Tips Of The Week

Tip 1:
Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) combine the features of SSDs and HDDs in the same unit, containing a hard disk drive and an SSD cache to improve performance of frequently accessed data. These devices offer near-SSD performance for many applications.

Tip 2:
You are likely to miss the availability of weekly once trains in both IRCTC and the official Railway websites, because you need enter a particular date to look for trains between any two stations. ERail website will give you all the available trains without forcing you for the date.

Tip 3:
Since HDD Mechanic software repairs the file system structure in a HDD, it may also work well with SSDs containing the same FAT and NTFS file systems. But please make it sure before making any trial attempt.

What is SSD?

Question Of The Week

What is SSD?

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device. SSDs have no moving or mechanical parts, which distinguish them from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) which contain magnetic spinning disks with movable read/write heads.

 

Since SSDs have no moving parts, they are basically silent, do not require cooling and can tolerate shock and vibration. While the most important advantage of a SSD is lower access time with less latency, the disadvantage is that SSDs are about 10 times more expensive than HDDs.

Most SSDs use I/O interfaces developed for HDDs, thus permitting simple replacement in all machines with the 2.5-inch form factor for laptops and 3.5-inch for desktop computers. Typically the same file systems used on HDDs can also be used on SSDs. While HDDs are available up to 4 TB, commonly used SSDs are less than 1 TB only.

 

There are two different types of SSDs; 1.the SLC (single level cell) and 2. the MLC (multi level cell). An SLC SSD is simply built where 1 bit rests within 1 cell of the SSD. Conversely, a MLC SSD means there are two bits within 1 cell of the SSD. MLC SSDs are lower priced but slower and less reliable than SLC SSDs. While the life expectancy of a MLC SSD might be similar to that of HDDs, SLC SSDs have been estimated to live anywhere between 49 years and 149 years, on average!

 

Newer SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, generally require half the power of HDDs and retain data without power. Older D-RAM based SSDs require as much power as HDDs, need separate power sources, such as batteries, to maintain data after the system is shut down. MLC flash is most common and is often found in consumer-grade products such as cameras, phones, pen drives, memory sticks and portable music players.

 

SSD technology suffers from a degradation phenomenon where the NAND cells show a measurable drop in performance called write amplification. A technique called wear leveling is implemented to mitigate this effect, but the drive will inevitably degrade in a gradual manner throughout its life.

HDD Mechanic

Program Of The Week

HDD Mechanic

 

Have you ever encounterd a reading error in any of your hard disk drives? Does it say, "file system structure corrupted"? It happened to my 5 year old 160GB sata HDD, after I interrupted a partitioning process in Acronis due to powercut (I live in tamilnadu, boss). For nearly a month, I was wasting my time to repair it through Windows Checkdisk and Acronis. Both of them identified that disk as healthy but did nothing.

 

Finally, I found HDD Mechanic through Google. Actually it is meant for recovery of lost files, when you are not able to read/write in the HDD. Of course, I had all my files in another disk as backup. But, I did start the process through HDD Recovery Wizard without much confidence. After a few hours, it found some files in the disk. When I closed the program, I found that if had repaired the file system structure and the disk was 75% back to normal in speed and space.

eRail

Website Of The Week

www.erail.in

This website presents the information about trains in India. Of course, you can see all those details in official Railway and IRCTC websites but only for express trains. Erail is unique in its display of the list of trains by including PASSENGER trains between any two selected stations. If you highlight/ double click on any train, you can see the detailed schedule. Moreover, you are likely to miss the availability of weekly trains in official websites but not here. Very useful one.