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See Also:
RAM Disks for NT
- eecsys
makes
some
ram disk software for NT, 2000, XP (including such sophisticated
features
as automatic write through to backing hard disk storage), it is also
referenced
briefly here.
- Microsoft (as part of a programming example) provides a
basic RAM
disk
for NT, it is referenced here
and here.
- ARSoft provides this
RAM disk for NT/2000 that is free and can be set up to 2GB
- here
is a ram
backed file system that was written by Neill Miller and Lars Bergstrom
for a computer course
- notes
on setting up ram disks on a number of platforms
- Cenatek makes the
"Rocket
Drive"
(a hardware RAM disk on a PCI card, this appears to be a lot more
reasonably
priced, though still about $1000, than previous "solid state disk" type
solutions) as well as ram disk software. The rocket drive is reviewed
here.
- basic
article
on the different RAM types.
- More solid-state
disks
- Gigabyte's i-RAM
card is
a RAM
disk on a PCI card, it gets its power from the PCI bus but its data
interface with the computer is actually though a SATA cable, so it
looks like a regular (but rather small) disk drive to the operating
system. The bare board is about US$100 and it takes regular DDR RAM
memory modules and can access up to 4GB (possibly up to 8GB in a future
version?). It is also battery backed up, so if your computer looses
power for a bit the drive will retain its data. It gets reviewed by The
Tech Report.
- Attorn BV makes a RAM based solid state drive with a disk
interface, the HyperDrive4.
Swap file sizing for NT
Firewire Interface
- ADS Technologies
makes
the
PYRO 1394
Firewire interface card, and in one package they bundle the full
version
of Adobe Premiere
- Adaptec makes the
FireConnect
4300
firewire card which they bundle with MGI Videowave
- firewire-1394.com
is a
store
front that specializes in firewire stuff
- Pinnacle
Systems
makes
some DV and firewire stuff
- x-bit labs has a good comparison
of USB2.0 to FireWire to ATA-100 interfaces for hard drives
External Serial ATA - eSATA
These units should be quite a bit faster that USB attached drives.
- In Aug'06 Iomega
launced a 320GB eSATA drive
- Novac makes some eSATA and USB external
drive towers for those with large storage requirements.
- Netcom's
NR5-4 is a 4-drive external box which will do RAID-5 across four
sSATA drives, it connects to the host computer via an eSATA interface.
- LaCie has a five
drive eSATA attached tower and they can link up to four of these to
provide up to a 20TB solution
RAID Controllers
A number of affordable RAID controller solutions are available these
days
(Hypermicro systems
carries a few). There are several that use IDE drives, including:
Slashdot discusses
(June 2004) the question of what RAID controller to use for a small
home server.
Arco makes a number of IDE
RAID
solutions, including controllers and mounting chasis.
I have installed a Promise FastTrack SX4000 IDE RAID controller in my
NT
4.0 server box. This controller supports a variety of RAID
configurations
with up to 4 drives (each drive is on its own IDE channel). I have
attached
four 80GB 7200 RPM drives, three from Maxtor and one Western Digital
and
set them up as a single RAID-5 array, which yields 240GB of usable
storage.
This card needs a DIMM RAM module (PC-100 or PC-133 speed) of between
64MB
and 256MB to function (and act as a cache). One of the Promise testing
reports actually lists some 512MB RAM parts so an even bigger cache
might
be possible.
The set up was pretty simple, just rearrange the guts of your
case
to
make room for the drives, route 4 IDE cables (here is where serial ATA
would be really nice!) and attach two power cables to the two power
splitters
that are supplied. Better make sure you've got adequate cooling
for
those drives. The card's BIOS allows you to set up the array,
then
you install the driver (in NT) and from then on you format the drive
and
go.
They supply a utility called PAM (Promise Array Management)
that you
can use to monitor and tweak the array. The controller can use the
S.M.A.R.T.
drive monitoring system too. The controller can be set to email you
when
something happens, as well it will log the event to the NT event
log.
One function it has is a "syncronize array" which can be scheduled to
happen
occasionally - when this occurs it recomputes the parity information.
