increasing hard drive size?

whiteonblu

A magazine i read said hardrives capacity can be increased because the capacity of smaller drives is intentionally decreased. That for example a 250 GB is a 500 GB deliberately reduced. And that they can be increased. Does anyone know about that. ?

It was a mag I was looking at, I cannot recall the name. It had an article about how companes deliberately make things break sooner so we have to buy new ones. They said for example car batteries are programmed to only last for one third their potential time.

Said laptop batteries can be repaired too

Tallon

Was the magazine 'The Beano' ?

yoyo

They possibly are talking about the way system manufacturers sometimes partition a drive 50/50, so a 500 gig drive will have a 250gig C and D drive (not exactly 250gb due to formatted capacity). If not that well then the magazine is talking rubbish!

Nick

whiteonblu

Tallon wrote: »

Was the magazine 'The Beano' ?

lol no

wexie

.....have a think about this for a second....that would mean that a company like Seagate or Western Digital would have to spend the money to manufacture a 500GB disk....then spend more money to make it appear like a 250GB disk....and only get the profits from selling a 250GB disk.

Does that sounds logical to you? In an industry where profit margins are constantly under pressure and a few cents on every product could be the difference between making a profit or a loss?

My guess is you may have misread the article (either that or it's complete hogwash).

deconduo

wexie wrote: »

.....have a think about this for a second....that would mean that a company like Seagate or Western Digital would have to spend the money to manufacture a 500GB disk....then spend more money to make it appear like a 250GB disk....and only get the profits from selling a 250GB disk.

Does that sounds logical to you? In an industry where profit margins are constantly under pressure and a few cents on every product could be the difference between making a profit or a loss?

My guess is you may have misread the article (either that or it's complete hogwash).

While in this case its untrue, similar things are done in the tech industry. The best example is with certain AMD tri-core chips.

The silicon manufacturing process means that there can often be problems or defects with certain parts of a CPU chip. In the case of quad core Phenom II chips its possible for one of the cores to be faulty. Rather than getting rid of the chip altogether, AMD simply disabled the faulty core and sold the chip as a tri-core CPU instead.

However there was a large demand for these tri-core chips, so there were a few batches of perfectly normal quad-cores that had a core disabled and were sold as tri-cores. These could be unlocked again to give you a perfectly working quad-core for the price of the tri-core.

wexie

oh absolutely, happens with cars as well, one particular manufacturer I know of puts cruise control in a certain model, but if you don't get the option they just leave off the buttons. Everything is there just not the button.

I guess it probably depends on what the cheapest option is.

Torqay

Reminds me of this...

Procrastastudy

Tends to happen with chips - hence why overclocking is so popular. Defo happens with GPUs.

HDDs are made up of platters I would be willing to bet you dont get 3 1TB platters in in 1TB HDD with two turned off.

Open up your HDD and take a look (Joking this will break it)

whiteonblu

wexie wrote: »

.....have a think about this for a second....that would mean that a company like Seagate or Western Digital would have to spend the money to manufacture a 500GB disk....then spend more money to make it appear like a 250GB disk....and only get the profits from selling a 250GB disk.

Does that sounds logical to you? In an industry where profit margins are constantly under pressure and a few cents on every product could be the difference between making a profit or a loss?

My guess is you may have misread the article (either that or it's complete hogwash).

It may be hogwash but..... see pic to see if I misread it. It is from this magazine

Tallon

That's retarded

Procrastastudy

Tallon wrote: »

That's retarded

Thats just lazy 'journalism' exactly the same point could have been made about other PC components where its true. Thats the stupidest thing I've ever seen written.

Oh hang on I just wrote an essay on Article 15 - That was probably yhr stupidest thing...

practice

Torqay: Reminds me of this...

Just downloaded 8gigs and working fine.
Thanks

the_syco

whiteonblu wrote: »

It may be hogwash but..... see pic to see if I misread it. It is from this magazine

Holy crap that's retarded! The mind boggles! Just read some of the other pages. These people seem to be writing whatever bullsh|t comes into ther head!

practice wrote: »

Just downloaded 8gigs and working fine.
Thanks

No smilie in the post. Possibly serious. :eek:

Tallon

According to the magazine, Osama is still alive too!

