Hard drive failure

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: February 12th, 2010 | 0 Comments

This week I have been asked to fix a computer by someone that I know, he has the computer a little over a year now and it has suddenly stopped working for him. Once the computer starts up you see the manufacturers splash screen, then nothing! It just stays there.

I thought it was a bit strange after a while of looking about I saw that the computer was not recognising the hard drive that was in the computer! Next I popped open the computer and with great difficulty I managed to get out the enclosure that holds the hard drive in place.

This was now the perfect time to use my external hard drive cables that I bought a while back, I connected the cables up and into my computer and turned the power on and the drive begun to spin, but no usb drive was detected. I thought that was a bit strange because every drive I connected before always got picked up by the computer.

So my last test was to power down my pc, disconnect my hard drive and plug in his hard drive, when I did this I got the same problem as his computer, it would boot to the manufacturers splash screen and go no further, this is when I knew the hard drive had failed. So I reconnected my hard drive and after a bit of online searching I found that the make of this hard drive had actually being given an unbelievable amount of problems, everyone had the same problem as the hard drive I have.

It turn out this hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) would work perfectly one day and you would shut the pc down normally and the next day it would just not work. So basically the hard drive is bricked. The problem apparently was to do with the firmware on the hard drive itself, there is now a fix released for the hard drive which will prevent this from happening, however if your hard drive has already been bricked then there is no way to flash the new firmware onto it.

There is a way to fix these hard drives, someone found this hack that would work involving getting a Nokia Mobile cable and connecting it to the hard drives pins and using HyperTerminal or putty to send commands to it, I think it looks a bit complex so decided not to give it a go.

After a while of looking for a new hard drive online I quickly realised how expensive some people are selling them for. I decided I would go for a Western Digital hard drive as they are the most reliable.

Most hard drives I looked up cost around €70.00 , The current hard drive in the computer had a capacity of 500gb so I asked him if he wanted more space, and since he does a lot of multimedia work he said he could do with a bit more, so we went to the next available size which was 640gb.

The cheapest place I found this hard drive was on Komplett where it was just €54.78, not bad so before I ordered it I said I will have a look in Pc world here in town and the price was just mental, they were selling a 500gb hard drive for around €140.00! Not a chance I was going to buy it from them, so I ordered it from komplett.

The funny thing is that the UK PC world are selling the same hard drive as the Irish PC world for only €70.00! It is ridiculas the way they can have such a huge difference in their prices, so much for a chain store, I thought they all kept their prices the same!

Western Digital (My Passport Essential) Portable Hard Drive

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: November 18th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Last week I went out and bought a new external hard drive :D . I had been meaning to get a new for a while now but just didn’t get round to it. So on my way home from college I went into PC World and bought a new one.

I already have an external hard drive, however it requires a mains adaptor, so it is not the best "portable" hard drive. So the new hard drive had to be USB powered.

After a while of looking at the various hard drives available I knew that the Western Digital was definitely the best. The one I bought is called Western Digital (My Passport Essential) Portable Hard Drive it looks really nice with a gloss finish.

I got the 250gb version for only €59.98, which is far cheaper than what I paid for my last one that required mains power. My old external cost about €120, basically double the price! But that is just because it has been so long since I bought my old external hard drive. Prices were definitely going to drop over the years.

One thing I hate is how hard drives are advertised, they say that you will have 250gb however you really only get 232gb! I have no idea what is taking up the other 18gb!i have formatted it a few times and still it is only 232gb, this was the same with my old hard drive, I think that the storage space that we actually will get should be on the front!

A good thing to note about this hard drive is that it can transfer data really fast! I transferred 8.05gb in only 2 and a half minutes!

Also I finally found out how to get the larger hard drives to get picked up by the PS3, all you have to do is format it to FAT32 :D . Just thought I would throw that in there, it is great, now I can play all my music and videos on my TV through my playstation!

**UPDATE**

Ok I found out why I am missing the 18gb, it is all to do with the American version of gb, in America they see a gb a 1000mb however really a gb is 1024mb. So those extra 18gb being advertised are not real! If it was the standard 1024mb as a gb then I would have had my full 250gb :D .