Invalid Drive Specification

By Ryan Hutzel | October 26, 2016 - 2:10 pm |February 9, 2023 Data Backup and Protection

Invalid Drive Specification, Drive Not Found

This can be a simple little fix, because most of the time the CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor), or the chip that keeps track of the date, time, and all the basic settings of the motherboard needs a new battery. I know it sounds weird that a computer has a watch battery in it, but they do. Their cost run about $5 to $10 bucks at your local watch battery store, or Amazon. A simple way of testing to see if your battery is not keeping charge is to enter into the BIOS and set the settings to recognize the hard drive. If the hard drive recognized, save your settings, reboot, see if it goes into your operating system. If all goes well, power off your system for about 5 minutes and unplug it from the wall. After this time reconnect the power to your computer and see if the settings kept. If they did not you will get that error message again and it is time to get a new battery for your computer. These batteries are internal to your computer, and are separate from your main battery if you have a laptop.

How and Where to Buy a New Hard Drive?

By Ryan Hutzel | October 26, 2016 - 1:34 pm |October 26, 2016 Introduction to Hard Drive and Data Storage

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How and Where to Buy a New Hard Drive?

Step 1: What kind of hard drive do you have?

First of all, let’s see what kind of interface you have. The most common is SATA, however legacy is IDE. This can be easily distinguished by seeing a wide 40 pin ribbon cable going into the back of your hard drive and two “L” shaped plastic connections. SATA drives can be easily identified with their unique USB like connection for both the power and data connections.

For laptop users, your interfaces are much like desktop hard drives, just smaller. If your drive has 40 pins on the back, it is an ATA/IDE and likewise for the SATA interface.

NOTE: Some older systems have limitations on the drive capacity it can handle, likewise with older versions of windows. Please consult your systems user manuals and manufacturer to see if these limitations apply to your scenario.

Step 2: What kind of hard drive do you need?

Depending on what your need is, will be the size and type/performance of the drive you purchase. Are you replacing your hard drive because of a system crash? If you are and you know that you did not use much of the storage space that you used before the crash, maybe you should simply replace the drive with the same capacity instead of upgrading. This would save some cash. I don’t recommend it entirely, only because any upgrade in a system it always a good thing. However, if you are a person that is always adding video, pictures, or mp3’s to your collection, it would be a good idea to invest in the most you can afford. This leads to the next section of discussion, specifications.

Step 3: Specifications of the hard drive

While the intentions of this page is not to review every hard drive out their (impossible to do….sort of), there are a few common specifications to consider first. In my humble opinion, I think the most important item to consider is the manufacturer’s warranty and the life cycle of the drive. This says a lot about the quality of the manufacturer and their products.

Seagate and Western Digital provides warranties from 1 to 5 years from the manufacturing date of the unit. If the drive fails naturally (you didn’t slam it to the floor) they will replace it under this warranty period usually very painlessly.

Next to consider (assuming you know what interface hard drive you have) is the cache and rpm’s. The more cache (on-board memory) the better the performance of the hard drive’s reading and writing abilities to keep up with the rest of the system or visa-versa. If you are going with a solid state hard drive, pay close attention to the read/write speeds, this will vary the pricing of the drive greatly for something that is a entry grade SSD or enterprise.

Today’s standard in rpm’s (revolutions per minute) spin rate of a hard drive is 5,400-10,000. The mechanical 7,200 drives are typically sufficient for every day use. If you are a laptop user, you will find that there can be a big cost difference from 5,400 to 7,200 for the same drive capacity. I would ask the question to yourself, “Does it matter if I wait a couple of more seconds for data or do I need it as fast as possible?” If you are looking for performance, of course hands down is

What is a Hard Drive

By Ryan Hutzel | October 26, 2016 - 9:00 am |October 26, 2016 Introduction to Hard Drive and Data Storage

What is a Hard Drive? | How Do Hard Drives Work?

A hard drive is a hardware device within a computer or external chassis that spins (a solid state drive does not spin, and is an altogether different technology) a magnetic disk that reads and writes information to and from it. The illustration on this page show the internal parts of a hard drive. This is a typical illustration, while most hard drives work identically, they may vary a bit in style and looks.

Hard drives are not typically accessed by the user physically and are normally internal to the computer case. The only exception today, is that if one were to use an external hard drive to carry from place to place or for backup purposes. External hard drives that are used for portable storage are usually in an enclosed casing.

In the illustration on this page, you will see that the four main parts of a hard drive are the disk platters, head arm, disk actuator, and the chassis. Not much has changed in the thought of how a hard drive works from it’s early days of conception, albeit the size of the drive has been standardized to both desktop and mobile sizes. The density of how much can be written on the platters have changed tremendously as well over time. I personally remember a 1mb hard drive out of an old IBM word processor with a 8086 cpu. It was state of the art back then. As new technologies are explored, someday even this style will change as barriers of physical and mechanical impossibilities become possible.

What is not shown in the picture is the connectors and circuit board below. Since the introduction of the SATA connector & power connector, the old school IDE & SCSI connection types have since faded into the past. No doubt someday, even SATA will become obsolete.

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