I'm now upgrading to an OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD. I installed the RAID card in the PCIex4 slot on my motherboard, got the latest drivers from OCZ and installed them, I have the drive set up as RAID0 (Striped) array, and I enabled the UEFI PCIe option in BIOS. It said 'Windows cannot locate the partition selected for installation.' Apr 14, 2013 Installing Windows 7 on OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCIe RAID card. Thread starter ws1173; Start date. It said 'Windows cannot locate the partition selected for installation.' I'm really stuck here, and any help would be much appreciated. I think the problem is that when I'm installing Windows and I try to load the driver for the RevoDrive x2, it.
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HDDs are accessed over one of a number of bus types, including as of 2011 parallel ATA (PATA, also called IDE or EIDE; described before the introduction of SATA as ATA), Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel. Bridge circuitry is sometimes used to connect HDDs to buses with which they cannot communicate natively, such as IEEE 1394, USB and SCSI.
Modern HDDs present a consistent interface to the rest of the computer, no matter what data encoding scheme is used internally. Typically a DSP in the electronics inside the HDD takes the raw analog voltages from the read head and uses PRML and Reed–Solomon error correction[128] to decode the sector boundaries and sector data, then sends that data out the standard interface. That DSP also watches the error rate detected by error detection and correction, and performs bad sector remapping, data collection for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, and other internal tasks.
Modern interfaces connect an HDD to a host bus interface adapter (today typically integrated into the 'south bridge') with one data/control cable. Each drive also has an additional power cable, usually direct to the power supply unit.
- Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), originally named SASI for Shugart Associates System Interface, was standard on servers, workstations, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and Apple Macintosh computers through the mid-1990s, by which time most models had been transitioned to IDE (and later, SATA) family disks. The range limitations of the data cable allows for external SCSI devices.
- Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), later standardized under the name AT Attachment (ATA, with the alias P-ATA or PATA (Parallel ATA) retroactively added upon introduction of SATA) moved the HDD controller from the interface card to the disk drive. This helped to standardize the host/controller interface, reduce the programming complexity in the host device driver, and reduced system cost and complexity. The 40-pin IDE/ATA connection transfers 16 bits of data at a time on the data cable. The data cable was originally 40-conductor, but later higher speed requirements for data transfer to and from the HDD led to an 'ultra DMA' mode, known as UDMA. Progressively swifter versions of this standard ultimately added the requirement for an 80-conductor variant of the same cable, where half of the conductors provides grounding necessary for enhanced high-speed signal quality by reducing cross talk.
- EIDE was an unofficial update (by Western Digital) to the original IDE standard, with the key improvement being the use of direct memory access (DMA) to transfer data between the disk and the computer without the involvement of the CPU, an improvement later adopted by the official ATA standards. By directly transferring data between memory and disk, DMA eliminates the need for the CPU to copy byte per byte, therefore allowing it to process other tasks while the data transfer occurs.
- Fibre Channel (FC) is a successor to parallel SCSI interface on enterprise market. It is a serial protocol. In disk drives usually the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) connection topology is used. FC has much broader usage than mere disk interfaces, and it is the cornerstone of storage area networks (SANs). Recently other protocols for this field, like iSCSI and ATA over Ethernet have been developed as well. Confusingly, drives usually use copper twisted-pair cables for Fibre Channel, not fibre optics. The latter are traditionally reserved for larger devices, such as servers or disk array controllers.
- Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The SAS is a new generation serial communication protocol for devices designed to allow for much higher speed data transfers and is compatible with SATA. SAS uses a mechanically identical data and power connector to standard 3.5-inch SATA1/SATA2 HDDs, and many server-oriented SAS RAID controllers are also capable of addressing SATA HDDs. SAS uses serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices but still uses SCSI commands.
- Serial ATA (SATA). The SATA data cable has one data pair for differential transmission of data to the device, and one pair for differential receiving from the device, just like EIA-422. That requires that data be transmitted serially. A similar differential signaling system is used in RS485, LocalTalk, USB, FireWire, and differential SCSI.
Integrity and failure
Close-up of an HDD head resting on a disk platter; its mirror reflection is visible on the platter surface.
Main articles: Hard disk drive failure and Data recovery
Due to the extremely close spacing between the heads and the disk surface, HDDs are vulnerable to being damaged by a head crash—a failure of the disk in which the head scrapes across the platter surface, often grinding away the thin magnetic film and causing data loss. Head crashes can be caused by electronic failure, a sudden power failure, physical shock, contamination of the drive's internal enclosure, wear and tear, corrosion, or poorly manufactured platters and heads.
