Hard Drive Overclocking Competition From Secau

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Hard Drive Overclocking Competition From Secau

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 30, 2011 @11:42AM from the spit-it-out dept.

Blittzed writes "We were reminiscing about the good old days of overclocking CPUs and memory, and the subject of hard drive overcloking came up. The discussion / argument we were having in the research lab ended up in a bet which now has to be settled. So, we are putting our money where our mouth is, and putting up $10,000 to anyone who can read a 500GB drive in under an hour. We will also consider other attempts with a smaller amount of money in the event that the one hour is not possible. There are a few rules (e.g. the drive still needs to work afterwards), but otherwise nothing is ruled out. Specific details can be found on the URL. Go let the white smoke out!"

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First Post by Niedi · 2011-06-30 11:45 · Score: 2

And the link is dead already? That was quick...
1. Re:First Post by wizzy403 · 2011-06-30 11:46 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Someone let the white smoke out...
2. Re:First Post by cultiv8 · 2011-06-30 11:55 · Score: 1, Redundant
  
  The OP forgot to mention which HDs they were trying to overclock...
  
  --
  sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
3. Re:First Post by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:01 · Score: 0
  
  can the original poster repost the rules here so we can get the concept?
  sudo hdparm -tT /dev/hda
  tests the combined throughput of the processor, cache and memory. This might be more involved than initally appears.
4. Re:First Post by Sulphur · 2011-06-30 15:32 · Score: 1
  
  The OP forgot to mention which HDs they were trying to overclock...
  How big is your hard disk?
  He replies with hand gestures.
5. Re:First Post by eharvill · 2011-06-30 15:33 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  We have a new pope already??
  
  --
  At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
6. Re:First Post by hairyfeet · 2011-06-30 18:59 · Score: 0
  
  I have a much better question....why? While I don't know if it is the same with Linux (I gave up messing with it around Ubuntu 10.4, but I'll assume it is) with Windows and the frankly insane amounts of cache one gets on a drive nowadays combined with Superfetch one will rarely notice your drive! In fact lately I've been using 5900RPM drives as OS drives because with 64Mb caches and plenty of RAM there just isn't enough of a difference in speed to deal with the extra noise and heat, especially if the customer wants it as an HTPC.
  So honestly I don't get it. you OC a CPU (or in the case of AMD unlock cores as well as OC) because you get a more expensive CPU at a cheaper price. Same thing with RAM or flashing an HD4830 into an HD4850 which I have done a couple of times so far and works well. But with HDDs you simply add a second in RAID 0 or if you don't mind dealing with the hot/crazy scale and the possibility you may be spending several hundred a year on replacements and be risking data? Well then go SSD. But it isn't like OCing that EcoDrive is gonna turn the thing into a Velociraptor, it is just gonna wear the thing out quicker for less gain than you would have seen adding a RAM stick. I just don't get it, folks with more time on their hands than they know what to do with I guess.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
7. Re:First Post by Joce640k · 2011-06-30 19:41 · Score: 1
  
  I'm failing to grok this. My two year old Velociraptor can sustain something close to 138MB/s transfer with no tweaking (the speed needed to read 500GB in an hour).
  Is there really no enterprise-level drive that can manage this...?
  
  --
  No sig today...
8. Re:First Post by Magic5Ball · 2011-06-30 21:17 · Score: 2
  
  Because some of us work with multi-TB scratch data on our workstations, and it it would be really nice not to have use do disk arrays to approach even one gigabyte per second, especially when even low-end memory and CPU busses can handle data at several times that rate.
  
  --
  There are 1.1... kinds of people.
9. Re:First Post by jimicus · 2011-06-30 23:47 · Score: 2
  
  I'm failing to grok this. My two year old Velociraptor can sustain something close to 138MB/s transfer with no tweaking (the speed needed to read 500GB in an hour).
  Is there really no enterprise-level drive that can manage this...?
  I'm hazarding a guess here, but I suspect that sustained transfer rate is for contiguous data - and even then it sounds a little high. As soon as you have to move the head to read the data (because large contiguous reads are really rare), you can expect to see the sustained rate plummet like a suicidal lemming.
10. Re:First Post by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 01:53 · Score: 0
  
  Coral proxy:
  http://harddisk.secau.org.nyud.net/
11. Re:First Post by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 02:03 · Score: 0
  
  Habeum PATAm.
12. Re:First Post by hairyfeet · 2011-07-01 03:22 · Score: 2
  
  But then you should be dealing with SSDs or Raptors. In the end it doesn't change the fact that unlike CPUs and GPUs and RAM where you are just pushing electrons through silicon with a HDD you are dealing with a mechanical device that has been built and testing for a certain rotational speed with a certain MTBF and by pushing that you are in essence redlining your car and hoping the engine doesn't blow.
  So it doesn't make any sense. With GPU, CPU and RAM you can use better cooling to drop the temp and allow more electrons through without damage. No matter what kind of fins you add with a HDD you still aren't gonna get close enough to that motor to matter and you are already talking 10,000RPM on a performance drive. There is a GOOD reason why we don't see 20,000RPM drives and that is because we are already at the limit and increasing spin is simply gonna add instability and increase risk of failure.
  And how many other than you use Multi-TB scratch drives? I bet its a teeny tiny niche at best. Not to mention if you are running machines that actually need multi-Tb scratch drives then I bet you have the money for 15k RPM drives or SSDs as machines running that much data through them are making serious $$$ for a company. So in the end this just doesn't make a lick of sense. It can't in any real way be used practically as it increases the risk of failure too much so at best you can say its a "for shits and giggles" test like running your AMD quad on liquid helium to reach 7.6GHz. Sure it might be impressive for a few seconds but it isn't like you are gonna use it for anything worth doing, now is it?
  
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  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
13. Re:First Post by drachenstern · 2011-07-01 06:46 · Score: 1
  
  Using multi-TB scratch disks on SSD would kill the SSD in a matter of months, as opposed to years on rotating disks.
  
  --
  2^3 * 31 * 647
14. Re:First Post by Coren22 · 2011-07-01 08:32 · Score: 1
  
  I have to say, I have an utterly different experience with SSDs, perhaps he should stop buying MLC and stick with SLC? SLC has 10x the life expectency, 10x the speed, but 1/10 the storage (and 10x the price...)
  
