Some time has now passed since the we first introduced a way to sort of “hack” your hard drive into delivering faster than normal performance. Since then there we have been asked many questions and recieved many requests for further testing of the hard drive. Here is a snippet of some of the questions that I will be answering:

What would happen if I were to just partition the hard drives instead of “cropping” them?

Can I set up different LBA numbers to and get the same performance?

Why even bother getting this hard drive if the Raptor one has lower seek times?

and the most important one of all:

What would the performance be like if I were to RAID two of these hard drives?

These questions among others will be answered as we put the Seagate 7200.11 under further testing and scrutiny.

Now that we know what exactly we are going to be looking for in our tests lets move on to what some readers have been asking since this article has been published.

Partitioning vs Clipping?

Some of the users suggested that formatting the drive into 2 partitions would generate the same effect as the method described in the previous article. To find out if this was truth or fiction I decided to find out in a very simple test. First I reverted the drive to its original size and then used Widows 7′ s partitioning tool to create 2 partitions one of the partitions was a 300 GB partition while the other was designated for the remaining space. Interestingly enough, the benchmarking software does not recognize logical partitions. Thereby I arrived at the following conclusion: while theoretically it is possible to partition the drive in such a way that the faster outer edges of the drive would be used with the smaller partition for faster access rates and the slower, inside for the storage, this arrangement would be largely impractical.

If I were to take your average gamer and use his/her rig as an example the following scenario would be presented. The user will be able to experience quicker boot times, however, anytime he/she would try to install a new game, the directory of which resides on the slower part of the drive, the effect would be cascaded into the faster parts of the drive since both sections are on the same platter and there is only one spindle..

Offline or Online

I have noticed an odd trend in the last few years, thinking it was merely a fad as engineers, coders, and managers let the proliferation of cheap and widely available broadband go to their heads.  It’s not just in one field or another, but all over the place – everything, whether it needs it or not, is going online.  The three biggest fields where we notice this happening with reckless abandon are games, hardware, and customer service.  The reason is, if not clear, simple.  Businesses do things for only one reason – profit – whether in the short term or the long term.  Either they believe they can produce a superior product or service that will attract new customers, or they believe they can get their customers to give them more money.  Unfortunately, I believe that most of them simply want their customers to give them more money; here’s why.

Regarding hardware, this is the most likely to be in the category of producing better hardware but it is not entirely immune from the desire to extract money from consumers.  In the last few weeks, I’ve played with both the Eye-Fi wireless SD card, and the Logitech Harmony remote for the Xbox 360.  Both require an internet connection, neither one actually requires one to perform its function.  In both cases, not only is an internet connection required, but the user must sign up for an account with the company for their Web portal.  In the case of the Logitech Harmony remote, this enables them to provide fresh new configuration files for new A/V hardware as soon as it comes out.  It also allows them to collect data on who’s using what hardware with what else, data that is valuable to companies for marketing purposes.  The ability to retrieve drivers online is not new, but it is very nice.  That one be required to store that configuration data on the Harmony servers is not.  The Eye-Fi wireless SD cards operate in much the same way, having to hit the remote server in order to send data to the local computer.  This has been corrected in the newest revision of the Eye-Fi technology, but it’s a feature only included on the most ruinously expensive hardware targeted at RAW-shooting professionals, where America’s anemic broadband-upload bandwidth would be legitimately crippling.

TL;DR:  These days, more stuff that doesn’t need to be online, is.

]]> http://www.techwarelabs.com/why-must-everything-be-online/feed/ 2 http://www.techwarelabs.com/bait-and-switch/ http://www.techwarelabs.com/bait-and-switch/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:01:45 +0000 Jason Jacobs http://www.techwarelabs.com/?p=2584 Scammers, Frauds, and Thieves Oh My!

The world wide web is fraught with an endless supply of theives, scammers, phishers, malware, viruses, and outright fraud. Websites run by owners and sometimes hackers with nothing but the foulest of intent literally sitting around waiting for the unsuspecting to stumble upon their page and be suckered in. The list of websites to avoid grows at a staggering rate and even when a fraudulent website goes down it seems that two more pop up to take its place. What the web needs is a good dose of pest control and some international laws to put these people behind bars. But until that happens your best tool in fighting the online scumbags is a little dose of common sense and some research.  That having been said I voluntarily let myself be exposed to one of these online operations so you all can see the dirty underbelly of the beast. If you think you don’t need the lesson I hope you trust your credit card company and have plenty of money to burn.

