Jack-O-Bytes Reviews: Hard Drive

Showing posts with label Hard Drive. Show all posts

Sunday, 15 January 2012

Possible Causes of PC shutdowns and BSOD's

Hey everyone, Today I am going to be looking at a few of the reasons that you can get BSOD's or random shutdowns on your computer. There are lot of things that can cause BSOD's and shutdowns but I am going to mention some of the more common reasons.

Memory or RAM

I am going to start with the RAM or Memory as it is sometimes known. The RAM in your computer acts as a buffer between the CPU and the Hard drive. It is used to store in use programs to help them perform better than if they were loading from the hard drive. Anyway, sometimes the RAM will become unstable and loose little bits of it's memory. If this happens when a program goes to the RAM to look for part of the program that is needed it isn't there. This isn't always too bad as sometimes it will just cause a program you are using to crash, If however the part of the RAM that fails is storing part of the Windows program it can cause BSOD's. You can test your RAM by downloading a program called Memtest86 from here This program can be burned to a disk or put on a pen drive so you can boot from it at start up. It then scans the RAM and tests it for damaged sectors.

RAM Can sometimes cause BSOD's due to damaged sectors

Hard Drive

The next piece of hardware that can cause a BSOD is the hard drive. The hard drive is the part of the computer that stores all of you programs and data. If a hard drive is damaged or starts to wear out it can sometimes damage the programs that are on the drive it self. Just like with the RAM this means that when the hard drive comes to load a piece of data that is needed by windows it can cause it to BSOD due to that part of the program not being there to be loaded. It can also be caused by a head crash which is where the hard drive head hits the disk platter and scratches away the data which renders that whole section unreadable and unusable. Finding out if you hard drive is on the way out is very much like finding out if the RAM is broken. All you need to do is download this program. HD Tune runs on the computer and checks the S.M.A.R.T of the hard drive and also scans the platter for errors.

Hard Drive Errors can cause BSOD's as well

Overheating

The next possible cause of a BSOD is if the hardware of the computer is overheating. There are many reasons that a piece of hard ware can overheat. The following list is some of the causes;

Damaged Fans
Blocked fans (Usually due to dust build up)
Blocked vents (Mostly on laptops caused buy covering the vents with fabric such as trousers)
Dried out thermal paste (often on older computers)
A heatsink that is not securely attached (damaged in transit or from being knocked or not correctly installed)

When a PC or Laptop starts to overheat it will often shut it self down which can sometimes cause a BSOD. You can check the temperature of the CPU by using a program called CPUID Hardware Monitor downloadable from here once this program is running it will scan all the sensors on the computer and report back the temperatures and voltages. If you can't even boot into windows without the computer BSODing then you will most likely have to go into the BIOS and go into the hardware or PC health section of it to see what temperatures that it is reporting. In the BIOS anything over 45c could be causing an issue, In windows anything over 55c will most likely be a problem once you stress the PC.

Overheating can often cause BSOD problems

Voltages and Power Supply

This one is a less likely cause of a BSOD but it is still a problem. Sometimes the power supply of a PC can go dodgy. This can be caused from stressing it too much (not having a powerful enough one for your hardware) or due to just the age of the power supply (The capacitors often age over time and don't hold charge properly) Also bad quality PSU's (generally less than $10 per 100w) can also cause problems. It is easy to check the voltages by using the same program as the temperature one above. CPUID Hardware Monitor reports back the voltages as well as the temperatures so you can kill two birds with one stone using this program. If the voltages seem a long way off their targets (Shown at the side of CPUID hardware monitor) then this could quite possibly be the cause of the BSOD's.

A bad PSU can cause BSOD's due to bad voltage supply

Now that you have read through this simple list of possible BSOD causes you can have a go at diagnosing the problem for your self. This will save you a lot of money if you find the problem and don't have to use a very expensive PC repair company.

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Apple, Dell, Intel Expect HDD Shortage to Have Drastic Impact on PC Market.

Although the high-tech market tends to recover quickly from almost all kinds of disasters and large manufacturers often try to reduce their risks, the flooding in Thailand and consequent potential shortage of hard disk drives will clearly affect the whole PC industry in the coming quarters. But while giants like Apple, Dell or Intel are concerned, they remain relatively optimistic.

Intel, the world's largest supplier of microprocessors on the planet, said on Friday that it was keeping an eye on a dynamic situation in Thailand that directly impacts that hard drive supplies, but expects existing stores of drives and unaffected sources to help keep the PC industry supplied.

"The PC supply chain has proven to be very resilient, as most recently demonstrated in the response to the earthquake in Japan," said Jon Carvill, a spokesman for Intel, reports Reuters news-agency.