The
first time this happened it also decided to rebuild one of the drives.
I had suspected one of the drives was a bit marginal as it had
occasionally
misbehaved in the past. A week later, when I got a replacement for it,
I got to try out the automatic rebuild feature. This worked quite well,
shut down the PC (with the right drive brackets this controller
supports
hot-swap too), remove the old drive, install the new drive, turn on the
PC. Then the FastTrack BIOS interrupts the boot to tell you that you
should
check your cables or if you have installed a new drive press ESC to
proceed.
Pressing the ESC key the PC continued to boot normally (although a bit
slower). By the time I opened up the PAM utility the drive was
already
rebuilding, no intervention required. In all it took about 70
minutes
to rebuild the drive (during which time the array was usable, although
somewhat slow - this is running on a dual 400MHz machine).
The only odd thing about this setup is the lack of drive
activity
lights,
the product material from Promise (along with the various reviews I
read)
all showed four status LEDs on the card's rear bracket, but mine did
not
have this, so right now I have no drive activity lights.
Serial ATA
USB
- EverythingUSB.com
has a lot of USB information
- EasyUSB
is an
adapter that fits in a 5.25 inch drive bay and gives you 2
front-mounted
USB ports along with a 3.5 inch drive bay. Apparently made by Antec.
- The USB
On
The
Go standard has just been formally released (22 Dec 01) this will
allow
two USB devices to communicate directly (without a computer having to
be
inbetween them). This could be really good news for storage intense
mobile
devices such as digital cameras and MP3 players and eventually tapeless
digital video recorders. As of July'05 not much has happened on
this front, but this ShareDrives
appears to be doing something similar.
- A review of the Atech
Flash Technology PRO II, which is an internally or externally
mountable,
USB connected, multi-format memory card reader that can accept
CompactFlash
Type I or II (including Microdrives), SmartMedia, Secure Digital or
MultiMedia
cards.
- The Mini
DigiDrive
from Addonics
is another of these multiple format flash card interface units, it is
available
in both an internal and external configuration.
- How about a USB memory
drive built into a Swiss Army Knife?
- USB
to Serial adapters
- USB is going wireless,
goodbye bluetooth
- Slashdot discusses options for portable
storage (which are typically USB connected). Ximeta makes some small NAS boxes
(i.e. ethernet interfaced) that might well prove portable too. These
are called the NetDisk and NetDisk Mini and are available in Canada at Futureshop.
- pqi
makes a number of USB connected drive modules
- Addonics makes a four
slot PCMCIA box that attaches to a computer via a USB2.0
connection, this allows on to build a very versatile flash card reader
and possibly also to use other PCMCIA type peripherials.
- Mediasonic sells a number of USB / Firewire external
drive enclosures.
- Archos makes some USB attached external disks, including
the ARCDisk
which is
available in 20 and 40GB sizes (LondonDrugs advertized the 20GB unit
for CDN$280 in Sept 2004) and is based on a 1.8" hard disk, making it
very small indeed.
- ARSTechnica (Apr'05) has a round up review of
10 USB pen drives, a good look at the various features that are
available, in case you need something like a drive you can boot from.
- Ideative is making an SD Flash Card
with a USB interface built in (that needs no extra adapters),
apparently SanDisk
and Delkin
also makes something similar.
- Fixing
and Formatting USB flash drives
- Recover
lost photos from flash drives
- The Silex
SX-2000WB is a USB device that allows you to attach various USB
peripherials (hard drives and maybe printers) and then shares them on a
802.11b/g wireless LAN.
- The Kanguru
BioSTOR USB drive housing encrypts/decrypts all data on the fly (so
the contents of the drive are always encrypted) and is unlocked by a
finger scanner.
- The Rally
Drive from OCZ is a USB flash drive that is twice as fast (at
reads) than the competition (Nov'05) delivering about 28MB/s read
rates, its also significantly faster (say 20-30%) on writes as well
- LaCie now has their "Lego-Brick" styled desktop
hard drives. Cute. What we now need are some external CD/DVD
burners to match and a small driveless computer in another brick...
