Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso
Google Inc.
Abstract:
It is estimated that over 90% of all new information produced
in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on
hard disk drives. Despite their importance, there is relatively
little published work on the failure patterns of disk drives, and
the key factors that affect their lifetime. Most available data
are either based on extrapolation from accelerated aging exper-
iments or from relatively modest sized field studies. Moreover,
larger population studies rarely have the infrastructure in place
to collect health signals from components in operation, which
is critical information for detailed failure analysis.
We present data collected from detailed observations of a
large disk drive population in a production Internet services de-
ployment. The population observed is many times larger than
that of previous studies. In addition to presenting failure statis-
tics, we analyze the correlation between failures and several
parameters generally believed to impact longevity.
Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive’s
self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with
failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that mod-
els based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful
for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found
that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated
with drive failures than previously reported.

Full report here: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

New KingKong Shader exploit for XeLL and Linux LiveCD

>> The shader exploit is executed through the booting of a modified KingKong disc via a firmware modded drive.
[QUOTE]
This patch works like the crwl360-loader did, but without a serial cable and still requires a 4532 or 4548 kernel.
If you have a newer kernel, you are out of luck.
The patch includes the fixed sector reader code created by tmbinc and found in the free60 cvs.
Details here: http://free60.cvs.sourceforge.net/free60/xell/readcd

How the patch works:
Patch your King Kong ISO with either the windows exe or compile the source for Linux.
If your using the windows patch, you will need to download cygwin1.dll and put it into your windows/system32 folder.
Then make sure shader.bin, the exe, and your King Kong ISO are in the same folder and run:
win_patch.exe (name of iso)
or
./linux_patch (name of iso)
After your ISO is patched, burn it like a normal game.

How the exploit works:
You must add the XELL loader to lba location 0x20 on a separate CD (any cd/dvd media will work). With a compiled 360 Linux kernel named vmlinux in the root directory.
Once you have burned your patched King Kong disc, just insert the game into the 360 and press start at the King Kong main menu.
After a few seconds your DVD drive should eject the King Kong game and all you have to do is insert your CD with XELL and vmlinux.
It will take approximately 10-15 seconds to boot into Linux if everything is working correctly.

Thanks to:
Everybody working to bring homebrew to the 360!
This shader was generated by xorloser.
[QUOTE]

Cpasjuste released gentoo-xenon-minimal-2006.1 with xenon kernel patches and latest Xell at lba 0x20 of ISO:
[QUOTE]
This is a liveCD for Linux on the Xbox 360. It is based on the official gentoo minimal installer named install-ppc64-minimal-2006.1.iso with a few changes to boot on the Xbox 360 (codename xenon).
Currently, Samsung drives aren’t supported.
[/QUOTE]

Note (Xant): Bit more details about what you’ll need. As this uses the Hypervisor Vulnerability you’ll need Xbox360 kernel 4532 or 4548 (downgrade is not possible atm as Microsoft blew-up an eFuse in CPU to prevent kernel downgrades, if you got a lower kernel version you’ll need to find the CD/DVD burnable HD-DVD addon software update called HD_DVD_10-2006.zip (md5 cd4db8e2c94266ab73513c361dd5b8f6) that will upgrade your console to 4532).
You will also need the King Kong Xbox360 game, make an iso of it, apply the above new shader hack that include cdreader and burn it … and to run this modified gamedisc on your 360 will will need to flash your Xbox360 DVD-ROM drive with a modified firmware of course. And you’ll also need to burn the ‘xenon modified’ gentoo minimal 2006.1 LiveCD that includes the XeLL BootLoader. The LiveCD doesn’t support the Toshiba-Samsung DVD drive for now (unless you can get it in 0800-mode, but afaik there’s no way to do that if you’re using the new method with the new shaders above), so you’ll need an Xbox360 Hitachi-LG drive. Then just boot your modified King Kong, press start on the main menu and when the drive opens, insert the gentoo xenon LiveCD.