  --
  APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
15. Re:First Post by Coren22 · 2011-07-01 08:34 · Score: 1
  
  SLC, constant write at full speed will kill it in a matter of 10 or so years.
  
  --
  APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
16. Re:First Post by Coren22 · 2011-07-01 08:35 · Score: 1
  
  http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=15k+sas&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=4570783421788284630&sa=X&ei=VS8OTpvVPIugtwev9cnqDQ&ved=0CGEQ8gIwAg
  15k SAS is a reality, and if they shrunk the platters a bit more, 20k is doable.
  
  --
  APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
17. Re:First Post by hairyfeet · 2011-07-01 10:16 · Score: 1
  
  That is only if you use MLC which frankly as I linked to above is kinda shit ATM. Whereas if you use enterprise quality SLC (more expensive but if you are really running machines pumping so much IOPS that they need MultiTb scratch then you should have the $$$) have a MTBF if you write full blast of 5-7 years, with some rating 10+. And as another pointed out there are 15k SAS drives out there already as well.
  So in the end this simply makes NO sense at all. Everything you OC is electrons through silicon, which can be cooled down easily enough. Here we are talking about a motor spinning at insane rates already with a pubic hairs worth of distance between functional and screeching death. It gains you nothing, as it isn't like there is some huge price difference between drives based on speed and you certainly will NEVER get a 7200RPM drive anywhere close to SAS speeds as they simply don't have motors that can take the stress.
  In the end this is about as pointless as that Killer NIC, which for several hundred dollars at launch you too could gain a whole 2% if the moon was right and the ISP played along. Only this is worse as the Killer NIC would at least continue functioning even if it didn't speed you up, here you are pushing a motor beyond its operating limits and actually trusting data to it. That is Forest Gump levels of dumbshit right there.
  
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  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
18. Re:First Post by HappyPsycho · 2011-07-05 06:35 · Score: 1
  
  What is the slowest point in your PC?
  The performance of hard drives has limited what can be done on PCs for years, they are orders of magnitudes slower than any other part of the PC (short of removable disk drives) and as you have correctly pointed out many schemes have had to be designed to counter their slowness.
  Any disk cache falls apart once your data set passes the size of available ram and then performance drops to the performance of the hard drive itself. There is also the issue of any caching mechanism adds overhead, and if you get allot of misses the performance benefit is almost completely negated, all you need is a somewhat random I/O pattern and it goes to hell.
  If we bring this argument down to the common person on the street, will they see a difference if you upgrade the processor? probably not, ram? beyond a certain point nope (pass 2GB now a days and most can't see much difference), PCI-E 3.0 / SATA 3.0 / USB 3.0? Most devices can't even saturate the 2.0 version of these interfaces.
  The day I dropped in my OCZ Vertex into my home system to say I saw an increase in performance that outmatched going from 2G to 4G and then to 12G of RAM. I see a difference from the memory but only in certain apps. I also saw little difference except in gaming going from a X2 athlon to a quad phenom. I've also seen little real difference in most apps with a Centrino duo vs a i7 (my boss's laptop vs mine). I tend to win most comparisons / tests we do due to my solid state vs his mechanical hard drive.
  We are hitting diminishing returns on pretty much any other part of the chain, solid state is the only real answer at the moment but they have a size / cost issue to deal with 1st.
Perhaps instead of such a large prize... by Aranykai · 2011-06-30 11:51 · Score: 2, Funny

They should have considered spending some of it to upgrade their hosting.

--
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
1. Re:Perhaps instead of such a large prize... by Kamiza+Ikioi · 2011-06-30 23:18 · Score: 1
  
  Their hosting was only good for 500GB per hour, which they bet $10,000 that it was impossible for the Interwebs to read.
  
  --
  I8-D
An hour? by hawguy · 2011-06-30 11:54 · Score: 5, Funny

An hour!? I have a 500GB drive on my desk and I can read it in under a minute! The first line says: "Seagate Barracua 7200.11 500 Gbytes" The entire label has only a few dozen words and serial numbers.
1. Re:An hour? by Dunbal · 2011-06-30 12:09 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.
  
  --
  Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
2. Re:An hour? by 0123456 · 2011-06-30 12:14 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.
  I just ran smartcl here and the two Seagate Barracudas in this machine have each been running for 29,908 hours.
3. Re:An hour? by jamesh · 2011-06-30 12:19 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.
  I just ran smartcl here and the two Seagate Barracudas in this machine have each been running for 29,908 hours.
  I see what you're saying... even the SMART data is corrupt.
4. Re:An hour? by Freultwah · 2011-06-30 12:25 · Score: 2
  
  You won't be able to push any more than 18 gigabytes in a minute through SATA-II and that's in theory. So theoretically one could read a 500 GB drive in ~28 minutes, but the drives just aren't nowhere near as fast. Then again, maybe your Barracua is many fold faster than Barracudas. I know my Sonny cassette player was faster than that from Sony.
5. Re:An hour? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:30 · Score: 0
  
  An hour!? I have a 500GB drive on my desk and I can read it in under a minute! The first line says: "Seagate Barracua 7200.11 500 Gbytes" The entire label has only a few dozen words and serial numbers.
  Barracua.... oh yeah .....
6. Re:An hour? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:47 · Score: 1
  
  I think you missed the point. He can read all the text that is physically printed on the 500GB Hard Drive in under a minute.
  My speed-reading ability has (thus-far) not been limited by SATA-II bandwidth.
7. Re:An hour? by flappinbooger · 2011-06-30 12:51 · Score: 1, Redundant
  
  I see what you did there...
  
  --
  Flappinbooger isn't my real name
8. Re:An hour? by Luckyo · 2011-06-30 12:54 · Score: 2
  
  I can top this with my old 2x 200GB seagate barracuda 7200.7 drives. Used to be used together in raid0 on my old machine, now been in use as separate drives (one as system drive).
  They're yet to cause problems, unlike several other brands I had to kick into the curb while these two lived. Their power on time is reported as 43092 and 45394 hours respectively by S.M.A.R.T.
  You're probably talking about that specific failure in barracuda family, 7200.11. I had one of those, and had the typical problem (logic board dies). Exchanged it on warranty, they sent back a similar size 7200.12. No problems with that one either.
9. Re:An hour? by TheDarkMaster · 2011-06-30 13:10 · Score: 1
  
  This one made my day, thanks :)
  
  --
  Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
10. Re:An hour? by PopeRatzo · 2011-06-30 13:13 · Score: 1
  
  I've got an old Seagate 2.1Gb SCSI Barracuda that's been running since the 1950's.
  You start it with a pull-cord, like an old lawnmower. Sounds about the same, too.
  I'm not sure I can read that in under an hour, though.
  
