Should You Be Looking For A Hard Drive Upgrade?

Most desktop PCs bought or built in the past five years are probably using hard drives in the capacity range of 80 GB to 250 GB. Recent price drops in the hard drive market mean that most current drive generation is more attractive than ever before. You can get 1 TB hard drives for less than $100 now.

Knowing that capacity may not be the only impetus for upgrading your hard drive, we "recreated" a three-year old system with a 200 GB hard drive and looked at what would happen if we replaced the drive with a modern terabyte model.

Capacity Quadrupled, Performance Doubled

It is safe to say that each and every hard drive selling today is far superior to older-generation drives, as improving recording technologies keep pushing forward capacities and performance. Other modifications, such as the interface transition from parallel ATA to Serial ATA 150 (and then 300 MB/s), also make a difference. But no individual feature—even Native Command Queuing or a larger cache—can make as much of a difference as simply stepping up from one drive generation to the next. In fact, the only reason why new hard drives aren’t getting faster to an even greater degree is an increased emphasis on power consumption and drive efficiency.

The bottom line is a simple recommendation that is almost always valid: when it comes time to buy a new hard drive, make sure the one you pick is a latest-generation model.

Capacity Upgrade: Check

The number one reason to purchase a new hard drive for an existing system, undoubtedly, is capacity, since a three-year old 200 GB hard drive fills up fast. In a year, most people typically add at least a few gigabytes of digital pictures, or even more data if video is stored on the drive. Add to that music, new applications, and so on. Unless you don’t touch digital media at all, you might need an additional 50-100 GB capacity per year, and enthusiasts and professionals may easily require far more. Hence, a hard drive replacement or upgrade every few years is absolutely warranted.

Performance Upgrade: Sure?

The next reason for replacing a hard drive would be performance. To illustrate this, we recreated a typical PC system using a Pentium 4 660 processor and a 915G-based motherboard from Asus with 1 GB of RAM; this represents an upper-mainstream system from the 2005-era. We selected a 200 GB Samsung Spinpoint P120 series SATA hard drive and ran several performance and power consumption benchmarks. Then we replayed the benchmark suite using a brand new 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen to measure the difference.

Southbridge Battle: 780a, ICH10 and SB750, Compared

All chipsets today offer integrated Serial ATA (SATA) support, since all mainstream hard drives now utilize the fast serial interface. Even entry-level chipsets tend to support the creation of striped sets (RAID 0) or mirrors (RAID 1) to accelerate storage performance or improve data protection.

Upper-mainstream and high-end products not only offer more SATA ports but also added software-based functionality, such as RAID 5. Although few users actually use RAID 5 on desktop PCs (given a three-drive minimum), this mode requires processing horsepower to calculate parity, which is required to rebuild stored data should one hard drive break. The CPU supplies the horsepower, but the southbridge acts as the controller for the RAID operations, and we found significant differences between RAID 5-enabled desktop chipsets for these tasks.

Under Core i7's Hood: Comparing The C0 And D0 Steppings

Whether you're looking at the IT hardware business or automobile industry, products often receive bug fixes, improvements, or upgrades during their active life cycle. Cars get face-lifted once they’ve been on the market for a while, usually at that halfway point between launch and the introduction of a successor.

In terms of silicon devices, we’re talking about steppings, which often incorporate a number of different improvements. When Intel introduced its Core i7-975 Extreme, it started to replace the 965 Extreme's C0 stepping with the more advanced D0 silicon. We found some significant differences between the two.

New Steppings Don’t Mean More Performance

First of all, we’d like to make clear that modified processor steppings eliminate known bugs, while also improving the production process. Typically, this includes optimization on a transistor level, which may result in extended clock speed margins, lower voltage requirements for standard operation, or even the addition of features.

As a result, the latest processors normally show better energy efficiency, as they may require slightly less power than previous steppings to deliver the same performance results. However, stepping updates usually do not introduce any performance increase, as the processor vendor would rather have you pay for that.

New Stepping Mean More Possibilities

Other publications, such as AnandTech (Core i7-920 D0 Preview) and X-bit labs (D0 Processor Stepping in Action), already reported impressive results with D0 parts over the previous, first-generation Core i7 C0 stepping. Anand looked at a model 920 while X-bit labs tested a 965-Extreme.