Official Site: www.free60.org (shader by: xorloser, LiveCD by: Cpasjuste, XeLL by tmbinc)
Download new shader: here
Download new LiveCD: here
Gentoo-Xenon Mini LiveCD Readme: here
Discuss this news item on our forums: New King Kong Exploit and Gentoo Livecd

Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone

Commentary: Company risks its reputation in competitive business
By John C. Dvorak
Last Update: 7:18 PM ET Mar 28, 2007

BERKELEY (MarketWatch) — The hype over the unreleased iPhone has actually increased over the past month despite the fact that nobody has seen or used the device. This, if nothing else, proves the power of branding and especially the power of brand loyalty.
It’s the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market. And it’s exactly the crowded-market aspect of this that analysts seem to be ignoring.
Apple Inc.’s past successes have been in markets that were emerging or moribund. Its biggest hit has been the iPod. But let’s examine what happened here.
First the MP3 player business was segmented and unfocused with numerous players making a lot of cheap junk and not doing much to market any of it.
Apple does what? Advertise. Gosh, what a concept.
Then there was the online music distribution business, again unfocused and out-of-control with little marketing and a lot of incompatible technologies. So Apple comes in with a reasonable solution, links it to the heavily promoted iPod and bingo. A winner.
It advertises on TV, on billboards and on the Internet. Within no time the company takes over the business that would probably still be languishing without Apple.
Thus Apple does what it does best. It produces a jazzy product and promotes it like any good business should do. And in the process manages to get a high margin.
This is nothing more than the fundamentals.

Now compare that effort and overlay the mobile handset business. This is not an emerging business. In fact it’s gone so far that it’s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.
During this phase of a market margins are incredibly thin so that the small fry cannot compete without losing a lot of money.
As for advertising and expensive marketing this is nothing like Apple has ever stepped into. It’s a buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies
The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.
There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive. Even in the business where it is a clear pioneer, the personal computer, it had to compete with Microsoft and can only sustain a 5% market share.
And its survival in the computer business relies on good margins. Those margins cannot exist in the mobile handset business for more than 15 minutes.
And note that the Microsoft Corp. versus Apple battles are laughable compared to the frenzied marketing mania in the handset business. Even Microsoft itself has troubles with its attempts to get into a small sub segment of the handset business with its operating system.
What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.
It should do that immediately before it’s too late. Samsung Electronics Ltd.
SSNGY ) might be a candidate. Otherwise I’d advise you to cover your eyes. You’re not going to like what you’ll see. End of Story

World Record Transfer Speed Set: 25.6TB per Second

Holy crap. The world record for fastest data transfer was just broken by Alcatel/Lucent, as they were able to transfer 25.6 terabits of data in one second over a single fiber strand. Well, that certainly puts my DSL line to shame.

Of course, this insanity isn’t about to be hooked up to your house anytime soon, but just knowing that they’ve figured out how to do it means that eventually, at some point, people will probably have speeds similar to this when they connect to the Internet. Hell, even 1/10th of that speed would be totally bananas overkill. But I’d take it, oh yes, I would take it. –Adam Frucci

Evolving Computer Developed; We Are Doomed

-from gizmodo
Researchers at the University of Oslo have developed a computer that evolves on its own using genetic algorithms to boost performance. See?

What their hardware does is par up “genes” in the hardware to find the hardware design that is the most effective to accomplish the tasks at hand. Just like in the real world, it can take 20 to 30 thousand generations before the system finds the perfect design to solve the problem, but this will happen in just a few seconds compared with the 8-900,000 years it took humans to go through the same number of generations.