  --
  You are welcome on my lawn.
11. Re:An hour? by Sulphur · 2011-06-30 13:59 · Score: 1
  
  I've got an old Seagate 2.1Gb SCSI Barracuda that's been running since the 1950's.
  You start it with a pull-cord, like an old lawnmower. Sounds about the same, too.
  I'm not sure I can read that in under an hour, though.
  Will it run Stuxnet?
12. Re:An hour? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 14:07 · Score: 0
  
  I see what you're saying... even the SMART data is corrupt.
  When I worked at Dell, the common statement was that SMART successfully finds 10 out of every 6 actual errors.
13. Re:An hour? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 14:08 · Score: 0
  
  The page isn't up, so I can't check the particulars of the contest, but if SATA-II was the limitation, you might be able to get around it by getting a 4K drive and reading only a small part of each sector (sequentially, of course.) This would cause the entire sector to be read by the drive's controller and yet only a small fraction of the data passed on through the SATA-II interface. All the data would still be technically read by the drive.
  But, as you said, SATA-II isn't really the limitation...I've only heard of pro SSD models coming close.
14. Re:An hour? by EdIII · 2011-06-30 14:47 · Score: 1
  
  I have been laughing for at least 5 minutes hysterically....... you pwned him so good. LOL
  Thank you
15. Re:An hour? by MurukeshM · 2011-06-30 14:59 · Score: 1
  
  And you still couldn't read it correctly. Epic.
16. Re:An hour? by number11 · 2011-06-30 15:07 · Score: 1
  
  I've got an old Seagate 2.1Gb SCSI Barracuda that's been running since the 1950's.
  Now, that's impressive. Presumably a secret project that IBM stole for their first model, which was introduced in 1956. But IBM's only had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of 5MB, and it needed 3-phase power and a forklift to move it. Yours is a lot bigger. But is it faster than IBM's (whose access time was close to 1000 ms)?
17. Re:An hour? by rmaureira · 2011-06-30 15:45 · Score: 1
  
  You forgot the "GET OFF MY LAWN" part... *sigh*
18. Re:An hour? by symbolset · 2011-06-30 15:53 · Score: 1
  
  The SAS 6G and SATA 3 (6Gbps) models of SSD go up to over 500GB now. Reading that in a few minutes is no big deal. Even the SATA II Intel 320 series does 600GB and sequential reads at 270 MB/s, which would be 600GB in (600000/270 seconds) - 2222 seconds or just over 37 minutes. My laptop has a better data rate, but I use off-brand components :-). This is no problem at all.
  A spinning rust platter isn't ever going to dish that, but if this is a job you need done and you're willing to spend ten grand, I'll take your money all day.
  And let's not have the Base2 Vs Base10 argument, OK? A 2.4 percent difference isn't going to change the outcome of this one.
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
19. Re:An hour? by number11 · 2011-06-30 16:16 · Score: 1
  
  You forgot the "GET OFF MY LAWN" part... *sigh*
  Hey, that's implied by my low UID. It shouldn't have to be explcit.
20. Re:An hour? by hedley · 2011-06-30 17:16 · Score: 1
  
  He means it's been running since about 10 to eight.
21. Re:An hour? by spire3661 · 2011-06-30 17:24 · Score: 1
  
  This is exactly why I limit any working computer with actual unique data to 500 GB or less. Beyond that it really becomes alot harder to maintain your dataset.
  
  --
  Good-bye
22. Re:An hour? by symbolset · 2011-06-30 18:20 · Score: 1
  
  That's rather limiting. There are PCIe attached solutions that consistently read/write at more than 6GB/s rather than 6Gb/s - like for example the ioDrive Octal. It can have far more storage than your limit - ten times as much on one card. That thing has a serious 48Gbps serial read bandwidth, sustained, and you can configure many PCs with eight or sixteen of them. This is only one of many. There are actually some applications that strain against the limitation of this bandwidth.
  The good rule for a thumb rule is that it should be general enough to scope its use. By bragging your rule on slashdot you've only defined the limits of your own vision and use. You're advertising that you're either "old school" or you're limited by some vendor's products, or late. Not a good place to be.
  Here's a good rule of thumb: A storage drive can never be so fast, nor so capacious, nor responsive enough to serve every storage customer's need - but on a clear disk you can seek forever.
  Do you see what I did there?
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
23. Re:An hour? by SharpFang · 2011-06-30 18:27 · Score: 2
  
  The problem is not the old disks. Actually, the older, the more reliable. It's the newest disks that are the worst. When you boast "My disk is running fine for 5 years already" you're talking about a disk from 5 years ago. And it's the disks from 2 years ago that keep dying on us. Tollerances get
  
  --
  45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
24. Re:An hour? by SharpFang · 2011-06-30 18:34 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, but did the rules state the data read needs to be the same as the data written? Error free?
  Just grab the data from the cache without worry if the cache got to be filled correctly and enjoy superior read speed!
  
  --
  45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
25. Re:An hour? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 18:55 · Score: 0
  
  Bah! I'm using an old millstone rotated by a crazy donkey. If I stop the donkey, I can read the whole millstone in half a minute!
  Writing, though, needs a quick handyman with his chisel.
  And don't you dare, youngsters, bring your newfangled lawnmowers on my lawn!
26. Re:An hour? by ian_from_brisbane · 2011-06-30 19:32 · Score: 1
  
  Tollerances get
  Must have been using one of those new disks.
27. Re:An hour? by SharpFang · 2011-06-30 21:00 · Score: 1
  
  whoops... something got
  anyway, tollerances get smaller, meaning less room for error, wear and smaller wear causes faults. Disk that had 2 years warranty was built so that it could work for 18 years +-15 years. Now a disk with 2 years warranty will work 3 years +- 6 months...
  