Sunday, 23 October 2011

Seagate: Thai Flooding Is a Multi-Quarter Issues for Whole Hard Drive Industry.

Hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturing facilities Seagate Technology were not damaged by severe flooding in Thailand, but the company's production capacity is constrained by shortages of components. Even though Seagate moderately lowered its shipments forecast for the fourth quarter of calendar 2011, it clearly admits that the problems caused by the flooding are a multi-quarter issue.

Seagate, the world's second largest maker of hard disk drives, has two Thailand facilities: Seagate Teparuk, which produces head stack and head gimbal assemblies, and Seagate Korat, which manufactures slider, head assembly and head gimbal assembly as well as hard drives. At present, Seagate's own facilities in Thailand are running at full production, but the company experiences supply issues with third-party component manufacturers, which significantly reduces Seagate's ability to produce HDDs.

"Our business priority is to work with our external component suppliers, supporting their efforts to rebuild the supply chain as quickly as possible. We expect to experience significant impacts to our production levels, while our suppliers work together businesses up and running. Given the severity of the situation and the expense of supply constraints caused by the disruption, including those described by our primary competitor, the effects on our industry are likely to be substantial and will extend over multiple quarters," said Steven Luczo, chief executive officer of Seagate.

Monday, 16 May 2011

OCZ Announces Enterprise-Grade 960GB Solid-State Drive.

OCZ Technology Group, a leading provider of solid-state drives, has announced its new enterprise-grade solid-state drive (SSD) with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface along with proprietary controller architecture. The new Talos drives combine high reliability with high capacity (from 200GB to 960GB) and maximized input/output performance.

Talos SSDs are available in 3.5" form factors (2.5" to follow) and range from 200GB to 960GB. Talos SAS SSDs deliver speed with up to 64 000 4K random IOPS [input/output operations per second] and are specifically optimized for enterprise storage applications, providing clients who require substantial transactional processing with superior performance and cost-savings. Additionally, the Talos SAS interface offers the benefits of interoperability and integration with existing devices, flexibility for traditional storage environments, and the ability to scale greater amounts of drives, providing larger aggregate pools of storage. The drives also deliver reliability features including superior power loss protection, endurance, encryption, and ECC protection.

Saturday, 6 November 2010

How To Defrag Your Hard Drive In Windows XP

To De-fragment your hard drive go to

1) My Computer
2) Right click on A Hard Drive Symbol
3) Click Properties
4) Click on the Tools Tab
5) Find the button that says Defragment Now And click on it
6) Select the drive that needs defragmenting from the list at the top
7) Click Defragment in the bottom left corner
8) The computer will do the rest.

After you have done this you will most likely notice a performance boost. It may be a small amount of difference or a lot depending on whether or not you have ran a defrag program before..

www.customdesktops.moonfruit.com

Saturday, 30 October 2010

Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drive Review

I purchased the Western Digital Caviar Black as an upgrade over an older IDE drive. I chose the Caviar Black as it has better performance than the Caviar Green and Caviar Blue. I installed the drive with a Foxconn A6VMX motherboard and an Athlon 64 x2 5600.

Specs

Storage Ammount: 500, 640, 750, 1000, 2000

High Speed Cache: 32mb (64mb on only 2tb model)

Processor: Dual Processor (Allows for more data to be transfered quicker)

Quality

This hard drive seems to be very well built. It is heavy and has a very strong metal top and strong metal sides. This is a very positive thing for a hard drive as sometimes people knock them when trying to install them. It is built well and feels very sturdy.

Performance

I have had this hard drive for about 2 months now and in the time I have had it I have seens a very good increase in performance over an older Samsung F1 IDE drive. I did a few performance tests and these are the results;

Random Access: 12.3ms
Average Read: 78mb/s
Burst Speed: 220.4mb

As you can see from those results this hard drive has very good performance. These are the performance figures on the well known Samsung Spinpoint F3

Random Access: 13.8
Average Read: 124.8
Burst Speed: 258.9

As you can see. The Western Digital Caviar Black struggles to keep up with the F3 drive. I do however think that me having it partitioned into 3 peices and have a full XP install and loads of programs probably lowered it chances against the F3 so I would add a little performance to each of the Caviar Blacks results.

Noise and Temperature

This hard drive is very quiet for a performance drive. It isn't audiable at all over the noise of my fans in my computer. It does also stays very cool with temperatures ranging in my setup from 29c-34c. This is easily cool enough to help it continue working correctly for a long time.

That is all for this review,

Jack-O-Bytes