The HDD's spindle system relies on air density inside the disk enclosure to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk rotates. HDDs require a certain range of air densities in order to operate properly. The connection to the external environment and density occurs through a small hole in the enclosure (about 0.5 mm in breadth), usually with a filter on the inside (the breather filter).[129] If the air density is too low, then there is not enough lift for the flying head, so the head gets too close to the disk, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss. Specially manufactured sealed and pressurized disks are needed for reliable high-altitude operation, above about 3,000 m (9,800 ft).[130] Modern disks include temperature sensors and adjust their operation to the operating environment. Breather holes can be seen on all disk drives—they usually have a sticker next to them, warning the user not to cover the holes. The air inside the operating drive is constantly moving too, being swept in motion by friction with the spinning platters. This air passes through an internal recirculation (or 'recirc') filter to remove any leftover contaminants from manufacture, any particles or chemicals that may have somehow entered the enclosure, and any particles or outgassing generated internally in normal operation. Very high humidity present for extended periods of time can corrode the heads and platters.
For giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads in particular, a minor head crash from contamination (that does not remove the magnetic surface of the disk) still results in the head temporarily overheating, due to friction with the disk surface, and can render the data unreadable for a short period until the head temperature stabilizes (so called 'thermal asperity', a problem which can partially be dealt with by proper electronic filtering of the read signal).
When the logic board of a hard disk fails, the drive can often be restored to functioning order and the data recovered by replacing the circuit board of one of an identical hard disk. In the case of read-write head faults, they can be replaced using specialized tools in a dust-free environment. If the disk platters are undamaged, they can be transferred into an identical enclosure and the data can be copied or cloned onto a new drive. In the event of disk-platter failures, disassembly and imaging of the disk platters may be required.[131] For logical damage to file systems, a variety of tools, including fsck on UNIX-like systems and CHKDSK on Windows, can be used for data recovery. Recovery from logical damage can require file carving.
A common expectation is that hard disk drives designed for server use will fail less frequently than consumer-grade drives usually used in desktop computers. A study by Carnegie Mellon University[132] and an independent one by Google[133] both found that the 'grade' of a drive does not relate to the drive's failure rate.
A 2011 summary of research into SSD and magnetic disk failure patterns by Tom's Hardware summarized research findings as follows:[134]
- MTBF does not indicate reliability; the annualized failure rate is higher and usually more relevant.
- Magnetic disks do not have a specific tendency to fail during early use, and temperature only has a minor effect; instead, failure rates steadily increase with age.
- S.M.A.R.T. warns of mechanical issues but not other issues affecting reliability, and is therefore not a reliable indicator of condition.
- Failure rates of drives sold as 'enterprise' and 'consumer' are 'very much similar', although customized for their different environments.
- In drive arrays, one drive's failure significantly increases the short-term chance of a second drive failing.
Market segments
Two Western DigitalVelociRaptor 1 TB SATA 10,000 rpm 3.5-inch HDDs
- Desktop HDDs
- They typically store between 60 GB and 4 TB and rotate at 5,400 to 10,000 rpm, and have a media transfer rate of 0.5 Gbit/s or higher (1 GB = 109 bytes; 1 Gbit/s = 109 bit/s). As of August 2014, the highest capacity HDDs store 8 TB.[89][135]
- Mobile (laptop) HDDs
- They are smaller than their desktop and enterprise counterparts, tend to be slower and have lower capacity. Mobile HDDs spin at 4,200 rpm, 5,200 rpm, 5,400 rpm, or 7,200 rpm, with 5,400 rpm being typical. 7,200 rpm drives tend to be more expensive and have smaller capacities, while 4,200 rpm models usually have very high storage capacities. Because of smaller platter(s), mobile HDDs generally have lower capacity than their greater desktop counterparts. As a note, there are also 2.5-inch drives spinning at 10,000 rpm which are belonging to the enterprise segment, thus not intended to be used in laptops.
