DriveSavers dispels common hard drive recovery myths

Freezing or hitting failed hard drives don’t work and can actually increase the damage, according to DriveSavers representatives. Known for successfully recovering data from thousands of drives a month, DriveSavers engineers have seen everything from burnt laptops to hairspray cemented floppy disks. Not wanting to pay for professional recovery, some people resort to urban legends that may sound good at first, but according to the company have no scientific basis for working.

We spoke with John Christopher, DriveSavers’ Director of PR at the SIGGRAPH convention in San Diego California. The average recover costs around $1700 and DriveSavers handles between 1300 and 1500 hard drives a month with a 90% success rate, according to Christopher. The success rate is phenomenal considering that many customers will often make thing worse before sending their drives to the company.

“Customers always do more harm. You’ve got one copy, one chance… why mess around?” said Christopher.

Hard drive head crashes and mechanical failures comprise approximately 60% of DriveSavers’ hard drive recoveries and many computer geeks have heard about freezing the drive to shrink the platters. Basically you pop the hard drive in the freezer overnight and in the morning you quickly attach it to the computer and grab all the data. The theory is that the platters will shrink while cold and become “unstuck” from the drive head or casing, but according to Christopher this is bogus.

“If anyone got it to work, it was pure luck, I can’t find any reasons why it would work and my clean room guys have never gotten it to work,” Christopher told us. He added that water can condense on the hard drive platters after it has been take out of the freezer. “Then you get water spots which is really bad,” he said.

Another myth is you can hit the hard drive when it is spinning up to force it back into working order. “Some people try smacking it on the side while the drive powers up,” said Christopher. That too doesn’t work he said.

And it doesn’t end there because some customers have tried buying identical drives on eBay and then replacing the platters in their bathrooms. “They think that their bathrooms are cleaner,” Christopher told us.

So what’s the craziest data recovery the company has ever done? Christopher said that was a loaded question because most of the drives come with unbelievable stories. The company handles drives that have been burnt in fires, drowned in floods and has even recovered the contents of a PowerBook that sunk in the Amazon River.

Christopher does remember one of the first recoveries which was a student’s only copy of her thesis from a floppy disk.

“She put the disk in her purse and sat down at a bench. She heard a hissing sound which was a Aquanet hairspray can discharging all over her floppy.”

Despite having a sticky cemented disk, DriveSavers fully recovered the document.

Speaking of floppies, the company still receives floppies for recovery. Christopher told us that people even send in ancient 20 to 30 MB RLL/MFM formatted hard drives.

Drive recovery procedures are constantly changing and Christopher told us that increasing drive capacities are making things somewhat more difficult for his engineers. One example is that people are buying computers with a terabyte or more of storage, but that space is actually spanned across two or more drives. This is a big danger is one of the drives dies and takes out the whole array.

“These computer companies don’t say that the drives are spanned. So now the customer has no clue and says ‘I didn’t know I had four drives’”

Incidentally, a very satisfied DriveSavers customer walked up to us during the interview and told us how the company saved his 160 GB hard drive. Jacob Pollack said he first took his drive to an Apple store and their reps botched the job.

“My drive had very important media files and the Apple store just reformatted my drive,” Pollack said. He added that the reps eventually referred him to DriveSavers.

GPS rival to integrate tech for global search and rescue system

Representatives of the Galileo project, Europe's effort to establish a civil global positioning system, have presented an ambitious plan to equip its satellites with a future worldwide search and rescue technology to be able to locate and communicate with individuals in emergency situations anywhere on the globe.

The new project was announced as part of the recent annual Joint Committee Meeting of COSPAS-SARSAT, an international initiative focused on a satellite system for search and rescue. Galileo representatives confirmed that their future satellite system will be equipped with transponders to relay distress signals to search and rescue organizations, as a key technology of MEOSAR (Medium Earth Orbit Search And Rescue), a future worldwide search and rescue satellite system.

What is fascinating about the Galileo system is that it promises to overcome many of the limitations satellite-based rescue systems have today.

