Strange HDD clicking sound, is it dying? I guess not.

Filed Under (storage) by Abbas on 08-02-2011

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So I recently upgraded my notebook’s internal hard disk from a 160GB Toshiba to a 500GB Toshiba one. It was getting harder for me to maintain my downloaded stuff like movies and games on the 160GB small hdd so the upgrade was inevitable. Strange clicking sound from my Toshiba HDD

After some thinking I purchased the 500 gb hard drive and spent some time trying copy the windows installation partition from the old hard drive to the new one via different partition image making applications. Majority of the these partition making applications work from within the operating system and you cannot make a copy of the current Window’s partition from within the operation system so you need to boot the PC with a bootable media and run the partition cloning application from there. Anyway I never got to that stage and I was tired enough to let go the idea of making copy of the operating systems partion.

The next plan was to install a fresh copy of Windows into the new hard disk. Up til this point, I was running the new hdd externally from a USB enclosure. Near the end of the partition copying plan, I started hearing a strange clicking sound and Read the rest of this entry »

Compressing huge DVD movies to 700mb DVD-rips

Filed Under (guide, movies, optical media, storage, video) by Abbas on 20-08-2008

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Ever wanted to compress your huge 4GB+ DVD movies to 700MB dvd-rips while still retaining the original DVD quality? Well thats what we’re gonna learn today. You might be familiar with the regular 700MB dvd-rips ‘scene’ releases, where most underground DVD movies are in 700mb compressed avi format. Today we’ll learn how to compress your personal DVD movies to small 700MB compressed format like the ‘scene’ releases, so that you can keep your DVDs safe in your drawer and enjoy watching the compressed rips from your hard disk drive.

Now if you’re familiar with the ‘xvid asd’ compression format used for those tv-shows rips, you might know how nicely compressed those videos are. You get a complete 50minutes season video in a 350MB avi file. We’re gonna use that sort of superb compression for our DVD today in this following tutorial. You’ll see that even when our ~4GB DVD movie is compressed to a 700MB dvd-rip, there wont be much difference in the video or audio qualitybecause of the compression softwares and audio/video settings we’re going to use.

We’ll be using this very nice Xvid/DivX conversion tool called Read the rest of this entry »

SATA revision 3.0 doubles up data-transfer speeds to 6Gbps

Filed Under (news, storage) by Abbas on 19-08-2008

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Sata Revision 3.0 Leads to 6Gb/s data transfer speeds

While I understand that the 5Gbps USB3.0 speed makes this 6Gbps transfer speed of “SATA 6Gb/s” a little less impressive. But still this speed boost announcement by SATA I-O is good news for all you game lovin’, vista using netizens caz a two-fold increase in transfer speeds (2x, that is).

The announced specifcations allows products designers to beging work on SATA 6Gb/s products. Although the specifications aren’t finalized yet and SATA I-0 will continue to thrive for improved data streaming and better power management. Read the rest of this entry »