  --
  45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
28. Re:An hour? by nagnamer · 2011-06-30 23:27 · Score: 1
  
  You won't be able to push any more than 18 gigabytes in a minute through SATA-II and that's in theory. So theoretically one could read a 500 GB drive in ~28 minutes, but the drives just aren't nowhere near as fast. Then again, maybe your Barracua is many fold faster than Barracudas. I know my Sonny cassette player was faster than that from Sony.
  You should try Sany. Way faster than even Sonny. The only problem I had with it is it would only read the cassette once and then you need a new player... and a new cassette.
  
  --
  Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
29. Re:An hour? by nagnamer · 2011-06-30 23:29 · Score: 1
  
  The SAS 6G and SATA 3 (6Gbps) models of SSD go up to over 500GB now. Reading that in a few minutes is no big deal. Even the SATA II Intel 320 series does 600GB and sequential reads at 270 MB/s, which would be 600GB in (600000/270 seconds) - 2222 seconds or just over 37 minutes. My laptop has a better data rate, but I use off-brand components :-). This is no problem at all.
  You have to use Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5" SATA 500GB hard drive (WD5002AALX).
  
  --
  Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
30. Re:An hour? by nagnamer · 2011-06-30 23:31 · Score: 1
  
  He could read it correctly. Rules don't say that you have to write correctly, though.
  
  --
  Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
31. Re:An hour? by Hank+the+Lion · 2011-06-30 23:57 · Score: 1
  
  You forgot the "GET OFF MY LAWN" part... *sigh*
  Hey, that's implied by my low UID. It shouldn't have to be explcit.
  If your UID really would be low, then OK, maybe.
  But to be considered 'low', I would guess that it would have 4 digits. Or less.
32. Re:An hour? by AmiMoJo · 2011-07-01 00:00 · Score: 2
  
  Not really as during the life of the disk it will remap failing sectors to some spare unused blocks that are kept specially for that purpose. Once it runs low on spare blocks it will generate a SMART warning, and when it runs out you are screwed. The more hours the drive has on it the fewer spare blocks it is likely to have left.
  
  --
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  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
33. Re:An hour? by jermz · 2011-07-01 00:08 · Score: 1
  
  Bah. Kids these days with their "superior" 5 digit UIDs...
  
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  Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
34. Re:An hour? by Zappy · 2011-07-01 00:14 · Score: 1
  
  I agree;
  Now, GET OFF MY LAWN
35. Re:An hour? by dfetter · 2011-07-01 00:38 · Score: 1
  
  Here I thought I was fairly late to the party.
  
  --
  What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
36. Re:An hour? by bamf · 2011-07-01 00:48 · Score: 1
  
  Call that low?
37. Re:An hour? by Skal+Tura · 2011-07-01 02:43 · Score: 1
  
  We got hundreds of 500Gb & 750Gb Barracudas online. Annual failure rate is about 4%, but did peak at 7.38% at one point. Larger seagates are the worst drives ever, starting from 1Tb. Their sustained maximum contiguous read spead is about 22M/s only, if you are lucky! (We've tried ES.2 and Constellation only if i recall right, both high end drives, Constellation meant for enterprise only, and ES.2 if i recall right was basicly 'cuda meant for RAID required envs like video editing, for which their sustained rate is far too low)
  
  --
  Pulsed Media Seedboxes
38. Re:An hour? by operagost · 2011-07-01 02:45 · Score: 1
  
  Low UID, did you say?
  
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  Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
39. Re:An hour? by yourlord · 2011-07-01 02:54 · Score: 1
  
  I have 4 18GB 10krpm Seagate Cheetah U160 SCSI drives I bought in 2000, and which have been run 24x7 virtually ever since (other than brief down times for maintenance, etc)..
  That's roughly 87000 hours of run time on all 4 of them, with no failures. I retired them this past March along with the RAID controller they've been married to all this time. I retired them not due to failure (though the bearings in one sounded like the end was drawing near), but because I needed more storage in the server.
40. Re:An hour? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 03:24 · Score: 0
  
  You're probably talking about that specific failure in barracuda family, 7200.11. I had one of those, and had the typical problem (logic board dies). Exchanged it on warranty, they sent back a similar size 7200.12. No problems with that one either.
  There's nothing actually wrong with the logic board when a 7200.11 fails. The drive, for lack of a better word, just gets confused when it encounters a specific edge case (see "Root Cause" on that page) .
  To unconfuse the drive, you hack an adaptor that permits you to use the drive's built-in serial port (Yes, the bare drive itself features a real serial port. You could do this with a VT100 dumb terminal!) to wake it up. Seagate 7200.11 fix The hardest part of the hack is building the RS-232C adaptor.
41. Re:An hour? by SharpFang · 2011-07-01 04:26 · Score: 1
  
  The surface, the bad blocks is not really the problem here. Sure it degrades and starts slowing down, and eventually bad blocks may happen. But far sooner the disk motor bearing will die from constant vibrations, the head mechanism bearing will fail, the seals will leak moisture inside (and the dessicant bag will reach its capacity), the lubricant supply for the bearings will run dry, the "emergency parking" mechanism of the head will get stuck, capacitors will die on the PCB, and so on...
  The magnetic surface quality is the least of the problems, but the quality of bearings puts a real practical limit on lifetime of every drive.
  
  --
  45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
42. Re:An hour? by Luckyo · 2011-07-01 06:09 · Score: 1
  
  Worth noting that there's a major difference between 10k rpm SCSI drives and standard 7200rpm IDE ones, both in terms of manufacturing quality and cost.
43. Re:An hour? by spire3661 · 2011-07-01 07:43 · Score: 1
  
  Done looking down your nose at me? Did it ever occur to you that i am neither ashamed nor embarrassed that I have never come across a unique dataset i couldnt cram into 500GB or less?
  
  O noes I dont have access to hyper-expensive and exotic hardware. /seppuku
  
  --
  Good-bye
44. Re:An hour? by w0mprat · 2011-07-01 10:18 · Score: 1
  
  They seem to scale well, reading a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1500Gbytes took 0.1 seconds longer.
  
