vendors do not disclose any information about their hard drive Firmware area structure or even about how to access it. We put more than four years of research and development into Repair Station, and we've made it able to access and recover the Firmware area.

Firmware Area failures

More than half of hard disk drive failures are caused by firmware area damage. Just a little damage is enough to render a hard drive totally unusable. In such cases hard drive becomes inaccessible and sometimes can completely disappear from the system.

For example, a hard drive can lose its parameters such as device model number and capacity. When it happens, there is no access to partitions and files. In most cases the problem is caused by firmware area damage and can be fixed with Repair Station.

Repair Station reads the Firmware Area, extracts and analyzes all firmware structures, rebuilds damaged parts and writes the firmware back to the drive. The process is absolutely safe to the data (partitions and files) and takes no more than 20 minutes.

If you have an issue with a hard drive, please feel free to download Repair Station and run diagnostics (which is free). Repair Station diagnoses the Firmware Area and hard drive mechanics and displays a short summary of hard drive's health.

hddguru Low-Level-Format-Tool & more

Thank you very much, Dimitry!
Firmware
files.hddguru.com/index.php 
files.hddguru.com/download/Software/
ultimatebootcd.com/
hdat2.com./
Atola Technology Archive Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity
HDDGURU: Software: HDD diagnostics and recovery
files.hddguru.com/download/Software/DiskInternals%20Recovery/

Hard drive firmware update utility (Bootable CD ISO)

This utility, on the bootable CD, will then examine your system, detect all 2.5/1.8 inch hard drives installed, and then check the firmware revision of the drive. If required, it will prompt you to run the appropriate firmware update program for your drive. 

hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
Utility for repairing HDD bad blocks, 0 sector, HDD bios settings
Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity to reduce hdd capacity
hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/ 

Partition Find and Mount

Partition Find and Mount allows you to recover deleted partitions. What's special in this program is that it allows you to mount lost partitions right into the system, so the operating system sees that lost partition like a good one. This software also has the possibility to create and mount images of the entire hard drive or separate partitions.

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HDD Capacity Restore Tool
blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/

HDD Capacity Restore Tool allows you to restore factory capacity of any hard drive. A complete capacity restore guide is supplied with the application.

hdd-tools.com/products/cr/download/crsetup.exe 
this tool can NOT recognise USB Mass Storage devices
pull out an old PATA hard drive, install windows XP32bit on it, install SP3 and hdd capacity restore.
This utility has nothing to do with partitions or images of anything. It only works with the hard drive as a physical device. You certainly cannot alter (restore) capacity of a hard disk that you use to boot the Operating System… If this is the case, then you would have to boot from some other hard drive (or attach this hard drive to another working PC as a secondary drive).
If you’re looking to restore capacity on a notebook drive and you don’t have a desktop available, you can use Hitachi’s Feature Tool, which must be copied onto a bootable CD/DVD. Google Hitachi Feature Tool and follow the instructions. Good luck!
Unfortunately, it will not see hard drives on Promise or any similar additional cards; this is “normal”.
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Samsung HD103UI 1TB:
hdd-tools.com/products/cr/download/crsetup.exe
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HDD Low Level Format Tool

This freeware Low Level Format utility will erase, Low-Level Format and re-certify a SATA, IDE or SCSI hard disk drive with any size of up to 281 474 976 710 655 bytes. Will work with USB and FIREWIRE external drive enclosures. Low-level formatting of Flash Cards is supported too. Low Level Format Tool will clear partitions, MBR, and every bit of user data. The program utilizes Ultra-DMA transfers when possibleFor use as portable application make sure that you put affhdd.sys into C:\Windows\System32
Also, the operating system has to be 32-bit only.

windows displays a yellow exclamation over dynamic disk in my diskmanagement. no partition. how can i get my data back?
http://www.computerbase.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-135480.html
Test the disk with ‘TestDisk’ and set the disk partition to primär and u get the data back
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IBM/HITACHI Drive Feature Tool

IBM/Hitachi Drive Feature Tool is a DOS-bootable tool for changing various ATA features. The Feature Tool allows you to control some of the features of IBM/Hitachi Deskstar and Travelstar high performance ATA hard disk drives and supports 48-bit addressing, so it will work with the new large capacity drives.
Seagate Technologies

