Archive for June, 2010

System BIOS and Hard Drive Related FAQs (Part I)

Monday, June 7th, 2010

The most commonly asked questions about the system BIOS and its relationship to hard drives. The following will provide you with basic information beginning with the definition of a BIOS, to identifying key features found in various BIOS’s. The purpose of this document is to aid you in solving minor difficulties you may be currently experiencing.

System BIOS and Hard Drive Related FAQs (Part II)

Monday, June 7th, 2010

5.

Partition Record Technical Details

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Different operating systems have different Partition Type bytes . The most common DOS partition type is 6h , which is used for Primary DOS partitions greater than 32 Mbytes. Here is a list of known (and suspected) partition type bytes: 00 Not Occupied 01 DOS, Primary Partition (12-bit FAT, <16MB) 02 XENIX root 03 XENIX usr 04 DOS, Primary Partition (16-bit FAT, >=16MB and <32MB) 05 DOS, Extended Partition 06 DOS, Primary Partition (16-bit FAT, >32MB) 07 OS/2 HPFS, Win NTFS, QNX ver 2, or Adv UNIX 08 AIX – boot 09 …

What is the length of cable that I can use with a Serial ATA drive?

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Serial ATA cables are available in many lengths up to 1 meter. Minimum cable length is 12 inches, using shorter cables can cause timing, or noise interference on the cable. The same conditions apply to cables that are too long

Tips for upgrading drive in Macintosh computer

Friday, June 4th, 2010

To upgrade the drive in your Macintosh computer, the first thing to consider is do you want to upgrade the internal drive or do you just want to add additional storage with an external drive? Internal Drive vs. External Drive An internal drive will generally provide much better performance on the computer and can be used to store programs and data

Tips for Replacing a Drive from a Failed RAID

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

There are several items to consider when replacing a drive from a failed RAID . If you are building a new RAID, then all drives in the array should be the identical model if at all possible

Hard Drive Errors

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

1. ‘No ROM Basic’ Error When a partition is not set to the bootable partition.

Partition Offset Information

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Partition Offset Information is a simple, single file Windows utility you can run to read and display the starting LBA for every partition. This tool detects disk drives that report themselves as large sector drives, typically 4KiB sectors, and analyzes the starting sector of a partition to see if the logical file system clusters are aligned to the disk drive or not.

Partition Offset Information (Part II)

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

How to check if a partition is aligned?

Will adding an ATA PCI Adapter card increase disk performance?

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

It really depends if the motherboard on the system supports the transfer rate of the hard drive.