On October 7, 2001, a little-known man
with a long beard and a benevolent
smile took to the world stage. In a video
message to the whole planet, Osama bin Laden
announced that “America is full of fear from its
north to its south, from its west to its east” after
the terror attacks a month before. A consensus
was formed immediately – government, secret
service and the media all agreed the tape was
authentic. Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network had
destroyed New York’s World Trade Center and
flown a plane into the Pentagon. But now, almost
11 years later and a year since Bin Laden’s
assassination, agreement is no longer universal.
Serious doubts have been raised about the
authenticity of eight of Bin Laden’s self-released
video messages. And with the absence of any
photographs of Bin Laden’s corpse, there is
a school of thought that his death in May 2011
may have been faked too. If the numerous
conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks
show us anything, it is that in today’s
information age, people are more

mordeith

'Instructions on how to free up the full capacity of intentionally reduced hard drives are widely available on the internet'

I did an quick google and came up with nothing If someone finds it let me know, I'd really like to use my old 30gb hard drive as my new 500gb external

Actually it has happened in the past but you're talking rare cases by PC vendors either for compatibility reasons or simply to stick the same drive in a bunch of models (for economy of scale reasons) and then nobble the cheapest to make the higher-priced models more attractive.

It was not a practice by HDD vendors themselves.

And in the present, yes, if you study the specs of some current HDDs, some of them appear to have underutilised platters. You wouldn't know if they are short-stroked or if its just a publishing error without testing, but I have seen it time and time again. In these cases there is absolutely no way of 'unlocking' the extra capacity and you won't even find much info googling because it's something only a small number of people are knowledgable enough to be aware of.

whiteonblu

practice wrote: »

Torqay: Reminds me of this...

Just downloaded 8gigs and working fine.
Thanks

what is the point of the download more ram site? is it a virus one downloads? or a joke

Tallon

whiteonblu wrote: »

what is the point of the download more ram site? is it a virus one downloads? or a joke

I believe it actually downloads more ram to your current ram slots

yoyo

I have heard that Apple were to restrict hard drive upgrades, by making a proprietry caddy the hard disk would only work in which the onboard firmware would only allow a certain portion of space be used if an "unofficial" upgrade was performed making the upgrade pointless. I don't think this went ahead though

Nick

wexie

........

I'm guessing they're also advertising these in that magazine

whiteonblu

Tallon wrote: »

I believe it actually downloads more ram to your current ram slots

That's retarded

yoyo

whiteonblu wrote: »

That's retarded

It's clearly a joke :pac:

Nick

Capt'n Midnight

Procrastastudy wrote: »

Tends to happen with chips - hence why overclocking is so popular. Defo happens with GPUs.

once upon a time there was the story that they only tested against orders

so if they had a order for a million P66's they would only test against that spec till they filled the order and then test the next chips against the next order like P60 and so some chips would slip through the net

if it was ever true those days are long gone.


Overclocking is where you take a risk of crashing that the manufacturer won't stand over. You can get some performance gains but at a financial and power usage cost and with lower stability and you have to be more careful about the operating conditions. It's like fine tuning a car yes it can go faster, but no you wouldn't let your granny use it.


very very very roughly hard drives have a fixed cost of €30 + a cost proportional to number of platters.

across a range of drives the number of platters and heads increases while the electronics stay the same.




LOL at the car battery thing, lead acid batteries suffer in hot humid climates. In the Philipines they increased the warranty on branded batteries from two to three years to cut down on illegal smelters making dodgy batteries. There was no change in the batteries with a longer life, just a longer warranty and more replacements. It was a marketing decision not a technical one. The batteries didn't get better, they just swapped out more of them in year three.

Anyway with the exception of storing video hard drives are far too large for most purposes. It would be nice if they re-released a 'classic' hard drive. Something > 100GB but with outstanding reliability rather than the few percent failure rate. Then again drives are so cheap that mirroring is probably the way to go for important stuff.

vibe666

that articular story IS ridiculous, but a few years ago (i don't actually know if it is still the case) a certain manufacturer of business class printers was only making a single model of (at least, possibly others too) their biggest selling office multifunction printers and used a modified firmware to underclock some of them and labelled and sold them as a lower specced model as it was cheaper for them than actually having multiple production runs of different models of more or less the same printer. all you needed to get the full speed out of it was an updated firmware.

Capt'n Midnight

technically speaking there is actually a little extra room on every hard drive

it's for remapping bad sectors. and can be seen with SMART utilities

but it's there for a reason, 'no user serviceable parts' etc.

vibe666

whiteonblu wrote: »

That's retarded

much like the idea that you can somehow magically double the size of an old hard drive.

whiteonblu

yoyo wrote: »

It's clearly a joke :pac:

Nick

i know, with an address in wind up, new york. i was joking with Tallon for his earlier beano comment

whiteonblu

vibe666 wrote: »

much like the idea that you can somehow magically double the size of an old hard drive.

in fairness i only asked as it says instructions are on the net. found nothing with google

vibe666

whiteonblu wrote: »

in fairness i only asked as it says instructions are on the net. found nothing with google

looks like a cross between lazy journalism and some sort of conspiracy nut just making up whatever pops into their head. much like the rest of the magazine from what can be seen online.

