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 I thought it might be the old toshiba HDD. To my surprise, the sound was coming from the new hdd and that was kind of shocking because I was in no mood of taking back the new hard drive for a replacement back to the store. I decided to keep using the HDD because the click sound wasn’t very frequent. So I proceed and installed the new hdd into my laptop.

For the next few days, I kept hearing frequent abnormal clicks from the hdd. Usually, I’d hear a click once an hour or every two hours. It was annoying and I wasn’t happy because the Idea of a new hdd crashing AFTER you’ve reinstalled a ton of applications and drivers and have started making the new disk your new home. Well, with time, over the last few weeks, the clicking sound frequency went down and now the clicks occurs barely 2 to 3 times a day. A friend of mine mentioned it might be the reading head of the disk striking the cover of the hdd and might be nothing dangerous because the only thing that’d be worrying is if your hdd head is touching the surface of the spindle.

I’m still wondering what might be the real cause of the strange noise and have searched around and read different reviews on the types of sounds that failing hdds make but haven’t heard about a scenario that is similar to mine. Guess only time will tell if these sounds were the warning of dying disk or not. So far I haven’t had any problems with file transfer speeds and basic operations on my PC.

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 ‘Auto Gordian Knot’ for ripping our DVD, head over here and dowload the free full package. Next step is to install the program, so do so. You’ll be asked for permission for installation of a few plugins, tick yes.

After its installed, head over to Start menu > Program Files > Auto GK and run Auto GK. Here’s how it should appear.

1. Now get your favorite DVD disc and insert it.
2. Go to My Computer, right click on the DVD-drive icon, and select OPEN
3. You’ll see the contents of the DVD disc. Go to to VIDEO_TS directory.
4. You should see files name like VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB, the files that are big in size are the ones that have the actually movie, the rest of the smaller files in KBs aren’t of our use (see the image below to have an idea).

5. 

   The big files are the ones that have the movie, ignore the smaller KB files

6. now open the first BIG file in the series ( VTS_01_0.VOB in this case) and open it with your DVD media player, if its a video of the DVD title menu or some other unnecessary file, close the media player, try the next file.
7. When u find the file from where the movie starts actually, close the media player, and get back to Auto Gordian Knot and select that VOB file in the “Input Area”. Also select where u want to save the compressed dvd-rip. should look something like the screenshot below.
8. 

   Select the correct VOB file in the input area, make sure its the file which containts the beginning of the movie

   
   

9. In Auto GK’s window, come down to where it says “Step 3 – Select output size”, select Custom Size and input 700 in the text box in front of that option. like shown below

10. 

    Enter the 700MB size in the cutom size box

11. Now click on Advanced options, you’ll see a window like the in the image below, set all your options as the appear in the image. i.e. select the audio quality to 128 kbps (its more than enough for a dvd movie), and select video size to 800 (you can keep it around 768 pixels also +- if you want to), in any case the video size should not be more than the dvd’s video size, as ‘upscaling’ the video size in the rip wont make the quality any more better, anyway take a look at the image below
12. 

    Selecting between the DivX or XviD plugin is your own choice, if your DVD player has DivX support then choose DivX

    
    

13. Now click on ‘Add job’, you’ll see the video address appear in the job queue. Press start and the program will start ripping your dvd.

Please be patient now, since compression is an exhaustive process. It’ll take more than an hour for one DVD to be compressed. You’ll see a DOS prompt window pop-up (that’s for the audio compression algorithms), then you’ll see the DUB window pop up for awhile while Auto Guardian Knot uses it for video compression.

End Result, finally a 700mb DVD rip is generated from the 4GB DVD:

In my example, I used my Saw IV movie DVD, on which the video files were around 3.9GB.  My C2D 2.66GHz cpu with 4GB of DDRII ram took 1 hour 40 minutes to make the 700mb dvd-rip. So while Auto GK is making your dvd-rip, you can do something else in the meanwhile. By the way, here’s how the 702mb DVD-rip quality looks like now, a screen shot of the dvd-rip movie (click on the image to see full size in new window).

SAW IV movie 700MB DVD-rip screen shot, the DVD-rip is made from the Original 4+GB DVD, click to see in full size

Now you can save all your DVD movies on your HDD in 700MB dvd-rips form, that’d take very little space compared to if you tried saving the original 4GB+ dvd on your HDD. I hope this guide has helped you in someway.

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. SATA Revision 3.0 devices will be fully backword compatible with its predecessors and the same connectors will used. SATA Revision 3.0 specifications are expected to be finalized in the 2nd half of this year. SATA I-O has also launched its certified logo, and products that pass the 6Gb/s speeds and other Revsion 3.0 requirment will proudly brag around with the logo.

[via Engadget]