Step One Identify a Product to be Purchased

The buying habits of most consumers out there are controlled by ads and of course desire. So we see a product advertised and naturally compare it to what we already have or don’t have which results in desire. For me personally I had a desire for a good digital camera that has some of the features of a DSLR but without the associated weight. I wanted a point and shoot with the quality of a DSLR, the ability to add a flash, and the movie capabilities of a good camcorder. I narrowed my choices to just a few among which was the Canon G10. With my candidates selected we proceeded to the next step.

Online Searching is not Always your Friend

Popping open Google took all of 1.5 seconds, the resulting search for the best price took quite a bit longer. Digging through links and sifting through the prices took the better part of an hour. Finally I found a rather generic looking website offering the Canon G10 and pretty much all of my other candidates and significantly lower prices than others online.  Get ready for the Disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: TechwareLabs does not endorse any of the following websites and does not suggest in any way that you purchase products from these websites. Any loss of money or compromise of your credit information is not the responsibility of TechwareLabs. This article is intended for informational purposes and to help you avoid financial and data losses.

Now that that is out of the way I arrived at EliteCamcorders.com and to exemplify the price differential we will use the following table:

Now  the differences in price between Newegg and EliteCamcorders was huge, especially when you look at the higher end camera the D90. As I personally don’t know of anyone willing to burn $100 let alone $340 for no good reason I quickly gave EliteCamcorders a call.

After waiting on hold for a sales representative for five minutes I was assured that both the G10 and the D90 were in stock and ready to ship. I was also told that if ordered on a Monday I should receive the camera on or before Thursday. Since I really only wanted a portable camera (and this was an excerise in Bait and Switch) I selected the cheaper Canon G10. The camera was ordered on a Friday at 1:25PM, by 1:31 I had an e-mail confirming my order and telling me I needed to call them back to “confirm” my order. I found this a bit unusual as I had never had to call to confirm an order before.  And here is where out online experience takes a turn for the worse, much worse.

The Dirty Underbelly

Before I tell what occured it is important to explain the tactics behind  bait and switch. Basically a retail store, entices you with a low price to get you in the door and ready to buy, but once the purchaser goes to buy you find that you need to upgrade something to buy it, or the product is no longer in stock and the alternative product is much more expensive. The online version of this is much the same and thus I will continue explaining my experience.

After the purchase was made I called the number in the e-mail to “confirm” my order. After being asked for the numbers on my CC card, my address, etc I was asked if I needed a battery for an additional $100. I asked if the G10 was a retail unit and was told yes. As such I said it should come with a battery and was told it did not.

Thats most interesting, Lets take a closer look. A quick check of their website shows that the tab “Items Included” is both blank and non-functional. This is so that the store can claim whatever they want when they say that something is or is not included. I told them to just ship me the camera as it was, for if it is a retail box then it should come with the battery. I also asked for a tracking number for the camera so I knew when to expect it and was told that my tracking info would be included in an e-mail that would follow.

Two days went by without a “followup” e-mail so I called again and was told this time that the camera was backordered (here comes the switch part) but that an alternate product the Panasonic DMC-FZ28K was in stock and available, the DMC-FZ28K is a 10MP camera compared to the 14.7MP (15MP) of the Canon and it is also not nearly as professional a product. EliteCamcorders lists the DMC-FZ28K for $399 making it $40 more expensive than the Canon G10, but wait theres more. I was then informed that the only DMC-FZ28K left was one that was included with their “Deluxe” bundle for $699 and that he (the sales rep) could process my order immediately if I liked. At this point I was sure that any regular customer of theirs would need vaseline for their ordering experience and politely declined. At this point I was told the backorder of the G10 would be 3-4 weeks if not longer and I promptly asked them to cancel my order. The sales rep quickly put me on hold for five minutes and when he came back he told me his manager authorized him to split up the “deluxe” package and sell me just the camera for the regular price. I again politely turned the offer down and asked him again to cancel my order at which point I was told “Yeah, Fine…” as he hung up on me.

UPDATE: After additional research I returned to the EliteCamcorders website to check on some details and noticed that the “BackOrdered” G10 price has dropped down to $359. This of course meant one of two things:

A. The G10 was now back in stock.

B. The site is trying even harder to entice peoplel to buy then switch the product on them, or force additional purchases.