  --
  After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
45. Re:An hour? by AmiMoJo · 2011-07-01 21:42 · Score: 1
  
  I used to repair computers for a living and the most common hardware failure was a HDD running out of spare blocks. It seems like once drives start doing lots of re-mapping they start to fail quickly, suggesting that there may be some underlying cause for it.
  We used a bit of software called PC Check which would read the SMART logs and check the number of re-mappings. Often failing drives would not produce SMART warnings until you ran the full surface scan test, at which point they suddenly realised things were bad. The problems start well before then, typically manifesting as corrupt files and a damaged OS.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
46. Re:An hour? by SharpFang · 2011-07-01 21:52 · Score: 1
  
  I used to repair computers for a living
  So you don't any more?
  When did you finish?
  If more than 2-3 years ago, your experience is obsolete...
  
  --
  45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
47. Re:An hour? by AmiMoJo · 2011-07-01 22:01 · Score: 1
  
  Less than 1 year ago.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
48. Re:An hour? by Freultwah · 2011-07-01 23:12 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, that's the whoosh you get when you read something in a foreign tongue while slightly drunk, at 3.25 in the morning.
49. Re:An hour? by RockDoctor · 2011-07-02 02:10 · Score: 1
  
  Hey, that's implied by my low UID. It shouldn't have to be explcit.
  You've forgotten which sock-puppet account you're posting from, Taco. Now get off MY lawn!
  
  --
  Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
50. Re:An hour? by jcrb · 2011-07-02 08:25 · Score: 1
  
  so apparently /. is the only place in the world where in a "whose is longer" contest, the objective is to lose?
  
  --
  -jon
51. Re:An hour? by symbolset · 2011-07-08 18:53 · Score: 1
  
  Dude, that's not where I was going. I was trying to be light, as evidence "on a clear disk you can seek forever".
  You need not be offended that your needs don't fit the odd cases my customers need. I struggle each day to keep up so that I can serve them, and have whole books of notes on each. It takes something over half of each of my days to dig into the available tech to make sure I'm up to speed, and there's always something I missed. To need to work even 1GB in real time is a pretty big deal, let alone 500GB.
  Some folk actually need to work terabytes of data in real time though. For example one of my customers that logs ten years of email for 10,000 users. If they can migrate that data to some more responsive media so as to more efficiently search and index the data they're more likely to be able to comply with a court subpoena before the deadline and not lose a court case by default that could cost MANY of millions of dollars. These subpoenas are rather common, and if they failed to deliver the content to the courts and defaulted once, they would become more common as carpetbaggers exploited this weakness. They're well motivated to keep up with the pace of tech.
  Funny story: I was doing faster I/O on RAMDISK in 1985, though admittedly on lesser volumes. What we've done since now and then is make it cheaper and more common, more reliable and more capacious. Not faster. In a quarter century we should be able to do better.
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
White smoke? by damn_registrars · 2011-06-30 11:56 · Score: 0

I think there is some coming from the server that hosts that website.

--
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
1. Re:White smoke? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:53 · Score: 0
  
  There's some white smoke blowing around in here. Wait, what were we talking about?
White smoke, bah! by Rungi · 2011-06-30 12:05 · Score: 1

If you're OC'ing an SSD, wouldn't it be blue smoke? http://www.ncat.edu/~dowtin/pc/smoke.html Can you effectively OC an SSD?
Is that all? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:07 · Score: 1

Um, if all that has to be done is read the drive in under an hour, what's to stop me from just putting an additional set of heads and control electronics on the other side of the disk? I know there used to be such disks that could only read from one set of heads as a marketing thing for forward facing web services...
1. Re:Is that all? by spydum · 2011-06-30 12:17 · Score: 1
  
  Exactly -- I always wondered why this was not done -- is it a limitation of the form factor? Why not have two arms? We already use multiple heads, multiple platters. Seems like you could double the performance or at least allow a minimal cost error checking (single disk-level mirroring?) with such a solution.
2. Re:Is that all? by a_nonamiss · 2011-06-30 12:26 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  According to the rules, it needs to be reversible. They mention forensics, so maybe they're trying to do it undetected. At any rate, I'm pretty sure cracking the seal on the hard drive is verboten.
  
  --
  -Arthur
  Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
3. Re:Is that all? by blair1q · 2011-06-30 12:30 · Score: 1
  
  Dunno what you're talking about. Disks used to have multiple r/w arms. They also used to be the size of your desk. Putting another arm in the housing would only work if it was on the opposite side from the one that's there, but now your housing is 4 cm longer, and you've got extra wire causing latency and skew problems.
4. Re:Is that all? by Grishnakh · 2011-06-30 12:36 · Score: 1
  
  There have been hard drives in the past with two arms. I don't think it helped performance enough to make up for the cost difference.
5. Re:Is that all? by mlts · 2011-06-30 12:38 · Score: 1
  
  I've seen drives with two arms before, configured multiple ways:
  One drive had one arm just for reading, one for writing.
  One was made so if one arm failed, the other could continue. In the mean time, one arm did the work, while the other one just stayed idle.
  One was similar to the previous, except both arms did reading/writing at the same time.
  I think it didn't catch on because of cost, but could be wrong.
6. Re:Is that all? by tibit · 2011-06-30 13:04 · Score: 2
  
  Head preamps are usually somewhere on the arm assembly, and they drive controlled impedance differential pairs, so an extra inch or two shouldn't be that big of a deal. Latency is not an issue at all, each arm would be controlled separately and they don't need to be synchronous at all.
  
  --
  A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
7. Re:Is that all? by Sloppy · 2011-06-30 13:10 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I always wondered why this was not done
  If you look at it the right way (translation: I'm about to break a rule) it's done all the time. It's called RAID0.
  But seriously, that tells you why it's not done: because if your really care about performance that much, you can get more performance than a multi-head-set drive and spend less money by using commodity parts. If you make a drive that works this way, no one will buy it. (Except for money laundering purposes. ;-)
  
  --
  As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
8. Re:Is that all? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 15:32 · Score: 1
  
