Active hard-drive protection

Last updated

In computer hardware, active hard-drive protection refers to technology that attempts to avoid or reduce mechanical damage to hard disk drives by preparing the disk prior to impact. This approach is mainly used in laptop computers that are frequently carried around and more prone to impacts than desktop computers.

Contents

Implementation

Usually, the system consists of accelerometers that alert the system when excess acceleration or vibration is detected. The software then tells the hard disk drive to unload its heads to prevent them from coming in contact with the platters, thus potentially preventing a head crash. [1]

Many laptop vendors have implemented this technology under different names. [2] Some hard-disk drives also include this technology, needing no cooperation from the system. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BIOS</span> Firmware for hardware initialization and OS runtime services

In computing, BIOS is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the booting process. The firmware comes pre-installed on the computer's motherboard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Floppy disk</span> Removable disk storage medium

A floppy disk or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard disk drive</span> Electro-mechanical data storage device

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Motherboard</span> Main printed circuit board used for a computing device

A motherboard is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use.

RAID is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical data storage components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. This is in contrast to the previous concept of highly reliable mainframe disk drives known as single large expensive disk (SLED).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laptop</span> Personal computer for mobile use

A laptop computer or notebook computer, also known as a laptop or notebook, is a small, portable personal computer (PC). Laptops typically have a clamshell form factor with a flat-panel screen on the inside of the upper lid and an alphanumeric keyboard and pointing device on the inside of the lower lid. Most of the computer's internal hardware is in the lower part, under the keyboard, although many modern laptops have a built-in webcam at the top of the screen, and some even feature a touchscreen display. In most cases, unlike tablet computers which run on mobile operating systems, laptops tend to run on desktop operating systems, which were originally developed for desktop computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Accelerometer</span> Device that measures proper acceleration

An accelerometer is a device that measures the proper acceleration of an object. Proper acceleration is the acceleration of the object relative to an observer who is in free fall. Proper acceleration is different from coordinate acceleration, which is acceleration with respect to a given coordinate system, which may or may not be accelerating. For example, an accelerometer at rest on the surface of the Earth will measure an acceleration due to Earth's gravity straight upwards of about g ≈ 9.81 m/s2. By contrast, an accelerometer that is in free fall will measure zero acceleration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Head crash</span> Read-write head of a hard disk making contact with the platter

A head crash is a hard-disk failure that occurs when a read–write head of a hard disk drive makes contact with its rotating platter, slashing its surface and permanently damaging its magnetic media. It is most often caused by a sudden severe motion of the disk, for example the jolt caused by dropping a laptop to the ground while it is operating or physically shocking a computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disk enclosure</span> Specialized casing

A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power hard disk drives or solid state drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.

The Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) is Apple's motion-based data protection system used in their notebook computer systems. Apple introduced the system January 1, 2005 in its refreshed PowerBook line, and included it in the iBook line July 26, 2005. Since that time, Apple has included the system in all of their non-SSD portable systems, now the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).

Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The phrase was originally used by IBM as a term to describe the robustness of their mainframe computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard disk drive failure</span> Electromechanical malfunctioning

A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solid-state drive</span> Computer storage device with no moving parts

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, or solid-state disk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of laptops</span>

The history of laptops describes the efforts, begun in the 1970s, to build small, portable personal computers that combine the components, inputs, outputs and capabilities of a desktop computer in a small chassis.

Hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) is available from many hard disk drive (HDD/SSD) vendors, including: Hitachi, Integral Memory, iStorage Limited, Micron, Seagate Technology, Samsung, Toshiba, Viasat UK, Western Digital. The symmetric encryption key is maintained independently from the computer's CPU, thus allowing the complete data store to be encrypted and removing computer memory as a potential attack vector.

ThinkVantage Technologies is a set of system support utilities to reduce total cost of ownership of Lenovo brand desktop and laptop computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer hardware</span> Physical components of a computer

Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices such as a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and speakers.

Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics. These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: access time and data transfer time .

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shock detector</span> Indicator of physical shock or impact

A shock detector, shock indicator, or impact monitor is a device which indicates whether a physical shock or impact has occurred. These usually have a binary output (go/no-go) and are sometimes called shock overload devices. Shock detectors can be used on shipments of fragile valuable items to indicate whether a potentially damaging drop or impact may have occurred. They are also used in sports helmets to help estimate if a dangerous impact may have occurred.

References

  1. Ku, Andrew (2003-10-07). "IBM ThinkVantage Technologies: Hard Drive Active Protection". AnandTech. Archived from the original on 2006-04-27. Retrieved 2009-05-19.
  2. "Just Add Wheels: Leveraging Commodity Laptop Hardware for Robotics and AI Education" (PDF). 2008. At least three different manufacturers now offer models with built-in accelerometers: The Apple Sudden Motion Sensor, IBM HD Active Protection System and Acer GraviSense
  3. "Free Fall Sensor and WD Drives Includes This Feature". WDC.CustHelp.com. Western Digital. 2012-01-19. Retrieved 2015-08-05.[ permanent dead link ]