Neat. Who knows how many practical applications this will have, but the idea of a computer evolving on its own to do what it needs to do is both cool and kind of terrifying. –Adam Frucci

Intel spills beans on Core 2 successor: SSE4, faster virtualization, bigger caches

-from ARS technica

By Jon Stokes | Published: March 28, 2007 – 02:23PM CT

At a press conference today, Intel’s Pat Gelsinger revealed fresh details of the company’s forthcoming 45nm processor family, codenamed Penryn. Penryn is the 45nm successor to the Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest microarchitecture that underlies the popular 65nm Core 2 Duo processor line.
Related Stories

Gelsinger opened the briefing with a discussion of the success of the company’s “tick-tock” model of processor innovation, a model in which process shrinks and major architectural revisions are rolled out on a staggered two-year time scale. “Today’s disclosures clearly lay out that this engine is delivering and delivering on track,” said Gelsinger, responding to what he characterized as initial skepticism that the model could work.

Gelsinger then moved on to discuss Penryn, which is the first product that will be produced on Intel’s new high-k dielectric 45nm process. Penryn is more than just a shrink—it’s a derivative of Core 2 Duo (codenamed Merom) with a number of improvements. Gelsinger laid out those improvements in more detail than we’ve seen so far, so I’ll outline them below.
Penryn’s improvements: SSE4 support, better virtualization

Penryn’s back end boasts two major advances over its predecessor. First is a new radix-16 divider that offers a 2x performance improvement on division operations vs. Core 2 Duo. The fast divider also speeds up a range of operations that depend on the divider hardware, like the square root function. Penryn’s SQRT operation is 4x the speed of Core 2.

The other major back-end improvement is support for the SSE4 extensions, a group of 50 new vector instructions aimed at speeding up media and other data-parallel applications. SSE4 will be paired with a new “Super Shuffle Engine,” a full-width, single-pass, 128-bit shuffle unit. This will enable Penryn’s vector hardware to perform 128-bit shuffle operations (e.g. pack, unpack, packed shift) in a single clock cycle. The beefed up shuffle capabilities will help Penryn align incoming vector data in the SSE registers so that the execution hardware can go to work on it.

Intel claims that SSE4, in combination with other new features that I’ll describe shortly, will offer Penryn a performance improvement of as much as 40 percent over Core 2 Duo on some software like video codecs, and as much as 20 percent on games.

A big part of this performance boost will no doubt be due to the higher frontside bus speeds that Penryn will support. Penryn-based Xeon systems will sport frontside bus speeds of up to 1600MHz. Intel estimates that the increased FSB speed could yield up to a 45 percent speedup on bandwidth- and floating-point-intensive applications on the fastest Penryn-based quad-core systems.

To go with the faster FSB, Intel has also upped the cache on the Penryn processors. Dual-core parts will have 6MB of shared L2, while quad-core products will have 12MB. These caches will also be paired with an enhanced version of Intel’s Smart Cache technology. The new Smart Cache will let Penryn speculatively execute across cache lines, eliminating the typical stall associated with non-aligned loads.

Intel will take advantage of the 45nm process not only to increase the amount of cache, but also to raise clockspeeds without significantly boosting power dissipation. Penryn parts will eventually reach the 3GHz mark, and may go even higher. The TDP numbers for Penryn desktop quad-core parts will be 95 and 130 watts, with desktop dual-core parts coming in at a 65W TDP. The TDP numbers for the 45nm Xeon will be 50W/80W/120W, depending on clockspeed. For dual-core, the numbers are 40W/65W/80W.

For Penryn-based mobile parts, Intel will introduce a new low-power state that they’re calling Deep Power Down. In the new state, the core clock is turned completely off, along with the L1 and L2 caches. Process state is saved in a special part of the processor so that the system can be restored on wakeup.

The other big power-related news about Penryn is that it will an enhanced version of Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration Technology. The new version will let Penryn detect when one core is largely idle—and thus not drawing much power—so that it can boost the clockspeed of the other, more active core while remaining in the same power envelope. For single-threaded applications where only one core is used, this will enable Penryn to speed up that one thread by devoting more power to the core on which it’s running.
Penryn boosts virtualization

One of the major features that Penryn brings to the table is a pretty important improvement to the performance of its Virtualization Technology (VT). Specifically, the performance of its virtual machine (VM) exit and VM entry instructions has been boosted so that VM transition times decrease by an average of 25 to 75 percent.