- The Jaguar
Video and Music Player enclosure accepts a 2.5in hard drive and
makes it into a USB connected drive, but also adds video and audio
output jacks and the ability to play media that is stored on the drive.
- How to build a flash drive into a Lego
brick
- Novac is making an SATA
to USB interface module to allow easy temporary attachment of an
SATA harddrive
- Delayed Write Failure is a problem that plagues the
FireWire attached external drives (a good discussion of this can be
found at busTRACE
Technologies), there are some people who are reporting
similar issues with USB attached external drives. A possible fix
for this is to convert the partitions on the drive from primary to
logical. Eight
possible causes of this issue. This might be
associated with the "Large System Cache" feature that can become
enabled for Windows XP systems with more than 512MB of RAM, see
Microsoft's KB330174
for more details.
- Cooldrives Mini VCR allows
you to record video directly to CF and SD memory cards, plus has a USB
interface
- An external
eSATA to USB adapter from Addonics
- Olixir makes some very rugged external hard
drives (targeted at military and industrial use, so probably quite
pricey).
- Kingmax's USB Super
Stick looks to be about as small as USB pen drives will get
- LaCie is updating their silverscreen
multimedia drives, to 500GB with a variety of video and audio
outputs.
- Maxtor has teamed with Sentry to make a pair of fire-resistant
hard drives, one is a safe with a USB pass through jack, allowing
you to put a hard drive inside it, another is an external USB drive
case that is bulked up with layers of fire proofing.
SCSI
Tape Drives
- VXA drives from Ecrix
offer
high capacity
at reasonable cost, unfortunately for me these appeared shortly after I
got my DDS-3 unit otherwise I would have considered them
- DLT
- 8mm
- DAT DDS-1, DDS-2, DDS-3, DDS-4
- AIT
- SCSI
- IDE
- Iomega's REV
drive, a 35GB removable cartridge system might be an appealing
alternative to tape in some markets
FAT32 versus NTFS
Windows 98 introduced the FAT32 file system, which is needed for
partitions greater than 2GB (well it might actually be 4GB). The FAT32
system supports partitions up to 128GB. With Windows 2000 (and
continuing in Windows XP) Microsoft (see their knowledge
base) removed the ability to format partitions greater than 32GB
using the FAT32 format (though you can still use them if you can format
them elsewhere). This was to encourage you to use NTFS instead.
This artical from AnandTech has a good run down
on the differences between FAT32 and NTFS.
Now why would you want to continue using FAT32 on some drives? Well the
main reason I can think of is to allow you to move a drive between
several computer systems with different operating systems. For example
between Windows and Linux, or between Windows 98 and 2000. In order to
do this you would need FAT32 (or FAT 16 for a small drive) since NTFS
support is limited and still somewhat experimental on Linux, as well
NTFS support is only available through a third party driver on Windows
98.
With the advent of inexpensive external USB connected drives this is a
real issue. Especially as these units are often being built on 2.5"
laptop drives (and even smaller drives such as those used in the iPOD)
which makes them very portable and quite affordable (in Sept'05 a 60GB
unit could be bought for about US$100-150 depending largely on the make
of the drive inside).
But you say, Windows 98 is disappearing and I never use Linux or
Macs. Well there is one other application that has come along
recently. This is direct transfer between USB devices, currently this
is facilitated by a small device called a USB Bridge (such as this unit
from Delkin - see my digital
photography page for more). With one of these you can transfer data
from one USB device to another without needing a computer. This is
mostly of interest to digital photographers, allowing them to move
pictures from expensive flash storage cards onto a less expensive
device (such as a portable hard drive) in the field, allowing them to
free up the flash device for reuse. If you have a camera that emulates
a USB storage device then you can copy directly from the camera to an
external hard drive, if your camera needs special software then the
easiest thing is to eject the flash card and insert it into a card
reader with a USB interface and transfer from it instead. Either way
you are carrying a lot less hardware than if you brought along a laptop
to do this. At the time of writing these bridge devices do not
understand NTFS (but do know FAT16 and FAT32) and it appears unlikely
that Microsoft is going to allow others to provide NTFS based solutions.
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