July 2012 – Frank Leonhardt's Blog

Western Digital Red Series review

I’ve got a SATA drive throwing bad sectors – not good. Its a WD Cavier Green, and it’s about a year old. But I’ve hammered it, and it was cheap. An IDE drive throwing bad sectors is never good – once the problem is visible it’s on the way out. I doubt WD would replace it under warranty as its not on a Windows box and I therefore can’t download and run their diagnostic, but we’ll see about that.

And anyway, Western Digital launched the ideal replacement two weeks ago – the Red series. Unlike the Green, it’s actually designed to run 24/7 – cool and reliable. They’re pitching it squarely at the NAS market, for RAID systems with five or less drives, they say. Perfect, then. And a good market offering given that last month’s IDC low-end storage forecast predicted an 80% gowth in the small/home office NAS market over the next five years.

The Red series launches with 1Tb, 2Tb and 3Tb versions, with 1Tb on each platter.

I checked the specifications with scan.co.uk – 2ms access times too! Lovely! Hang on, that’s too damn good. I suspect someone at Scan has gone through the specification sheet to add the access time to their database and found the only thing on the list measured in milliseconds. Actually it can withstand a 2ms shock! WD doesn’t mention the access times, or the spin-speed come to that (about 5400 given the hum).

Well, having now checked one of these beasts out, the access times are obviously something they’d want to keep quiet about. In comparison with the Cavier Green, which is supposed to be a low-impact desktop drive, it’s about the same on writes and about 30% slower on reads. However, once it’s in position it is about 30% faster streaming. This would be handy for an application where single files were being read, but not so brilliant if you’re jumping about the disk at the behest of multiple users – which is the intended market for this thing. Real-world performance remains to be seen, but I don’t think it’s going to be as quick as a Cavier Green, and they’re slow enough.

So why would anyone want one of these?

Compared to the Cavier Green, the red is rated for 24/7 use. Compared to the Black series, or anyone else’s nearline drives, its performance is terrible, but it is cheaper and much cooler with a lower power consumption.

If you want performance at this price point the Seagate Barracuda drives are cheaper and a lot faster, but Seagate don’t rate them for continuous use. The Hitachi Deskstar, on the other hand, is rated for 24/7 operation even though it’s a desktop drive and it outperforms the WD Red by quite a margin too. But hang on – WD recently acquired Hitachi’s HD operation so that’s a WD drive to. So for performance go for the Baracuda and for best performance running 24/7 go for the Deskstar.

The WD Red is basically a low-performance near-line drive except that it’s not, actually rated as being as reliable as the real near-line drives. But it is claimed to be more reliable than the Green series, and they do run just cool and just as quiet (subjectively). Is it worth the 35% price premium over the Green? Well, actually, sitting here with a failing Green, the Red with the three-year warranty is looking attractive for my data warehousing application. This isn’t NAS, it’s specialised, and I need low-power (cool) reliable drives to stream large files on and off. They could be just the job for that.

As an afterthought, comparing them with the Black, they also lack the vibration sensors to protect them in a data centre environment or a box chocked full of other drives. The idea of putting them in a rack server as a low-power alternative looks less attractive than it did.

23-July-123-September-12

Using ISO CD Images with Windows – Burn.Now problems

When CD-R drives first turned up you needed special software to write anything – originally produced by Adaptec but they were soon overtaken by Nero, with NTI and Ulead having lower cost options. Now, when you get a PC it will usually come with one of the above bundled, and Microsoft has added the functionally to Windows since XP (for CD, if not DVD). This is not good news for the independent producers, but Microsoft’s offering doesn’t quite cut the mustard, so most people will want something better.

My new Lenovo PC came bundled with Corel Burn.Now. Corel recently bought the struggling Ulead, and this is fundamentally the same product as Ulead burn.now. Unfortunately Burn.Now is also pretty feeble – it just can’t do the basics.

To duplicate a CD you need to copy all the data on it. Pretty obvious really. If you’re not copying drive-to-drive it makes sense to copy the data to a .ISO image on your hard disk. You can then transfer it to another machine, back it up or whatever; and write it to a new blank disk later. Burn.Now will create a CD from an ISO image, but if you ask it to copy a disk it uses its own weird and whacky .ixb format. Some versions of Burn.Now gave you the choice, but not the new Corel. It’s .ixb or nothing. This matters, because whilst everyone can write .ISO files, only Burn.Now can write from .IXB format.