if you posted the same thing in the conspiracy forum, you'd probably get a much more positive response.

jca

Tallon wrote: »

I believe it actually downloads more ram to your current ram slots

Basic technology lesson 1.
Hardware is different to software ;). Sweet Jesus I can't believe I'm reading this ****e!!

whiteonblu

vibe666 wrote: »

looks like a cross between lazy journalism and some sort of conspiracy nut just making up whatever pops into their head. much like the rest of the magazine from what can be seen online.

if you posted the same thing in the conspiracy forum, you'd probably get a much more positive response.

maybe i will see what happens.

Tallon

jca wrote: »

Basic technology lesson 1.
Hardware is different to software ;). Sweet Jesus I can't believe I'm reading this ****e!!

Maybe you misunderstood my post... it downloads more ram to your current ram in the ram slots

So if you have 2GB of Ram, it downloads another 2GB of ram and just stores it on the other side of the ram card

It's the same as when I upgraded from Celeron to an i7, I just had to download a new bios and I have a new i7 now

Procrastastudy

To be fair Apple have been doing this of late.

Build a PC, install mountain goat, desert eagle or what ever - and wham €750 worth of computer now costs €2200.

jca

Tallon wrote: »

jca wrote: »

Basic technology lesson 1.
Hardware is different to software ;). Sweet Jesus I can't believe I'm reading this ****e!!

Maybe you misunderstood my post... it downloads more ram to your current ram in the ram slots

So if you have 2GB of Ram, it downloads another 2GB of ram and just stores it on the other side of the ram card

It's the same as when I upgraded from Celeron to an i7, I just had to download a new bios and I have a new i7 now

NO I didn't "misunderstand" your post of gibberish. Stores ram on the other side of the ram card. You must be completely nuts!! Updated your bios and your crappy celeron becomes an i7.... Is that you mr Cowan?

RUCKING FETARD

...........

delta36

This thread is descending into chaos.. it's so damn funny!

Procrastastudy

jca wrote: »

NO I didn't "misunderstand" your post of gibberish. Stores ram on the other side of the ram card. You must be completely nuts!! Updated your bios and your crappy celeron becomes an i7.... Is that you mr Cowan?

Hang on Hang on - you're saying it doesn't increase your RAM when you click the link? It must my PC is running much faster now.

delta36

Procrastastudy wrote: »

Hang on Hang on - you're saying it doesn't increase your RAM when you click the link? It must my PC is running much faster now.

I accidentally clicked the download link too many times and got too much RAM. What do I do? Now my computer selects icons BEFORE I click on them, it's like it's running a few seconds ahead of me.

Tallon

delta36 wrote: »

I accidentally clicked the download link too many times and got too much RAM. What do I do? Now my computer selects icons BEFORE I click on them, it's like it's running a few seconds ahead of me.

Create an AOL account... That should slow things down nicely

Procrastastudy

I've installed Norton - its working slower than before but I was getting really worried it was becoming self aware.

delta36

Procrastastudy wrote: »

I've installed Norton - its working slower than before but I was getting really worried it was becoming self aware.

Did you have enough space on your RAM to install it?

Procrastastudy

delta36 wrote: »

Did you have enough space on your RAM to install it?

Yeah it said it needed 20GB so I just downloaded some more. I hope I don't run out of Hard Drive space downloading all this RAM!

delta36

Procrastastudy wrote: »

Yeah it said it needed 20GB so I just downloaded some more. I hope I don't run out of Hard Drive space downloading all this RAM!

Easily fixed, just download some more Hard Drive space onto the RAM, and the use that space to add more RAM.

Procrastastudy

delta36 wrote: »

Easily fixed, just download some more Hard Drive space onto the RAM, and the use that space to add more RAM.

I will later I'm downloading a faster processor at the moment. I hate the way I have to go to the shop to get software - I wish you could just download that as easily.

Tallon

Anyone got a link to a torrent of this?

delta36

Procrastastudy wrote: »

I will later I'm downloading a faster processor at the moment. I hate the way I have to go to the shop to get software - I wish you could just download that as easily.

I know what you mean. I was going to buy Microsoft Office last week, but didn't have space in my room to keep it.

Procrastastudy

Ah its okay now I've doubled my internet speed.

Torqay

Jeez, download a LIFE!!!

Procrastastudy

Plenty to do! Just not doing any of it. Actually thats a lie I'm ripping though exemption clauses.

delta36

Torqay wrote: »

Jeez, download a LIFE!!!

Sweet, do you have a link?