The utilities of Seagate work for Western Digital hdd

Source 
System limitation: DiscWizard
older PCs may only recognize correctly drives under 32 GB.
Seagate has a piece of software that installs in the boot section of the drive and overrides the restrictive BIOS.
Seagate's capacity issues FAQ
Barracuda 5400.1 Installation Guide ST340015A and ST340015ACE ATA
And if the new ribbon does not fix it, then run the zero write program on that hdd a couple times.
SeaTools for DOS
Manual on how to do that

F. Set Capacity
Occasionally, a disc drive may be too large and its size needs to be reduced to a lower capacity. Similarly, a drive with a reduced capacity may need to be reset to its native maximum capacity. Three choices are available under this section:
S - Set 32GB Capacity. A common setting for older systems.
R - Reset to Drive Maximum. Full capacity is restored.
M - Set Manually. Allow you to set a specific size.
It's working! the SeaTools DOS program did the trick. I reset the drive and I now have full capacity.

HDD Security System

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BIOS password was the first method widely used to protect the computer from unsolicited use. The idea was that your computer won’t boot until the correct password entered.

This type of protection was rather weak and was primarily intended to protect from intruders who have no access to the hardware itself. To bypass such protection, one could take the drive off the computer, attach it to another computer and all the data can be copied.

At that time, to protect the data on the drive, one had to create additional layers of security by using special software for data encryption.

The idea to protect data by setting the password not only to the BIOS but to the drive itself was proposed a decade ago, but only now the technology has spread enough to be widely used.
Nowadays all modern notebook computers set a password to the drive simultaneously with setting it to the BIOS. That is why it is important to understand how the disk drive security works.

HDD Passwords

The possibility to restrict access to the data exists on almost all modern drives. This restriction is implemented by the security system of the drive itself. Thus, it makes the attachment of the drive to another computer meaningless as the password is physically stored on the drive.

Every drive which supports security features can contain simultaneously two passwords: User and Master.

User Password

User Password is the password that you use to restrict the access to the data on the drive. When User password is set the drive becomes Locked. When the drive is locked, no data can be read or written to it.

So the drive is locked when, and only when the User password is set.

When locking the drive (i.e. setting User password), you can choose how the drive can be unlocked. Either only User password can unlock the drive or both User and Master passwords can be used. This is done by setting Security level flag. This flag can be modified only while setting User password. Security level can be either ‘High’ or ‘Maximum’.
Master Password

Master password is intended to be used in case User password is lost or forgotten.

Every hard drive has some predefined Master password set. Unfortunately it is not standardized. Usually it contains just 32 spaces, but it may vary depending on the hard drive manufacturer and model number. Master password can be easily changed if the hard drive is not in the locked state.

The capability of Master password (what you can do with it) depends on Security level flag which is set during locking the drive (as described in the previous section):

• If the Security level is ‘High’, Master password can be used in place of User password.
• If Security level is ‘Maximum’, the drive can be unlocked using Master password only with the erasing of all data on the drive.

By the way, the term “Security Level” will be substituted in the future versions of ATA Standards by the better one: “Master Password Capability”.
Back to BIOS

So, when you set a password on a notebook computer, BIOS will do the following:
• Store the password in the BIOS itself.
• Change Master Password of the HDD to protect the user from using manufacturer’s default.
• Change User Password of the HDD. This operation will lock the drive.

Improving Disk Performance

How to get the most out of your hard disks

by Roderick W. Smith Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
...
...
Filesystem Choice

Beyond adjusting the way the kernel talks to your hard disks, you can choose which filesystem or filesystems your system uses. Unfortunately, picking a filesystem for optimal performance isn’t an easy task. Too many variables exist that affect performance, such as disk throughput, disk head seek speeds, overall system load, how full the filesystem is, and whether you’re accessing large or small files. A few generalizations can be drawn, though:

*Journaling filesystems are preferable. Journaling filesystems (ext3fs, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS) maintain a journal, or log of pending changes. Maintaining the journal slightly degrades performance, but greatly speeds recovery after a power failure or other uncontrolled shutdown. Most journaling filesystems include more advanced features than do non-journaling filesystems (such as ext2fs), which partly or completely counteracts the extra effort the journal requires to maintain. Overall, a journaling filesystem is a big improvement, particularly if you want to minimize boot times after a problem shutdown. An exception is small filesystems (such as /boot, if it’s on a separate partition), on which the journal consumes too high a percentage of disk space to be worth its while.