  Well, it's not strictly equivalent to RAID0... (Yeah, you said break a rule, so I'm not saying "you're wrong!", just indulging in the essential and fun pedantry without which /. is not.)
  Say you have a video recording application where you're writing a video stream to disk, and that (perhaps uncompressed?) stream is of such ungodly bandwidth as to take a significant chunk of your drive's throughput. One head's fine if your disk isn't ridiculously fragmented (which it won't be); you have RAM to buffer it while the drive seeks occasionally (e.g. past a file fragment to the next unallocated space), then it'll catch up. But now suppose you want to playback a timeshifted stream of this same bandwidth -- even if you jump to RAID0 with two disks, thus doubling your throughput, you should have plenty of time to read/write. Only now you're seeking back and forth, and that latency really digs into your throughput. Maybe if you add 2 or 3 disks, it'lll work; maybe if you have enough RAM for huge buffers and a properly tuned I/O scheduler, you can read and write in big enough chunks to minimize the seek penalty. But a 2-headed hard drive will do just fine, and (at equivalent quantities) would be even cheaper than 2 identical drives, and similarly priced to 2 half-capacity drives for the RAID0 setup. Of course, since very few applications fit that profile, quantities are not the same, and RAID0 with however many disks you end up needing is still cheaper.
  So there is some sense in a dual-headed drive for very specific applications (something like DVR is the most obvious thing, but anywhere you have a real-time writing requirement where bandwidth is a significant fraction of drive throughput AND you can't put it on a separate drive from other IO), but there's nowhere near enough of those applications to justify it.
9. Re:Is that all? by adolf · 2011-06-30 16:54 · Score: 1
  
  From the practical aspect: My U-Verse DVR had a not-very-special 2.5" drive in it, and was able to record four things at once while replaying a fifth in my not-special configuration at home. (I believe it can actually do more than that with multiple receivers networked to it, but I just had the single DVR box.)
  That said, in the interest of pedantry: Unlike a striped RAID 0, a RAID 1 array of n+1 disks could conceivably perform as a single disk with multiple heads, since a RAID 1 of n+1 has n+1 worth of independent head stacks, all reading identical data. (Also in the interest of pedantry, n is 1 or greater, since otherwise it is perfectly possible to create a RAID 1 consisting of a single disk with none of this potential, even though it is neither redundant nor an array.)
  I don't personally know of an implementation that takes advantage of this mode of operation (in fact, ISTR discussion on the Linux md driver that specifically said that there were no plans to do so). Write performance would still be (best case) identical to that of a single head disk, but the potential gain for read performance is obvious.
  And in the interest of history, plus a being at least orthogonally related to TFS: I have a few IBM 9ES 7200RPM SCSI drives on a shelf, still. I distinctly recall a bit of verbiage describing the availability of different firmwares for these drives, which would optimize the caching algorithm for differing numbers of threads: For example, firmware n.2 for two threads, n.4 for four, et cetera.
  I never explored the idea of looking into it further because the closing sentence of "Please contact your IBM sales representative for more information" was rather off-putting, and sounded expensive. Besides, the drives were very able to keep up with every combination of seemingly-abusive realtime tasks I could shove at them when I was using them without any adjustment -- those fuckers were awesome back then. (Why fix it if it ain't broke? ;)
  
  --
  Kid-proof tablet..
10. Re:Is that all? by Z00L00K · 2011-06-30 17:01 · Score: 1
  
  I would also foresee problems with precision involved. Hard to keep heads on track.
  
  --
  If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
11. Re:Is that all? by hawguy · 2011-06-30 17:23 · Score: 1
  
  Say you have a video recording application where you're writing a video stream to disk, and that (perhaps uncompressed?) stream is of such ungodly bandwidth as to take a significant chunk of your drive's throughput. One head's fine if your disk isn't ridiculously fragmented (which it won't be); you have RAM to buffer it while the drive seeks occasionally (e.g. past a file fragment to the next unallocated space), then it'll catch up. But now suppose you want to playback a timeshifted stream of this same bandwidth
  That said, in the interest of pedantry: Unlike a striped RAID 0, a RAID 1 array of n+1 disks could conceivably perform as a single disk with multiple heads, since a RAID 1 of n+1 has n+1 worth of independent head stacks, all reading identical data. (Also in the interest of pedantry, n is 1 or greater, since otherwise it is perfectly possible to create a RAID 1 consisting of a single disk with none of this potential, even though it is neither redundant nor an array.)
  Except that that's not true in the case that the grandparent post described where you have a stream bring written at close to the maximum physical transfer rate of the disk, then you want to read that same stream from the beginning while you continue to write to it.
  With two heads on the same disk, this should be possible, one head is busy writing, the other head is busy reading, with little seeking going on for either head and the full bandwidth of each head is available for each of the concurrent streams.
  But if you're using 2 singled-head disks in a RAID-1 pair, this would not be possible, since the heads would have to seek as they switched between read and write mode and half the time the head would be reading, the other half of the time it would be writing, cutting the available bandwidth by half.
  I think what you're talking about is the ability of the controller to read one piece of data from one disk in a RAID-1 set, and another piece of data from a different disk in that same set at the exact same time, using each disk as a "head". I think this behavior is present in most quality RAID-1 controllers, I'm surprised md doesn't do it too. Of course, this only works for reads, writes still have to go to both mirrored disks at the same time (well, a battery backed caching controller can defer writes for a time, so writes don't have to be flushed to both disks at the same time)
12. Re:Is that all? by SharpFang · 2011-06-30 18:47 · Score: 1
  
  I'm afraid the limitation is cost, few people are willing to pay twice the price for same capacity...on obsolete technology. There were few CD-ROM drives that used multiple lasers, then DVD came in and the projects didn't return their own cost. So far the bus was always not fast enough to guarantee doubling the speed of the fastest drives.
  If you want faster HDD, get SSD.
  And as for home mods, 1) the precisions involved are out of reach of any non-professional, 2) just think about writing the firmware to run that sensibly...
  Somewhere up to 80GB drives were openable and even had "rebreather holes". Currently they are filled with protective atmosphere and a membrane protects the inside from atmospheric air while retaining pressure. Opening a disk pretty much destroys it.
  