- Enterprise HDDs
- Typically used with multiple-user computers running enterprise software. Examples are: transaction processing databases, internet infrastructure (email, webserver, e-commerce), scientific computing software, and nearline storage management software. Enterprise drives commonly operate continuously ('24/7') in demanding environments while delivering the highest possible performance without sacrificing reliability. Maximum capacity is not the primary goal, and as a result the drives are often offered in capacities that are relatively low in relation to their cost.[136] The fastest enterprise HDDs spin at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm, and can achieve sequential media transfer speeds above 1.6 Gbit/s[137] and a sustained transfer rate up to 1 Gbit/s.[137] Drives running at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm use smaller platters to mitigate increased power requirements (as they have less air drag) and therefore generally have lower capacity than the highest capacity desktop drives. Enterprise HDDs are commonly connected through Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC). Some support multiple ports, so they can be connected to a redundant host bus adapter. They can be reformatted with sector sizes larger than 512 bytes (often 520, 524, 528 or 536 bytes). The additional storage can be used by hardware RAID cards or to store a Data Integrity Field.
- Consumer electronics HDDs
- They include drives embedded into digital video recorders and automotive vehicles. The former are configured to provide a guaranteed streaming capacity, even in the face of read and write errors, while the latter are built to resist larger amounts of shock.
Manufacturers and sales
See also: History of hard disk drives and List of defunct hard disk manufacturers
More than 200 companies have manufactured HDDs over time. But consolidations have concentrated production into just three manufacturers today: Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba.
Worldwide revenues for disk storage were $32 billion in 2013, down about 3% from 2012.[4] This corresponds to shipments of 552 million units in 2013 compared to 578 million in 2012 and 622 million in 2011.[4] The estimated 2013 market shares are about 40–45% each for Seagate and Western Digital and 13–16% for Toshiba.
External hard disk drives
See also: USB mass storage / USB drive and Disk enclosure
Toshiba 1 TB 2.5' external USB 2.0 HDD
3.0 TB 3.5' Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex plug and play external USB 3.0-compatible drive (left), 750 GB 3.5' Seagate Technologypush-button external USB 2.0 drive (right), and a 500 GB 2.5' generic brandplug and play external USB 2.0 drive (front).
External HDDs[j] typically connect via USB; variants using USB 2.0 interface generally have slower data transfer rates when compared to internally mounted hard drives connected through SATA. Plug and play drive functionality offers system compatibility and features large storage options and portable design.
External HDDs are usually available as pre-assembled integrated products, but may be also assembled by combining an external enclosure (with USB or other interface) with a separately purchased HDD. They are available in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch sizes; 2.5-inch variants are typically called portable external drives, while 3.5-inch variants are referred to as desktop external drives. 'Portable' drives are packaged in smaller and lighter enclosures than the 'desktop' drives; additionally, 'portable' drives use power provided by the USB connection, while 'desktop' drives require external power bricks.
As of April 2014, capacities of external HDDs generally range from 160 GB to 6 TB; common sizes are 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, 500 GB, 640 GB, 750 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB, 5 TB and 6 TB.[138][139] Features such as biometric security or multiple interfaces (for example, Firewire) are available at a higher cost.[140]
There are pre-assembled external hard disk drives that, when taken out from their enclosures, cannot be used internally in a laptop or desktop computer due to embedded USB interface on their printed circuit boards, and lack of SATA (or Parallel ATA) interfaces.[141][142]
Head Types:
Ferrite Heads: Early hard drives used read/write heads that were constructed of a thin copper wire that was wound around a small ferrite core with a tiny cut out of it. This cut determined the size of the data bits that could be written to disk and read from disk. An electrical signal would be sent through in one direction or the other causing electrical induction. This creates specific patterns of magnetic fields arranging magnetic particles on the platter to either face north or south. When reading from the disk, the head senses which direction a particle is in, translating that into a 0 or 1 bit.
Thin-film Inducted Heads: This type of head was developed by IBM in 1979. The heads used photolithographic techniques from semiconductor manufacturing processes to create the head structures. The magnetic core and the coil were created the same way. This gave a greater precision than the Ferrite design and allowed for more bit read and write accuracy.
Magneto-resistive Heads: These types of heads use separate read and write components for even greater precision than thin-film inducted heads. The read component is made of a thin-film material that changes its resistance when near a magnetic field (being the bits). This produces a stronger signal that enables greater areal density limits and thus allowing more bits to be crammed into a platter.