COSPAS-SARSAT currently operates a total 12 satellites. Five "Geosar" geostationary satellites orbit in 1000 km altitude: These satellites remain fixed relative to the position of the Earth and have a relatively poor coverage of the polar regions. This deficiency is somewhat covered by seven low-Earth orbit (850 km altitude) "Leosar" satellites circling the Earth around the poles. The major downside of today's system, which went into operation almost 25 years ago on September 10, 1982, is that there can be a substantial delay in relaying distress signals, which currently can be received through beacons at 121.5 MHz and 406 MHz.

The system cannot monitor the complete surface of the Earth at any given moment and depends on a satellite passing a distress signal overhead. In addition, the satellites cannot relay a distress signal to the ground at any given time, but rather have to store the location of the emergency and send it to a base station once there is one in reach. COSPAS-SARSAT says that it can take up to one hour until a signal is received and sent back to the ground.

Also, distress signals need to have a direct line of sight to the satellites, which may not be possible in some situations, especially in accident situations where individuals are trapped in a deep valley and the surrounding terrain obscures the view to the satellite.

Galileo promises to solve these problems, providing a global coverage with about 20 – 30 satellites in medium-Earth orbit. The project promises that the system will be able to monitor even polar regions; the capability of multiple viewing angles is expected to tackle the problem of terrain blocking.

The Galileo search and rescue component will also provide a basic communication component that is absent in the current Geosar and Leosar system. While the "Forward Link Alert Service" is promised to be fully backward compatible with the current operational COSPAS-SARSAT components and interoperable with all other planned MEOSAR elements, detects activated distress beacons and notifies the appropriate rescue body, there is a second feature, called "Return Link Service". This component will allow the satellite to send a return message to the emergency beacon and let individuals know that their distress signal has been received and help is on its way.

Galileo representatives said that four satellites with search and rescue transponders will be used to demonstrate the Galileo MEOSAR services.

Activist group recommends more control over search privacy

Public policy organization The Center For Democracy & Technology (CDT) has released a report calling for an overhaul of search engine privacy policies.

Once a completely non-glamorous tool for finding content on the Internet, search engines have become the backbone for e-commerce, online advertising, and digital privacy concerns. A few snafus and an increasing desire for privacy have caused giants like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to come under intense scrutiny.

Each of the three big sites has modified or announced plans to modify its privacy policy within the past year, but activists say there's still more work to do. Google and Microsoft, for example, plan to keep track of IP addresses that use their respective search engine for 18 months. Yahoo will keep this information for 13 months. Individual search terms on all three sites will remain in Google's history indefinitely, but will not link the searches to individual users after the user information is deleted.

As part of the report, CDT says search engines need to develop "new standards and policies that take privacy into account from the beginning."

CDT wants the government to step in because it says search sites cannot be trusted. "No amount of seul-regulation in the search privacy space can replace the need for a comprehensive federal privacy law to protect consumers from bad actotrs," writes the organization.

For the most part, CDT says long-term privacy is secured by all of the big search engines, as they delete unique identifiers to prevent linking search terms back to specific users. It's the short term that becomes worriesome, claims the organization.

Specifically, it says, search-based advertising must be closely monitored. CDT calls for search engines to offer more choices for how their data is stored and used, and that user privacy needs to come first before advertising revenue. This becomes more glaringly important when sharing data between multiple sites, owned by the same company, opens up new concerns.

"As it becomes possible to tie more and more information back to an individual user account, users should control the correlation of their account information with records of their online activities," writes CDT in its report.

Halo 3 hits one million pre-orders in record time

Microsoft's ultimate cash cow for the Xbox 360, Halo 3 has eclipsed one million pre-orders more than six weeks before the game is scheduled to be released.

The software giant announced today that it reached the one million pre-order milestone, counting all orders for Halo 3, Halo 3: Limited Edition, and Halo 3: Legendary Edition. The two special editions contain a bonus disc and physical Halo memorabilia. The $130 Legenday Edition also includes a Spartan Mjolnir Mark VI helmet and a second bonus disc. The Limited Edition title is priced at $70, with the standard version going for the standard Xbox 360 price of $60.