*Small files work best with ReiserFS. If a partition holds many small files, look into ReiserFS. Although it might or might not perform any better than other filesystems, ReiserFS is more efficient at packing small files onto the disk. The result is that you can fit more small files on a disk.

*ext2fs and ext3fs are dependable on all platforms. Fortunately, all the major Linux filesystems (ext2fs, ext3fs, ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS) are reliable on x86 systems. On other platforms, one or more of these may be sluggish or unreliable. If in doubt, stick with ext2fs or ext3fs; these are the most likely to be speedy and reliable.

If getting the absolute best speed out of your filesystem is important, you may need to perform some tests, ideally using the hard disk and applications you intend to use. For a typical single-computer desktop or even small server installation, such tests are likely to consume so much time that they aren’t worthwhile. If you’re deploying hundreds of identical desktop systems, though, it might be worth running a few tests to see how different filesystems cope with the sorts of tasks your systems will be performing.

Filesystem Layout
In addition to filesystem choice, filesystem layout can affect performance. Two factors are important to consider when designing a filesystem layout:
*Seek times. When Linux accesses data from different partitions on a single disk, the disk head must move (or seek) from one area of the disk to another. This action takes time, so if your disk layout is such that data from the start and end of the disk must be frequently accessed, performance will be degraded compared to a layout in which frequently accessed data lie close together.
*Disk throughput. As noted earlier, disk throughput varies from one part of a disk to another. As a general rule, earlier parts of the disk (partitions in low-numbered cylinders) perform better than do latter parts of the disk. Thus, putting frequently accessed data at the start of the disk generally makes sense.
Typically, the best performance can be achieved by placing the most-used partitions, such as partitions for /usr, /home, and swap space, in the middle of the disk. Partitions that are seldom accessed, such as /boot or a partition holding an emergency Linux installation, are best placed in the peripheral regions of the disk.
Figure One illustrates a good single-disk configuration. The assumption is that most accesses involve /usr, /home,, or swap space, with progressively less frequent accesses for partitions further from these. Such a layout will minimize disk seek times and therefore maximize performance. Of course, different systems might have different access patterns, so Figure One might be an excellent configuration for one system but poor for another.
Figure One: An optimized disk configuration places frequently accessed data near the center of the disk

In multi-disk systems, try to spread your access across disks. For instance, in a multi-boot configuration, don’t devote one disk entirely to Linux and the other disk entirely to the other OS. Splitting both OSs across both disks will improve performance for both OSs.

In a Linux-only configuration with multiple disks, put both commonly used and rarely used partitions on both disks. If /usr is on one disk and /home is on another, then a pattern of use that entails accessing files in both directories will require no head seeks to move between those two partitions (although of course there may be head seeks within each partition).

Advanced configurations take advantage of Linux’s support for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). This technology enables you to split a single virtual partition across two or more physical disks. This can be done to improve data security (in case one disk fails, a copy will exist on another disk), to improve performance (by spreading access across multiple disks), or both. Although RAID configuration is too complex to cover in this column, it’s well worth investigating if you need to get the most out of your disks.
Roderick W. Smith is the author or co-author of over a dozen books, including Linux in a Windows World and Linux Power Tools. He can be reached at
class="emailaddress">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com.
Roderick W. Smith is the author or coauthor of more than a dozen books, including Linux in a Windows World and Linux Power Tools. He can be reached at rodsmith@rodsbooks.com.

EASEUS Disk Copy

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If you copy a small disk into a bigger one, EASEUS Disk Copy can't manage the rest space, you may use EASEUS Partition Master to reallocate the free space. In addition Disk Copy - sector by sector copy, it's advanced Partition Copy - file by file copy is faster because it is only based on the files. EASEUS Partition Master also supports Resize/Move, Create, Deleted and Format, Hide and Unhide partitions etc in Windows Operating System.   Read more...

EASEUS Disk Copy is a freeware, which can create an exact (Mirror Image, Disk to Disk) copy of your old disk, including the operating system, applications, personal preferences, custom settings, and all of your vital data.

EASEUS Disk Copy can be used for copying, cloning, or upgrading your original small hard drive to a new larger drive. Essential Utility for Disaster Recovery.
File System Supported All file systems.
Operating System All Operating Systems
Minimum 128Mb RAM (recommended 256Mb)
Minimum 40Mb free disk space required

EASEUS Disk Copy  
- Download from Download.com
- Download from Majorgeeks.com
- TUCOWS.COM