Giant Magneto-resistive Heads: This technology is based on magneto-resistive heads with different thin-film materials that produced large amounts of magneto-resistance. That is where the term “giant” comes from – the giant amounts of resistance. In 1997, IBM introduced the GMR heads which replaced the MR heads with different elements and increased areal densities by many times. They are used in today’s high-end hard drives.
Interface:
Traditionally, hard drives are based on either IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) or SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) interfaces. We’ll dive into the world of interfaces in the sequel to this article. But for now, we hope this 'How It Works' guide has helped you to understand the fundamentals of hard drive technology. :) Heh, wait until we tell you about solid-state hard drives
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In times past, choosing the best PC storage option required merely selecting the highest-capacity hard drive one could afford. If only life were still so simple! The fairly recent rise of solid-state drives and hybrid drives (which mix standard hard drives with solid-state memory) have significantly altered the storage landscape, creating a cornucopia of confusing options for the everyday consumer.
Yes, selecting the best drive type for a particular need can be befuddling, but fear not: We’re here to help. Below, we explain the basic advantages and drawbacks for each of the most popular PC storage options available today. Tuck away this knowledge to make a fully informed decision the next time you're shopping for additional drive space.
Hard-disk drives
Hard-disk drives have been the default storage component in desktop and laptop PCs for decades. As a result, the term 'hard drive' is now the common descriptor for all storage hardware—the digital equivalent of 'Q-Tip' or 'Band-Aid.' Although modern hard-disk drives are far more advanced and higher-performing than their counterparts from yesteryear, on many levels their basic underlying technology remains unchanged. All hard-disk drives consist of quickly rotating magnetic platters paired with read/write heads that travel over the platters’ surfaces to retrieve or record data.
HDD interiors almost resemble a high-tech record player.The technology is mature, reliable, and relatively inexpensive compared with other storage options; most hard-disk drives can be had for only a few cents per gigabyte. Hard-disk drives are available in relatively high capacities too, with today’s largest drives storing up to 4TB of data. Usually hard drives connect to a system via the ubiquitous SATA (Serial ATA) interface, and they don’t require any special software to work properly with current operating systems.
In other words, traditional hard drives are spacious, simple, and comparatively dirt-cheap.
Hard-disk drives don’t perform nearly as well as solid-state drives or even hybrid products do in most situations, however. Today’s fastest hard drives can read and write data at more than 200MB per second with sub-8ms access times, but those numbers are significantly worse than the speeds of even some of the most affordable solid-state drives (which I'll cover in a bit). The faster the platter rotation speed, the faster the hard drive. For example, a 7200-rpm drive outperforms a 5400-rpm drive.
Hard-disk drives are best suited to users who need vast amounts of storage and aren’t as concerned about achieving peak system performance. If you're an everyday PC user who sticks mostly to email, Web browsing, and basic document editing, a standard hard drive should suit you fine. Just don't tinker around with someone else's SSD-powered PC, because once you've gotten a taste of a solid-state drive's blazing read/write speeds, it's hard to go back to even the speediest of traditional hard drives.
Solid-state drives
Several manufacturers offer SSDs. The HDD market is much more condensed.On many levels, solid-state drives are similar to hard drives. They usually connect to a system by way of the SATA interface (though PCI Express-based drives are also available for ultrahigh-performance applications), and they store files just as any other drive does. SSDs, however, eschew the magnetic platters and read/write heads of hard-disk drives in favor of nonvolatile NAND flash memory, so no mechanical parts or magnetic bits are involved.
By ditching the relative slothfulness of moving parts, solid-state drives deliver much better performance. They're the fastest storage option available. And not only can SSDs read and write data much faster than hard drives with most workloads, but they can also access the data much more quickly as well.
Whereas the fastest hard drives can read and write data at about 200MB per second and access data in a few milliseconds, the fastest solid-state drives can achieve 550-MBps (or higher) transfers that essentially saturate the SATA interface, and their typical access times are a fraction of a single millisecond. In a nutshell, SSDs make for a much snappier, much more responsive system, with lightning-fast boot times, application launch times, and file-transfer speeds.
Another huge SSD advantage is durability. Because they have no moving parts, solid-state drives aren’t susceptible to damage or degraded performance from vibrations or movement. Drop a system or laptop containing a traditional hard-disk drive, and you have a very real chance of corrupting your data. But a solid-state drive won’t--can't—skip a beat.
