3. Some Thoughts About The Future

S.M.A.R.T. Needs To Be Smarter

Hard drives, nearly universally, support a self-monitoring protocol called S.M.A.R.T. This protocol is capable of communicating to the host computer that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. In my imagination, the hard disk would politely notify Windows XP, and the operating system would pop up a screaming message that says "Listen, you fool, the hard drive has 22.5 hours to live. Your call..." OK, CANCEL, RETRY.

Here is the main menu screen from SANtools S.M.A.R.T. Disk Manager. Image courtesy of SANtools.

Yet, in actuality, it's often hearing the "clank of death" and the "whine of doom" that urges me to action. Somehow, it's been decided that the BIOS is the right place to read these kinds of messages. The only time you ever see them is when you reboot. I don't know about you, but, I keep my notebook running 24x7 unless I am traveling, and even then, I put it in hibernation. I never see the BIOS.

This is clearly an area where Microsoft should be taking the lead. If there's even a hint of trouble, raise all hell. Send me an email. Text message me. Hit me on the head with a hammer. I don't care just let me know. Sure there are third party tools out there such as SANtools' S.M.A.R.T. Disk Manager, but shouldn't something this critical be part of a modern operating system?

Perpendicular Recording: More Capacity, Yay! More Risk, Hiss!

The primal geek in me loves to see new innovations in storage technology. Look at perpendicular recording, for example. Here's why it's cool, and also why it is dangerous - by way of a "sheath of papers" analogy.

Your data is ordinarily represented by long sheets of paper colored either black or white. The old way of storing this data is laying each strip of paper, end to end; to eventually form huge round circles. The read head is on a boom that reads the pages from above. It works, but the technology takes up a lot of space.

The perpendicular way, is to stand the paper up like dominoes. The reading head can also see what color the paper is by looking at the top edge only. This means that someday, we could store every book, song, painting and movie made by human beings since the beginning of time on a single hard drive.

This is beautiful in a bittersweet way because the more stuff you can pack in, the more stuff you are poised to lose when the drive goes bad. When! Not if! Can you picture the neat little rows of dominoes collapsing? Let's see more efforts to improve reliability even at the expense of storage capacity.

RAID Needs To Be Ubiquitous

RAID technology is proven and really does work to prevent a total loss in the event of a failure. Yet as we all know, 99% of notebooks have one slot for a drive. Yet, with all the microminiaturization and multiple platter hard drives - why can't hard disk manufactures design a hard drive with built-in redundant RAID?

If drives can have multiple platters, and each platter can now store the planet earth, why not offer drives with slightly less capacity and a couple of extra lives? How about trickling down RAID technology to the masses? Mobile notebook users need it more than almost anyone else.

Conclusions

Lessons Learned:

Hard disk drives are not built to last forever. Heat is the primary cause of hard drive death, physical damage the secondary cause. The higher the capacity of the drive, the more you stand to lose in case of failure. Few people do regular backups, but everyone should! If your high end notebook can do RAID 1, use it. Regularly run S.M.A.R.T. Software to check on drive health. There is still room for improvement in 2.5' mobile drive technology.

See the companion article: The Easy Way to Replace a Dying Notebook Hard Drive.

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