A million pre-orders for a video game is a rare occurrence, and Microsoft says Halo 3 has reached that mark faster than any other video game.

Halo 3, easily poised to be the top seller for the Xbox 360 this holiday season, is supposedly the final installment in the Halo series, which put Microsoft on the map with the original Xbox.

A huge promotional campaign will put Halo 3 on brand names around the country, including Burger King packaging, 7-Eleven Slurpees, and even a special edition Halo 3 G6 GXP street car from Pontiac.

The game is set to debut on September 25.

Fujitsu marching towards terabyte hard drives for notebooks

Fujitsu announced that it has developed a basic read/write capability of ideally ordered alumina nanoholes on a 2.5” magnetic disk on the way to achieve a recording density of 1 Tb per square inch.

According to a press release, Fujitsu claims to be first to have created an ordered alumina nanohole patterns, including a flying head on a rotating disk. The fabrication process uses perpendicular magnetic recording at a density of 100 nm pitch nanoholes, which is supported currently available head technology, the company said. The pitch is significantly wider than the 25 nm pitch that was announced by the company earlier this year and that is expected to be necessary to achieve a recording density of 1 Tb per square inch.

“Fujitsu is the first company to demonstrate read/write signals in individual ideally ordered alumina nanohole using a flying head for measurement," said David James, vice president, advanced product engineering, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, in a prepared statement. With the growing demand for hard drives with high capacities, especially in small form factors, one Tb per square inch would enable potential storage capacities of up to 1.2 TB on a 2-platter 2.5" drive. We expect this breakthrough to provide revolutionary changes for various IT and consumer applications.”

Fujitsu did not say when this technology will be available, however, it could provide the industry enough headroom for one more decade before the looming switch to a completely new hard drive technology may be necessary. Currently mass produced hard drives achieve densities of up to 205 Gb per square inch in Seagate's single-platter 3.5" desktop drive. Samsung recently announced a 3-platter 1 TB drive which records data at 241 Gb per square inch. At the time 1 Tb per square inch will be reached, 3.5" drives, could record data at 1.33 TB per platter and translate into 4-disk drives with more than 5 TB capacity.

Blu-ray, HD DVD topple VHS sales

High definition discs became the second most popular video medium in the first half of 2007, officially overtaking legacy format VHS.

According to a research piece from trade publication Video Business, sales of Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs combined in the first half of 2007 beat VHS. During the last six months of 2006, the now-archaic format was still edging out the high definition newcomers.

By 2005%, VHS's market share in the home video market had fallen to around 15%, and has continued to fall ever since. Blu-ray and HD DVD overtaking the dying format was more or less expected, but through the end of 2006 the high-def competitors were still behind.

With the highly contentious battle between Blu-ray, fronted by Sony, and HD DVD, backed mainly by Toshiba and Universal, there was mounting concern that wary consumers would back off of both until a winner was decided.

However, both formats have already made significant marks in the home video market. Blu-ray's Casino Royale reached 100,000 units shipped in March, beating the 11 months it took DVD to reach that milestone. Meanwhile, HD DVD took a hold with the first high definition disc box set to be on Amazon.com's list of top five DVDs with the documentary series Planet Earth.

Warner's short-titled "300" is the most recent newsmaker, selling 250,000 copies on Blu-ray and HD DVD in a single week.

It's still a long way before the two formats really begin to chip into DVD, though. By comparison, over five million copies of the DVD version of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest were sold in its first 24 hours.

Blockbuster to buy Movielink

Though Blockbuster has flip-flopped on the idea of digital downloads in the past, it has now reportedly entered the market with a confirmed deal to acquire Movielink.

The AP reports that Blockbuster has finalized a deal to purchase the online video download site. At first, the rental chain will keep Movielink separate and run it as a standalone operation, but will eventually integrate it as part of Blockbuster Online.

Early this year, speculation of an acquisition rose when Blockbuster began preliminary talks with Movielink. Plans fell through, though, until Blockbuster named a new CEO a couple months ago, who expressed a greater interest in a stake of the online video market.