  --
  45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
13. Re:Is that all? by jones_supa · 2011-06-30 19:26 · Score: 1
  
  Then how can you do almost anything?
14. Re:Is that all? by AC-x · 2011-06-30 22:31 · Score: 1
  
  what's to stop me from just putting an additional set of heads and control electronics on the other side of the disk
  Err, the engineering difficulty involved? But, you know, if you can just install an additional set of heads and controllers on a hard drive then I guess you've got the prize money in the bag!
15. Re:Is that all? by Skal+Tura · 2011-07-01 03:16 · Score: 1
  
  RAID1 requires n+n drives, not n+n. RAID5 is n+1, RAID6 is n+2.
  All HW raid solutions except RAID0 has serious performance degradation, even most of the time HW RAID0 gives marginal benefit.
  SW raid (Linux) RAID0 gives *almost* linear performance scale upto 4 drives at least. RAID10 in Linux works in a sane way vs. HW RAID10, it actually gives almost same performance benefits as RAID0, while offering the mirrored redundancy.
  RAID1, RAID5, RAID6 in simplified terms could offer better performance than single drive, but the performance is just way too degraded due to techniques involved. If i recall right RAID1 is synchronous, so both drives to need it written before going on for next thing, and reading won't be spread over both disks neither.
  Sure, they give some benefit, but RAID0 actually gives performance.
  In your case, you need RAID0 type of arrangement for the managing of the heads actually, if you want tto see actual performance gains worth anything.
  Now you ask, why HW Raid is being sold for enterprises for very high cost, if they have weak performance? To skim more HW sales.
  HP & Dell servers with more than 4 drives have the way weakest I/O performance i've seen. HP Enterprise drives weak performance is only rivalled by Seagate ES.2. Their designs are intentionally made to weaken the performance. ie. 6 drive chassis uses only a single S-ATA link, 12 drive chassis atleast used 2. Their RAID cards are also insanely slow. RAID10 is made the way it gives you no perf. benefit (compare linux SW RAID10).
  That way they can sell you an reaaally expensive SAN, reeeaaaally expensive SAS 15k 2.5" drives with SSD like capacities at even higher price. Still you are being capped most likely by the transport layer to quite slow speeds.
  Oh, and the best 4 hdd performance i've seen to date using 7200rpm drives, was on SW RAID0/RAID10, on a computer build on cheapest AMD HW for that performance level. Same drives on a intel machine performed weaker, tho that might just be because it was a HP server. (Phenom X4 vs. Quad Xeon).
  Weakest atleast 2HDD performance was on a HP 12 drive server. It was even weaker than a 6 drive server. It had 12x2Tb drives, and it performed weaker than a cheap Core2Duo with 2x750Gb Cudas! The DC kept on looking into it for a week, updated all firmware, tried different OSs etc. but performance still sucked. They ended up giving me several machines in replacement for the same price (Same CPUs, more ram on each, 4 drives on each).
  Best Price / Performance is with 750Gb 7200.12 Cuda's by a huge margin, but you can't get them anywhere anymore (new that is). 500Gb Cudas come next (unbelievably yes). For larger your only option is WD Blacks. Altho, i do hear Hitachi Deskstars do give a decent performance too.
  Don't believe reviews btw. 250Gb WD Blue was actually supposed to have damn good perf/cost ratio, but they ended up costing about 80-90% of a 500Gb Cuda, with 60% the performance, with way higher variation and higher degradation depending upon position in the drive. 500Gb Blue & Black i still got to test.
  
  --
  Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Hmm... by screwzloos · 2011-06-30 12:08 · Score: 4, Informative

I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hard-drive-charts-2010/Throughput-Read-Average,2156.html

No, I didn't look at the page. It's Slashdotted.
1. Re:Hmm... by mariushm · 2011-06-30 12:21 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's about 132 MB/s actually - remember, it's multiples of 1000, not 1024 and then some space is used by the file system.
  Anyway, it's not clear what they want just from the description here on Slashdot. Read the labels of the drive? But seriously, one could get a 2 TB drive or whatever drive has the most density these days and make it show up as 500GB drive... I believe it's called http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html
2. Re:Hmm... by a_nonamiss · 2011-06-30 12:28 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Is that 15k RPM drive a "Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5" SATA 500GB hard drive (WD5002AALX)." It's stated pretty clearly in the rules that it needs to be that model. I don't think they're going for a speed test here, because there are plenty of SSDs that blow that speed away. They're trying to take a "normal" drive and super-speed it, for forensic purposes.
  
  --
  -Arthur
  Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
3. Re:Hmm... by Mitsoid · 2011-06-30 12:31 · Score: 1
  
  They specified a brand and model that had to be used (e.g. the net result would be an X% increase in speed).. I think they also limited the hardware modifications you can do.
  So this is a test to make a hard drive 'over clock' and I believe they mean it in the sense like we do for CPU and memory -- Software/voltage/etc.. More cooling would be okay, but not disassembly of the hard drive
4. Re:Hmm... by mysidia · 2011-06-30 12:51 · Score: 1
  
  More cooling would be okay, but not disassembly of the hard drive
  You could replace the drive firmware with a hacked one that changes error detection behavior, changes the way the buffer/cache is used to optimize the drive for the contest's access pattern, or kills any power saving features.
  The other thing would be changing characteristics of the drive's mounting to reduce vibration to insanely perfect vibration dampening for maximal mechanical performance.
5. Re:Hmm... by flappinbooger · 2011-06-30 12:59 · Score: 1
  
  So, upping the RPM obviously, but there must be various actuator settings in firmware that could be tweaked - safeguards, gain settings? What are the possibilities? I've never seen this done or even talked about, most people are "afraid" of hard drives, amazed they even work at all.
  
  --
  Flappinbooger isn't my real name
6. Re:Hmm... by SirMasterboy · 2011-06-30 12:59 · Score: 1
  
  http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+gigabytes+per+hour+in+megabytes+per+second
7. Re:Hmm... by Cramer · 2011-06-30 13:46 · Score: 2
  
  In all modern IDE/SATA drives, the firmware is stored on the plater, not in an eeprom. And for most manufacturers, it's not field accessable. Plus there's zero documentation for the firmware / internal processor(s) outside of the manufacturer's labs. (and maybe the company making the chips.) Hacking the firmware is beyond the reach of anyone who would be wowed by a $10k prize.
8. Re:Hmm... by mariushm · 2011-06-30 13:59 · Score: 1
  
  http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701277.pdf
  Formatted Capacity 500,107 MB = 488 GB so you need 138 MB/s to get data in an hour.
9. Re:Hmm... by slinches · 2011-06-30 13:59 · Score: 1
  
  Does it have to be a spinning platter drive? If not, some of the PCI-E SSDs can get over 1GB/s sequential reads which would easily put a 500GB read at under 10 minutes. Of course, you'd likely have to spend at least half of the $10k prize on the drive itself.
  