I called the 800 number to find out. After being put on hold for 30 minutes the sales person who told me he was transferring me to another department picked up the phone again, but this time answered as the customer service department. . . Interesting.  I inquired as to the status of the G10 and was told it was in stock and ready to sell. I then informed them of my previous cancelled order and was put on hold while the salesman checked his stock (didn’t he just do that?). When he returned he apologized for being wrong and told me the G10 was indeed out of stock. I asked about the lowered price and was told that they didn’t control pricing, instead the warehouse controlled pricing. You’re kidding right? I laughed and hung up as my BS meter just went nuke.

Reality check here: Why would any legitimate retailer reduce the price on a product that is not even in stock? The answer: They wouldn’t, there would be no need.

This all could have been avoided with a quick Google search of “Elitecamcorders” that turns up a plethora of information regarding these scammers.  Some quick information:

A search on their phone number 800-970-2966 shows that this number was used by XtremeCameras.com a now closed site. It seems that EliteCamcorders has gone through some transformations in their efforts to continue doing business as the company used to also be known as Xtreme Cameras (XtremeCameras.com), U Buy Digital (UBuyDigital.com), The Camera Professionals (TheCameraProfessionals.com), HD Camera World (HDCameraWorld.com). Are you starting to get the picture now?

Conclusion:

Unfortunately there is some truth to the old saying “if it looks and sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. As consumers it falls upon each of us to do our homework and not checkout and pass over your credit card information or hit the order button right away. A simple two minute Google search is all that is needed to turn up some information about the company you will be dealing with. Some good resources in your fight against these scumbags are:

• Reseller Ratings (excellent online directory of many website and how reliable they are)
• Google (add the search terms fraud and scam, or complaints to the company name and you will get much more accurate results)
• BBB (a good listing but by no means complete of companies that you will do business with)

Ultimately I did not receive anything from EliteCamcorders and I took the additional proactive step to notify my credit card company about the transaction and that any charges from their company were to be denied. I cannot stress enough the apparant illegality of their actions in this attempted Bair and Switch and cannot recommend that any ever do business with them.

I am not suggesting that EliteCamcorders is indeed a business engaged in illegal activities, all I am saying is that the business practices are questionable and that you should be aware of these tactics used to sell you merchandise that you probably don’t need. That’s if of course you receive them.

Keep your eyes open, do simple searches, and knowing what the signs of this classic fraud are will keep you from making these mistakes.

Modifying the Seagate 1.5TB Hard Drive: Unleash the Hidden Performance Within

Introduction

As many of you know, recently Seagate released one of the largest consumer drives on the market: the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS . The drive’s capacity is 1.5 TB (1500 GB) or approximately 1.397 TB. The drive specifications are decent and Seagate itself announced that this drive will be able to handle 120 MB/sec sustained transfer rate. All of us know that these rates will not be across the whole drive and were most likely obtained under the best possible conditions. That being said, we still can not overlook the fact that a 1.5 TB drive’s speeds place it directly in the Velociraptor territory. After discovering this astonishing speeds people normally bust out their Western Digital Velociraptor drives and start benchmarking them for comparison. So, what do they get? Velociraptor obviously wins in all categories – max speed, min speed, average speed, access time, you name it and it wins it. At this point they label the Seagate drive as second best and close the case. Of course thats the point, the Seagate drive was not meant to compete with the Velociraptor which is a performance drive and is instead targeted towards good performance and high storage capacity. So end of story right? . . . What if I told you there was a way to modify the 1.5TB Seagate to unleash the hidden beast within. . .

I decided to take the matters a step further. The WD Velociraptor is the largest “Raptor” class drive available on the market with the capacity of 300 GB. Despite the fact that it is the largest out of the lot, you still have a 300 GB drive compete against a drive that is basically five times its size. Normally, the giant will not stand a fighting chance, (look up David and Goliath if you don’t believe me) so I decided to even the fight out a little. What kind of speeds would you get if you were to take the large drive and downsize to the size of the Velociraptor? I decided to find out.

Prep for Surgery

Though really in this case we are not going to open up the drive, flash the firmware, or do cutting of any kind.

What we did to the 1.5 TB hard drive was to shrink it. There are a 5 easy steps you have to follow in order to accomplish that.

1. Download SeaTools DOS version from the Seagate website.

2. Burn the ISO onto a blank CD using any standard CD burner.

3. Put the burned CD into the CD-Drive and restart your computer.

4. The CD will boot automatically into the software’s graphical interface at which point you must click “ACCEPT” to the licence agreement.