Burn.Now is crippled. What about Microsoft’s current built-in options? You can actually write an ISO image using Windows 7 – just right-click on the file and select “Burn disc image”. Unfortunately there is no way to create such a file with Windows. To do this you need add Alex Feinman’s excellent ISO Recorder, which basically does the opposite: Right-click on the CD drive and select Create Image from CD/DVD.

Unfortunately ISO Recorder doesn’t read all disks – it won’t handle Red Book for a start. This is a bit of a limitation – was its author, Mr Feinman concerned about music piracy? Given Windows Media Player can clone everything on an Audio CD without difficulty, his conciousness efforts won’t make a lot of difference.

So – Windows is its usual painful self. If you just want to simply create an image of a CD or DVD with no bells and whistles, go to UNIX where it’s been “built in” since the 1980’s (when CD-ROMs first appeared). Just use the original “dd” command:

# dd if=/dev/acd0 of=my-file-name.iso bs=2048

An ISO file is simply a straight copy of the data on the disk, so this will create one for you. You can write it back using:

# burncd -f /dev/acd0 data my-file-name.iso fixate
Or
# cdrecord dev=1,2,3 my-file-name.iso

Burncd is built in to FreeBSD (and Linux, IIRC), but only works with atapi drives. In the example it assumes the CD recorder is on /dev/acd0 (actually the default).

Cdrecord works with non atapi drives to, but has to be built from ports on FreeBSD and for other platforms it’s available here – along with lots of other good stuff. The example assumes the device is 1,2,3 – which is unlikely! Run cdrecord -scanbus to locate the parameters for your drive.

Once you have your ISO file, of course, you could use Windows to write it. The choice depends on whether you have strongly held views on whether Windows is a worthy desktop operating system. Corel Burn.Now is, however, a long way from being a worth CD/DVD writing utility.

20-July-128-August-12

Samsung’s (Pyrrhic) Victory in Galaxy vs Apple iPad Case

British judge Colin Birss has struck a blow for the rest of the world against Apple’s litigious tendencies towards anyone any everything their lawyers decide has enough money to sue. Apparently, the 9th July ruling (Samsung Electronics (UK) Limited & Anr v. Apple Inc., High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, HC11C03050) requires Apple to put a notice on its UK website and take out advertisements in a large selection of newspapers and magazines stating that Samsung’s Galaxy tables are not a copy of Apple’s iPad, contrary to what Apple has been claiming in court. Apple is, apparently, appealing.

Samsung Galaxy Beam — Samsung Galaxy handset – not like an iPad

As part of the ruling, the judge said that Samsung’s offering was “not as cool” as an iPad. Although I’m at a loss as to what the legal definition of “cool” might be, it’s clearly relevant in a non-legal sense. iPads are “cool” as far as the fanbois are concerned, and unreliable yuppy status-symbols for the rest of us. If we want a tablet for any reason we’ll base the decision on price and support, not brand image.

iPad - too cool to be a Galaxy — The Apple iPad is much cooler than the Samsung Galaxy. Apparently.

So – the judge is telling Apple it must tell the world that the Galaxy isn’t a clone of the iPad. Surely Apple’s problem is potential customers lusting after an iPad but then opting for a cheaper Samsung alternative. That the Galaxy is not the same as a cut-price iPad should be something Apple shouts from the rooftops anyway. All their current rhetoric, that the Galaxy is an iPad clone, is playing into Samsung’s hands.

6-July-1224-July-12

Lunar Lander (LEM) – original BASIC/FOCAL version

One of the most popular games of the late 1970’s was Lunar Lander (also known as Rocket, LEM, Apollo and what-have-you). The general idea was always to land a Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) on the surface of the moon (or other planet) by adjusting the burn rate of retro-rockets in order to control deceleration and effect a nice soft touchdown.

The version presented here uses a set of calculations based on a program called LUNAR written by Jim Storer for the PDP-8 while a student at Lexington High School in the USA in 1969. It was converted from the original FOCAL into BASIC by Dave Ahl (then publisher of Creative Computing magazine) in the late 1973.

As far as I can tell, I have disentangled the calculations well enough to preserve the original’s look-and-feel, though it required a complete re-write for Java (which does not support the GOTO statement for program logic flow control). I couldn’t say that the calculations are accurate to life, but a good attempt at realism was made in the original. If anyone from NASA would care to comment please drop me a note.

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