Windows 10 Cannot Load Ocz Revodrive Hybrid Scsi Controller Driver Windows 7
Solid-state drives aren't without disadvantages, though. For one, SSDs are much more expensive than hard drives in terms of cost per gigabyte. Good, consumer-class solid-state drives run about $0.70 to $1.00 per gigabyte, whereas hard drives cost only a few cents per gigabyte. Solid-state drives don’t offer anything near the capacity of hard drives, either: The most popular SSDs have capacities of about 120GB to 256GB, with 512GB to 1TB models reserved only for those with gargantuan budgets.
OCZ's Vector SSD is one of the fastest around.SSD performance also varies depending on how full the drive is, or if it has been purged of data. Idle garbage collection or a feature called TRIM can help restore the performance of a “dirty” SSD, but that requires driver and OS support. (Windows 7 and 8 support TRIM.) Because the capacity is relatively small and performance is affected by how full the drive may be, many SSD users find themselves regularly moving less-performance-intensive data (such as documents or media collections) off their solid-state drives and onto traditional hard drives.
Another concern: When SSDs fail, they tend to do so without warning. Hard drives, however, will usually start to show signs of failure by throwing a S.M.A.R.T. error or suffering from a few bad blocks. In our experience, SSDs simply die without waving many—if any—red flags.
Solid-state drives are best suited to savvy PC users who seek high performance. If you don’t mind managing multiple volumes and you have the budget, pairing a fast SSD with a high-capacity hard drive will result in the best of both worlds. The SSD can hold the OS and your most frequently used applications, while the hard drive can handle the bulk-storage duties. Managing multiple storage volumes can be a bit of a pain for casual PC users; if you know your way around a PC, however, combining a fast SSD and large hard-drive storage is a great, high-performance approach with minimal compromise.
If you're considering making the jump to a solid-state drive, check out PCWorld's ultimate guide to SSDs, which reviews seven of the top SSDs on the market today.
Hybrid hard drives
SeagateHybrid drives such as the Momentus XT offer the best of both worlds, but fulfill that promise only to a certain extent.Hybrid hard drives blend HDD capacity with SSD speeds by placing traditional rotating platters and a small amount of high-speed flash memory on a single drive.
Hybrid storage products monitor the data being read from the hard drive, and cache the most frequently accessed bits to the high-speed NAND flash memory. The data stored on the NAND will change over time, but once the most frequently accessed bits of data are stored on the flash memory, they will be served from the flash, resulting in SSD-like performance for your most-used files.
Some of the advantages of hybrid storage products include cost, capacity, and manageability. Because only a relatively small solid-state volume is required to achieve significant performance gains, a large investment in a high-capacity SSD isn’t necessary. Hybrid drives tend to cost slightly more than traditional hard drives, but far less than solid-state drives. And because the cache volume is essentially hidden from the OS, users aren’t required to cherry-pick the data to store on the SSD to prevent it from filling up. The hybrid storage volume can be as big as the hard drive being used, and can serve as a standard hard drive. Boot times also see some improvement.
OCZThe OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid.Where hybrid products falter is with new data. When writing new data or accessing infrequently used bits, hybrid products perform just like a standard hard drive, and new hybrid drives have a 'break-in period' while the software learns which data to cache. Due to the fact that hybrid products rely on caching software, they can also be somewhat more difficult to configure.
For users who don’t want the responsibility of managing multiple volumes or who don’t constantly work with new data, a hybrid drive can be a great option to improve system performance—all without having to give up any capacity or having to deal with the headaches of using separate solid-state and hard-disk drives.
DIY hybrid storage configurations
That being said, some people create DIY hybrid storage configurations by linking a standard hard drive and an SSD with specialized caching software. (This is not the same as simply plopping both an SSD and an HDD into your PC.) Solid-state cache drives often ship with proprietary caching software included, though you can also take advantage of Intel's Smart Response Technology if you want to use an SSD that isn't specifically marketed as a cache drive.
Functionally, the setup performs the same as a typical hybrid drive, though stand-alone SSD caches often come in larger capacities than the paltry flash storage you'll find on most self-contained hybrid drives—meaning more of your data will receive an SSD-powered speed boost. On the other hand, you'll have to buy both a hard-disk drive and a solid-state drive, which can get pricey. You'll also need to configure the setup manually, whereas self-contained hybrid drives are much more of a plug-and-play option.
Windows 10 Cannot Load Ocz Revodrive Hybrid Scsi Controller Drivers
Basic components of a typical solid-state hard drive.