5. Click the drive labeled “ST31500341AS” by left clicking the name.

6. Go to the “Advanced Tools” tab and select the “Set Capacity Manually” option.

7. Once you have done that, a blank dialog should appear. Enter the amount of LBAs (Logical Block Addresses) you want your “new” drive to have and click “Continue”. The magic number for the 300 GB mark is 589080586. For reference the max number that you can enter into this field is 2930277167 which equals 1500.302 GB.

8. The confirmation message should look like the screenshot below. Once you achieved the confirmation, you are done. You can take out the CD and press the reset button or click “CTRL + ALT + DEL” to restart your computer.

**Note: The “Set Capacity Manually” only accepts LBA number so if you put something like “300 GB”, the software will set the size to zero and you will have to shut down the computer, restart and put the correct number into the Box. Also, after the capacity has been set, the software can not alter the size unless you completely Shut Down your computer, a simple Reset will not work.

After you set the size less than the maximum capacity, the remaining space will be invisible to the system and thus rendered useless. (If you downsize the 1500 GB drive to 300 GB, the other 1200 GB would be invisible) The drive will effectively become 300 GB in size.

Now I can hear you all screaming “What happened to 1.2TB worth of my drive space?” As I mentioned the drive is now a 300GB drive for all purposes. Look at it this way, the 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor is approximately ~$229 while the price of the Seagate 1.5TB drive is approximately ~$119 at the time of this writing. Now what you end up with is a drive that is higher in performance in all regards except seek times at a lower cost per GB. We are all about getting more for less around here. The added benefit is that you can always go back and reclaim that 1.2TB at any time, try to expand the Velociraptor at a later date (good luck).

The Past

The world of Central Processing Units (CPUs) is an interesting one, driven largely by the competition between AMD and Intel and in some cases, Via.  It is strange to see how, over time, people’s expectations of CPUs have changed.  In recent years it has become apparent that we will never be satisfied, that no processor is “fast enough”.  As soon as a new processor is released, consumers find a way to push its limits, and this “need for speed” is what keeps companies like AMD and Intel going.  The interesting thing here is how the quest for speed, and the means of attaining it have changed over time.

Early in the game, the manufacturing technology was not a major driver of the change in processors, the focus was on the architecture.  The leading style for PC applications was x86, and the competition between AMD and Intel was to make the best x86 processor possible.  At the time, they didn’t have the luxury of hundreds of billions of transistors per chip, they had to pick and choose their battles, and attempt to predict what would be most important to the consumer.

At that time, clock speed was what everyone looked for to determine the top CPU.  Intel’s Pentium processor debuted with a clock speed of 66 MHz, which seems like nothing now, but was nearly triple that of its predecessor.  The emphasis on clock speed grew dramatically as Intel released its Pentium 2, 3, and 4 models at 300 MHz, 500 MHz, and 1.5 GHz respectively.  Now we are all so used to clock speeds in the Gigahertz range that we have forgotten how recently we broke that barrier.

The Present

Now consumers not only want to do things fast, they want to do a lot of things fast, at once, and this has driven a change in the industry.  The processor had reached the point where its progression was beginning to slow, and the resolution was dual-core, allowing users to multitask much more efficiently.  Now we are seeing quad-core in desktop applications and significantly more cores in server applications.  The only way that this became possible was through major advances in process technology, by shrinking the size of the transistor, CPUs could have exponentially more of them.  This allows for not only more powerful cores, but for multiple cores to be included in one package.

Intel has been a major driver of process technology, largely because of its leading edge fabrication plants (fabs), and large R&D budget.  They released the first 45nm CPU in 2007 and AMD followed shortly thereafter.  Now that AMD has spun off its fabs into a new, independent company GlobalFoundries, expect more competition from them in driving process technology.

The Future

With CPUs trending towards more cores and less power, especially for laptops and netbooks, look for quick advances in manufacturing technology.  It was only 2 years between 65nm and 45nm, and I would expect that 32nm processors are not far away.  With a new technology and smaller transistors, look for the next wave of processors to have much faster clocks, more cores (on average), and longer battery life in mobile applications.  Could the next wave of 8 Cored 32nm processors be right around the deveoping corner? Every time it appears that Intel is unbeatable, AMD has showed the thought behind their name (Advanced Micro Devices) and shocked Intel, time and time again, .  Look for AMD to quickly close the gap that Intel has created, and possibly beat them to the 32nm punch. And it could all go down sooner than we all think…

What have you Heard?