We decided to do an apples-to-apples comparison with both Core i7 Extreme editions: the 3.2 GHz 965 and the 3.33 GHz 975. We set both to run at 3.33 GHz in order to compare performance and, surprisingly, we did find differences. Then we tried to overclock as far as possible on air cooling using a Zalman CPNS 10X cooler. Finally, we performed power comparison measurements at the highest clock speed, which both the C0-based 965 and the D0-based 975 processor would support reliably.

JDownloader 0.7 Released With Faster GUI and FlashGot Integration

JDownloader is an open source, platform independent and written completely in Java free tool that automates downloading from one click file hosters such as Rapidshare, Megaupload and etc. If you have premium accounts, you can configure JDownloader to use it. If not, JDownloader can also help you to download multiple rapidshare files automatically by reconnecting your Internet connection to change your IP address. Well this only works if you get dynamic IP address and not static ones. There are a lot more such as CAPTCHA recognition, auto extract or join files when it has finished downloading all parts, RAR password brute-force via dictionary list and etc, auto shutdown when finished downloading and etc…

Today I launched JDownloader and I got a notice that there is a major update. I updated it and noticed that the whole program’s GUI has changed to a much faster, nicer and easier to use interface.
I have to admit that the old interface is a little confusing and not so user friendly. The new layout tab helps a lot in making this program looks more tidy.

I was also very excited to learn that the new FlashGot now supports JDownloader! I have FlashGot installed on my Firefox browser and every time when I wanted to download files from RapidShare, I had to manually run JDownloader and let the clipboard monitor catch the links. But with FlashGot integration, I can just right click on the link and select “FlashGot Link” or “FlashGot Selection” if it is a text.

I wasn’t able to get FlashGot working with JDownloader at first. No matter what I did, JDownloader is always grayed out from the list of supported download managers. Then I downloaded the full version from JDownloader’s website, extract and ran it, this time I get a confirmation window asking me to install Firefox integration. I am very sure that didn’t come out when I upgraded from 0.6 to 0.7. After clicking OK, you can now select JDownloader from the Download Manager list.

I noticed that JDownloader is being developed very actively if compared to other downloaders such as CryptLoad. They’ve been talking about their version 2.0 for a long time but still nothing after so many months. JDownloader is FREE and it requires Java Runtime Environment to run. Supports Windows, Linux and Mac. Try it, I am sure you’ll love it.

[ Download JDownloader ]

LockHunter is UNLOCKER Alternative that Works on Windows x64

Without a doubt that The Unlocker is the best and its one of my must-install software after I’ve finished installing Windows. If you don’t know what is Unlocker for, it is a utility used to determine what file a process is using if a user tried to delete it, and displays a list of processes as well as choices on what to do with the process (kill task, unlock, etc.) along with a list of file function options (delete, rename, move). Even when I cannot eject USB flash drive from Windows, I can use Unlocker to find out which process is invisible in use that is causing the problem and unlock it.
The latest version of Unlocker is 1.8.7 released on 01 May 2008. It is updated to fix some bugs and also to support Vista. However, until today there’s no update to support 64 bit of Windows XP/Vista/7. If you’ve been searching high and low for an alternative, look no further because LockHunter does the same thing as Unlocker and it supports both 32 and 64 bit of Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and 7. Most importantly it is free and very light in system resource usage.
LockHunter is a free foolproof file unlocker to delete files blocked by something you do not know. LockHunter is useful for fighting against malware, and other programs that are blocking files without a reason. Unlike other similar tools it deletes files into the recycle bin so you may restore them if deleted by mistake.

Key Features of LockHunter

Shows processes locking a file or folder

Allows to unlock, delete, copy or rename a locked file

Allows to kill locking process

Allows to remove locking processes from hard drive

Integrates in to Explorer menu

It deletes files into the recycle bin, so you may restore them if deleted by mistake

Supports both 32 and 64bit Windows

There are a lot of other unlocker software listed in the official Unlocker’s website and most if not all of them can only unlock files and folders but not the whole drive letter. To me, very frequently I get errors like “This device currently in use. Close any programs or windows that might be using the device, and then try again” when I try to eject a drive from USB. If the unlocker software cannot support this feature, then it’s pretty useless to me. Thankfully LockHunter supports this.

If you didn’t know, LockHunter is developed by Crystal Rich, the same company that develops the award winning USB Safely Remove software. LockHunter is still in BETA which means it might have some bugs. If you encounter any, you can make a report using the form at this page.

[ Download LockHunter ]