Hard Drives | PC Pro blog

Posts Tagged ‘ hard drives ’

What does it take to kill a hard drive?

Monday, December 7th, 2009

snow smaller 1

Let me divert your mind to the physics of snow.

Let’s avoid the usual stuff about the individuality of snowflakes, and pass straight on to what happens when you encounter the accursed things in their billions – possibly trillions. In my case, this was last week, as a front passed over the Alps bringing rain at, or just above, freezing then moving on to snow, and a lot of it – half a metre in five hours, finishing at dusk.

After dark, the snow petered out and the skies cleared, allowing temperatures to drop to -10 or below. This combination of circumstances lead to an almost complete shutdown of the whole of Eastern Switzerland. All the passes were closed – even the big ones (Gotthard & San Bernadino) that take trucks through to Italy – but unfortunately for me, I had to drive into the middle of the whole thing with ten PCs and two servers in the back of the car.
(more…)

Tags: hard drives

Posted in: Random

Permalink

USB 3 first benchmark – it’s here, and it’s fast

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

usb-chart3

The first USB 3 external hard disk has arrived in the PC Pro Labs – a pre-production sample courtesy of our friends at Asus – and initial impressions are simply excellent.

The chart above may need a little explaining. The first two groups of results show how long it took, in seconds, to copy a folder of 3,000 small files, totalling 300MB in size, back and forth between a RAM disk and an external hard drive using various connections. The 650MB results are based on the same process using a single 650MB file.

The USB 2 and USB 3 figures were obtained by simply connecting the external drive first to a USB 2 port and then to a USB 3 one. The eSATA figures are from the A-Listed Iomega Professional External Hard Drive. (more…)

Tags: eSATA, hard disks, hard drives, usb