Blockbuster, which still has a logo in the shape of a VHS tape, went through enormous struggles with the transition to DVD and cheaper online alternatives. At one point it changed its nationwide rental policies three times in less than one year.

Blockbuster's main competitor is Netflix, an online rental service that began offering digital downloads earlier this year. However, the leader in the on-demand video market is the Xbox 360, which has a vast selection of movies and TV shows available on a "rental download" basis, where users have 24 hours to watch a purchased piece of content. It also offers more high definition video than any other digital download service.

Movielink is laced with DRM security, so much so that it has been widely panned by consumers and has failed to gain any more than a modicum of success. Its prices are also not competitive with services offered by iTunes and the Xbox 360, leaving consumers to pay more money for content that's more restricted. The online video site is owned by a conglomerate of movie studios who created it in 2002 as a legal outlet to combat illegal video sharing.

By 2006, however, there were significantly more sources offering video downloads legally, and movie studios became much more interested in digital downloads operated by third parties. In May 2006, Business Week reported that the five studios who invested in Movielink (MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros) were looking to sell the site. Blockbuster was the first to officially announce an interest in purchasing it.

Blockbuster will pay for the acquisition in cash, but exact financial terms were not disclosed.

Study: Gamers unaware, don't care about additional game console features

A new study shows that most gamers just want to play games and don't really care about all the extra expensive goodies packed into the multimedia consoles, according to a new survey from research group NPD.

Some of the most fundamental, basic features of the next-gen consoles went unknown by the 6,260 surveyed console owners in the US. For example, only 30% knew that the Xbox 360 has the ability to produce high definition graphics. Sony has done somewhat better in making that point with the PS3, but the NPD survey showed that one in two people were not even aware of the PS3's HD functionality.

Only 40% were aware of the PS3's built-in Blu-ray Disc player, and only 20% said they had watched a BD movie in the last 10 times they powered up their console.

The survey, which included people aged six to 44, also came back with only 37% knowing that the PS3 was backwards compatible with Playstation and PS2 titles. 50% were unaware of the multimedia features on Sony's portable system, the PSP, according to the survey results.

It also showed that handheld gamers are more likely to play online games on the Nintendo DS than on the PSP, and on the console side the most common online platform is the Xbox 360.

"To make headway in this 'next-gen' race, manufacturers still need to be primarily concerned with the quality and entertainment value of the games themselves," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

Xbox 360 Pro gets new HDMI port

Along with a cheaper price, customers who purchase a new Xbox 360 Pro will get to make use of a newly implanted HDMI port, previously exclusive to the top tier Xbox 360 Elite.

Microsoft has begun shipping the new version of the $350 console to retailers. Customers will be able to differentiate the new console from older stock by an HDMI logo printed on the Xbox 360 box.

"Retailers are gradually introducing HDMI-enabled Xbox 360s into the channel to meet demand," said a Microsoft representative, according to Gamespot.

When it launched in November 2005, the Xbox 360's only high definition output capability was through component video cables. Since then, HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) technology has grown in popularity among HD enthusiasts for its combined audio/video functionality and its ability to produce the highest video output, 1080p. HDMI first came to the Microsoft console with the addition of the Xbox 360 Elite, a third console SKU (stock keeping unit) with a larger hard drive than previous versions of the system, along with an HDMI port.

The addition of more sophisticated hardware comes almost immediately after Microsoft lowered the price of the console by $50. In 2005 the software giant was reportedly losing more than $125 per console but has continuously worked on bringing its manufacturing cost down.

Defcon 2007 – Mayhem, mystery and marriage

This year’s recently completed Defcon convention started off with a bang and ended on a tender note. Almost 7000 people attended the convention and one of those was an “undercover” reporter from NBC Dateline. I put undercover in quotes because she wasn’t very good at staying hidden and was discovered even before setting foot at the Riviera Hotel.

All the Dateline drama happened on Friday, the first day of Defcon, and you can read all about it in this article . While this was the highlight of the convention, Defcon had several other notable happenings.

