Recovering Secret HD Space

An anonymous reader writes "Just browsing hardocp.com and noticed a link to this article. 'The Inquirer has posted a method of getting massive amounts of hard drive space from your current drive. Supposedly by following the steps outlined, they have gotten 150GB from an 80GB EIDE drive, 510GB from a 200GB SATA drive and so on.' Could this be true? I'm not about to try with my hard drive." Needless to say, this might be a time to avoid the bleeding edge. (See Jeff Garzik's warning in the letters page linked from the Register article.)

Comments

riiiiiiiight

[goosebane]

while(people == stupid)

anything = believable;

Thats all I have to say.

Re:How? Reliability?

[coastwalker]

Agreed, business logic of overclocked CPUs is slightly different as the chips genuinely do have different speeds at some point in their history (if only in simulation in the worst case) but do not always continue to do so.

When a processor first comes to market the production process is full of variablility which ends up being reflected in the reliable maximum clock rates of the CPUs. Something like the normal or Gaussian distribution will apply to the spread of clock speeds. This is why the fastest chips are often in short supply and also why a premium price can be charged for them. As the production technology and minor mask set shrinks (Stepping?) is improved the number of fast chips increases. At some point the production process may become so good that all the chips produced will run at the fastest speed of the first production run. Additionaly overclocking a chip may be possible with reduced reliablilty because the test vector that failed the chip at the manufacturer is rarely exercised on the home users machine. The manufacturer is not going to be selling chips which might fail in some mission critical application so lables them appropriately.

I think that the manufacture continues to sell a range of chip speeds for several reasons in addition to the one you cite. There is no guarantee that the manufacturing process will remain stable with high yields of fast chips and the spread price model for chip speeds is always needed for a new generation of chips. Initialy at least there is no marketing driven reason for fooling customers by selling them something which has been artificially degraded.