Hard Disk Drives

My wife's laptop has died. I have a couple of old computers lying around, so I thought I would resurrect one so she would have something to use until we get the laptop sorted out. I fired up the best of the lot and it booted the Windows install CD just fine (which only takes an eon), but it couldn't find the hard drive. What's going on? I was sure the hard drive in this system was working fine. Try it in another system and it is indeed dead. Bah. Guess I'll have to buy a new one. Well, looky here, Newegg has 80 Gig drives for $40. That's certainly cheap enough, so I ordered one. Shipping was $8.

With the way disk prices have fallen, you can probably buy a terabyte drive (that's a million megabytes) for $100, but I really don't want or need that much space. Just copying 20 Gigs off of the hard drive from the laptop took me six hours last night. I might have been able to cut it down a little if I had been willing to sit there and babysit the stupid machine, but that is something I just won't do.

It should only have taken 20 or 30 minutes, but good ol' drag and drop isn't much good for copying an entire hard disk. It runs for awhile and then it croaks on some file. It doesn't tell you where the file is, and there is no telling what order things get copied in, so all you can do is copy everything in that directory again, EXCEPT leave out that file.

The first problem was the System Volume Information folder in the root directory. Wouldn't copy that. Fine, copy everything but that. Then we start running into problems with file names in the Application Data subdirectories (every user has one). We have files that are buried in directories that are 20 levels down, and Windows is complaining that the filename is too long or some nonsense. I ran checkdsk before I started and it didn't find any problems. Windows is wonderful. Just keep telling yourself that.

Of course, only a neanderthal would think that copying everything would actually copy everything. There's probably some special program available that will do it. If I had know it was going to take six hours I would have spent the time necessary to track it down. Anyway, I gave up trying to copy the Application Data.

While I'm on Newegg (looking for a new hard drive for the old computer), it occurs to me that flash memory has gotten really cheap. For that kind of money I should be able to buy a solid state disk (SSD) for less than a hard disk. Turns out that isn't the case. They are more expensive than hard disks. What the heck is going on? I smell a rat. I’ll bet the disk drive vendors are paying off the memory card makers to keep their prices high so they won't cut their legs out from under them. Actually, no, it's not a conspiracy. I forgot about swap space.

Elliot reminded me at lunch today about that. Swap space is a special section of space on your hard disk. The computer uses this space to pretend that it is has zillion bytes of memory (RAM), even though it actually only has 500 megabytes. Since the computer can only do one thing at a time, it loads whatever it is working on into RAM, and whatever it doesn’t need at the moment gets written out to swap space. If you have several programs open at once, and you are changing back and forth between them, stuff is getting transferred between memory and swap space all the time.

Regular flash memory (like what is used for the BIOS and your USB thumb drives) has a limited lifetime. It can only be written about 100,000 times before it starts failing. Most of the data (like the operating system files and application programs) on a hard disk gets written once and stays that way. The small amount of user generated data (your email, the letter to your mom, your Quicken files) isn't going to have a big impact on the write limit. For that kind of use regular flash memory would be fine.

However, the swap space, and to a lesser extent, the internet cache, get overwritten continuously whenever the computer gets busy. If you overwrite your swap space a thousand times an hour, your SSD memory made with regular flash memory chips would only have a working lifetime of about 100 hours. That would not be good. So they are using something else, something better, something that lasts longer, and evidently, costs more.

I took the laptop into a local repair shop today. We’ll see what they find. It may be something as simple as a bad memory card, or even just a dirty connector, or it might be a BIOS virus. I suspect the virus. Murphy’s Law, you know. If that is indeed the case, that will mean writing a new BIOS into the flash memory where the BIOS resides. HP (maker of the laptop) has a program you can download that will update the BIOS. Unfortunately, your computer must be in operating condition to run it. It’s a Windows program. What I need is a boot CD with this program. I did some looking today and I didn’t find any sign of any such animal. The laptop may be goner. I’ll just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, when the new disk drive gets here, I can set up the old computer so my wife can access her Outlook Express files. I hope.