Right now, a lot of folks who’re testing out VT have been disappointed that its performance isn’t much better than existing, non-VT-based virtualization solutions like VMware. Specifically, VMware products use a binary translation engine that ingests regular x86 OS code and produces a “safe” subset; VMware claims that this binary translation approach is as fast as, or faster, than VT-based approaches because the OS doesn’t have to do costly VM transitions in order to execute privileged instructions. (These claims are debated; I’m merely reporting the fact that they are made.)

A major decrease in VM transition times will help the performance of VT-based solutions like Xen, and it would make the “which virtualization package to use?” debate even more about managment and less about relative performance than it already is.

All told, Intel will introduce six Penryn products this year, spanning the full range of segments from ultra-mobile to server. A full fifteen Penryn products are currently in development.

Zune firmware update v1.3 is out

-from egadget
It was but a mere eight days ago when we suggested that the number one thing that would currently improve the Zune’s status would be to get firmware v1.3 out to end users, and thankfully, that day has come. Sure, it’s arriving ever-so-slightly behind schedule, but ZuneInsider is reporting that the latest software is finally available for download now, and it sounds like that annoying skipping problem with Zune Marketplace content will be addressed, as well as throwing in “improved device and software reliability” in the “device detection / syncing” departments. Additionally, the FM tuner drain has also been fixed so that it no longer eats away battery life in sleep mode. So while Microsoft still has a ways to go in our estimation in order to seriously compete, here’s to taking the first baby step.

[Thanks, Matt]

Plans for the rest of the week and maybe the future

First off I want to thank you for visiting and reading this page, and I know it seems like it’s just a place were the authors are dumping tech news. Well your half right, we here at Entechx read the RSS feeds, dig through digg, and scour the internet so you don’t have to. In there future we intend to get a podcast going, at the end of every week as a recap of the top news stories, based on popular hits here and things we feel like you need to know. If you want to see anymore of a certain type of story here please comment on this post with ideas.
Next Friday I leave for conference with SHPE (Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers) and won’t be back till Sunday afternoon. I will take my laptop and continue to find stuff but no promises, Drumdude is going to take the lead for the time being. He’s our resident Linux guru as well our IT man, so expect some great posting from him. Thursday and Friday, very little will be posted as I will begin to pack up.

My thoughts on the Iphone

So after I first heard about on G4, I thought it was a horrible idea, and I still think it’d be a waste of money to buy if you already own a Ipod. I will admit that unlike many people in my generation (’87-’89 peeps) I have a slight bias aginst the Macs, it was just the way I was brought up. I will still buy a mac books, maybe after their batteries stop swelling up. Back to the Iphones, from what i hear and read resembles a palm pilot and includes:

• Ipod like capabilities
• wireless internet
• A “revolutionary” user interface called a touch screen. It does move with ease and very smooth I’d like to add
• Safari, so you can browse the internet. You can even flip it sideways, like the zune, to browse the internet pages.
• ease at checking emails and voice mail, also making calls seems very easy.

This all seems like a good idea, but remember “don’t believe the hype” This thing is expensive, $500 on the low end, so if you are willing it get one I would suggest trading in or selling your current Ipod. You won’t need it anymore if you decide to get on of these Iphones. I think if you have an ipod and a phone you might as well not buy this, since I doubt you’ll be able to listen to music and talk on the phone at the same time as surfing the internet. If you want to do all of that yo might have a problem known as a cyber addiction.

The 120gb HDD

So I apparently stayed up too late or something last night, because I slept through all my classes,lucky I can now read more news and RSS for today. So as I read one storyabout the 120gb HDD for the 360 I was surprised to find out that Microsoft is making the transfer very frustrating. Get this the transfer from one 20gb to the 120 gb is only one way and deletes everything on both HDD, before replacing it with the copied data. Also anything you could think to do with it is impossible, unless we end up modding the some how, but for now it only works once and one way.