The Mystery Box challenge is a yearly contest that has attendees trying to break into a hardened-steel box. Protected by multiple sensors and locks, the box withstood attacks for 22.5 hours before a team of 20 finally broke in. During the contest, participants complained loudly about the deviousness of all the protections and called the boxes’ creator, “LoST”, a “very sick” man.

The Defconbots contest is another yearly contest that makes teams build automated guns that can shoot down paper targets. Teams modified plastic-pellet firing airsoft guns into robotic guns that automatically tracked white colored targets. Utah-based Team Octopi – the same team that won lost year – won this year’s contest by shooting 20 targets in 16.6 seconds. During the awards ceremony, the team told the audience that they knew nothing about computer vision when they started two years ago.

Defcon ended with some happy tears this year as two federal agents were married on stage in front of thousands of hackers. The Riviera’s minister presided over the ceremony and told the audience that he would love to do a group wedding for next year – that is if enough people are interested.

It’s interesting how the relationship between feds and attendees have changed in the past few years that I’ve been attending Defcon. Before 9/11 the feds were treated with a healthy bit of suspicion and a fed wedding would have never occurred back in the old days of Defcon. Some of the suspicion still exists today, but the feds have really tried to reach out to the community by conducting panels, answering questions and even offering jobs.

AMD offers $1.7 billion in notes to pay back ATI acquisition loan

AMD announced its "intention" to offer $1.5 billion worth of convertible senior notes, with the option of $225 million in additional notes to cover over allotments.

According to a press release distributed late Wednesday, the company expects to use the proceeds of the offering as well as some of its cash to repay the outstanding balance in a loan agreement with Morgan Stanley Senior Funding. AMD took out this loan in the amount of $2.5 billion on October 24 of last year in order to cover a substantial portion of the acquisition of ATI.

The purchase price of the former graphics chip maker was paid with $1.8 billion cash AMD had available, $2.5 million in cash through the Morgan Stanley loan as well as more than 57 million AMD shares. The total purchase price was $5.4 billion.

This new convertible senior notes offering follows close on the heels of an earlier offering AMD announced in April of this year. Back then, the company issued an offering that included an aggregate amount of $2 billion of convertible senior notes, plus an additional $200 million in notes to cover over allotments.

Siggraph 2007 Video: 2objet’s prototyping printer whips up wrenches in minutes

Three dimensional printers have grown up and are now popping out complicated objects in mere minutes. At the Siggraph convention in San Diego, we saw 2object’s Eden260 printer blaze away, making plastic wrenches in front of awed spectators. Watch our video to see the printer in action.

The Eden260 lays down layers of non-toxic photopolymer acrylic. Objects with walls as thin as .6 mm can be created and the printer has a resolution of 600, 300 and 1600 dpi in the x, y and z-axis respectively.

2-kilogram cartridges of resin are loaded into the front of the printer. Both opaque and clear plastic is available and the prototypes can be easily painted.

NCSA on track to build petaflop supercomputer

The National Science Foundation (NSF) received notice today that the National Science Board (NSB) has approved a resolution granting the NCSA receive funding to build a petaflop supercomputer at their facility in Urbana, Illinois.

If the NSF follows the NSB's suggestion, the new system will be called "Blue Waters" and will go online in 2011. It is expected to cost $208 million to build over 4.5 years. NCSA was one of several hopeful supercomputing centers to submit a proposal for this petaflop machine. The highest performing supercomputer at NCSA today was just launched on July 2, 2007. It's called "Abe" and operates at 0.091 petaflops. This new machine will be more than ten times more powerful than Abe is today.

Two resolutions were officially approved. The first is called "Track 1: A Leadership-Class System," and is the Blue Waters machine. The second is a lesspowerful machine intended "to bridge the gap between current high-performance computers (HPC) and even more advanced petascale systems under development": Called "Track 2: Mid-Range High-Performance Computing Towards the Petascale," it will be a $65 million 5-year project targeted at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS).

Neither award is final. The NSF has its own review process to go through and will be making the final announcement in September, 2007. However, the NSB's endorsement will likely weigh in very heavily. And having spent some time with the folks at NCSA earlier this year, I can tell you that everyone there is most likely running down the halls with great excitement.