  --
  Knowledge Brings Fear
10. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 14:04 · Score: 0
  
  Wasn't this the cause of the infamous Seagate 7200.11 issue?
  One of the possible fixes for that issue was to connect to the serial port on the drive and issue commands directly to the processor.
  ISTR one of the suggested tools would let you dump and overwrite firmware using that same connection.
11. Re:Hmm... by Cramer · 2011-06-30 14:30 · Score: 1
  
  Seagate was one of the few that would field update a drive -- through a special mode program sent to the drive... I'm aware of console ports on tape drives but not any hard drive. (esp. cheap retail drives.)
12. Re:Hmm... by Lost+Race · 2011-06-30 14:34 · Score: 1
  
  From that same document:
  
  1. As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes.
  
  So 500,107 MB = 500.107 GB
  "Formatted capacity" has nothing to do with file system formatting; it refers to the host-accessible storage capacity of the drive, which is 976,773,168 sectors (also from that same document). The contest is to read all those sectors in under an hour. Sectors are 512 bytes each, so you need to read 500,107,862,016 bytes in 3600 seconds or an average of 138,918,851 bytes per second.
13. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 15:07 · Score: 0
  
  A virtual "Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5" SATA 500GB hard drive (WD5002AALX) using DDR3 ram would certainly be faster than the non-virtual (once one populated it of course -- perhaps via tcpdump of an active internet oc-3 line) && once could certainly read the drive tag line in less than a minute.
14. Re:Hmm... by hedwards · 2011-06-30 15:46 · Score: 1
  
  I think you mean mebibytes per second.
15. Re:Hmm... by adolf · 2011-06-30 17:09 · Score: 1
  
  Sweet! After all these years, finally someone has come up with a reason for something better than UDMA 133!
  
  --
  Kid-proof tablet..
16. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 17:19 · Score: 0
  
  True, but there's prestige, too.
  If I was an engineer at WD (and therefore had access to the specs and firmware source), I'd definitely try it in private, and push for permission to claim the prize & bragging rights (without undue disclosure of IP, obviously). IMO it would be good publicity for the company, of course if I worked at WD, my boss would probably be the kind of asshole to forbid it.
17. Re:Hmm... by b0r1s · 2011-06-30 17:56 · Score: 1
  
  Meh. 15k drives, multi drive arrays, there's no reason to overclock CPUs anymore, and there's no reason to overclock hard drives. More cores scales better than overclocking, and more spindles scales WAY better than overclocking.
  
  Orgrimmar:DATA admin$ df -h | grep disk7 /dev/disk7 18Ti 238Gi 18Ti 2% /Volumes/DATA Orgrimmar:DATA admin$ date ; dd if=/dev/zero of=test.bin bs=16k count=10240000 && du -sh test.bin && dd if=test.bin of=/dev/null bs=32m ; date Thu Jun 30 22:47:45 PDT 2011 10240000+0 records in 10240000+0 records out 167772160000 bytes transferred in 240.477549 secs (697662466 bytes/sec) 156G test.bin 5000+0 records in 5000+0 records out 167772160000 bytes transferred in 139.259221 secs (1204747226 bytes/sec) Thu Jun 30 22:54:06 PDT 2011
  
  Server has 8G ram, so some of that may be in cache, but certainly not all of it. Extrapolate as needed.
  
  --
  Mooniacs for iOS and Android
18. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 18:19 · Score: 0
  
  Unless you have a sparse filesystem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file
  Try with something that isn't zeros :P
19. Re:Hmm... by citizenr · 2011-06-30 23:28 · Score: 1
  
  In all modern IDE/SATA drives, the firmware is stored on the plater, not in an eeprom. And for most manufacturers, it's not field accessable. Plus there's zero documentation for the firmware / internal processor(s) outside of the manufacturer's labs. (and maybe the company making the chips.) Hacking the firmware is beyond the reach of anyone who would be wowed by a $10k prize.
  Its not that mysterious. People mod DVDrom firmwares every day. HDD is just a DVDrom with magnetic media :)
  + firmware IS "field accessible". Every HDD on the market can have firmware updated by end user.
  
  --
  Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
20. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 23:35 · Score: 0
  
  Not true...
  HD firmware upgrade utility would be of great use. Determine likely processor from firmware, reverse engineer firmware.Then upload your own, using that same tool. If not available for that specific model, check manufacturer's techniques on similar drives...
21. Re:Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 04:19 · Score: 0
  
  In all modern IDE/SATA drives, the firmware is stored on the plater, not in an eeprom. And for most manufacturers, it's not field accessable. Plus there's zero documentation for the firmware / internal processor(s) outside of the manufacturer's labs. (and maybe the company making the chips.) Hacking the firmware is beyond the reach of anyone who would be wowed by a $10k prize.
  Please don't use words like "all" in comments like this. Especially when you're wrong to begin with. How is a drive, with firmware stored on the platter, going to spin itself up initially? I work as a firmware engineer for one of the "Big 3". The firmware is stored in flash.
22. Re:Hmm... by Cramer · 2011-07-01 05:27 · Score: 1
  
  Ask Maxtor for the firmware update for your IDE/SATA drive. Seagate has updates for *SOME* drives, but not all. WD... I've not seen one in years.
  (SCSI is a different fish.)
23. Re:Hmm... by Cramer · 2011-07-01 05:32 · Score: 1
  
  The tiny eeprom contains a boot loader. That code is MUCH smaller than the complex full interface. Somehow I doubt you've worked for any hard drive maker in the last decade.
24. Re:Hmm... by Agripa · 2011-07-01 08:36 · Score: 1
  
  Western Digital no longer publishes the internal organization for their drives but 126 MB/s over 500 GB yields about 1 hour and 6 minutes to read the entire drive in the best case. It is proportionally longer of course for larger drives since only one head can be read at a time and head switches require at least the same amount of time as a adjacent track seek.
  Without physically raising the spindle speed, I do not believe it will be possible to lower the time to read the entire drive significantly. The spindle speed is no doubt frequency locked to an on-board oscillator so I might try swapping the controller board with one modified for a higher spindle speed and then reading the drive. There are a couple of ways to go about that including raising the frequency of the reference oscillator or changing the phase locked loop divider that the spindle motor driver uses. RPM detection no doubt uses back emf sensing so fiddling with the spindle position sensing is not an option.
  All of this will be for naught though if the read channel will not operate at the higher frequencies involved and the drive may simple fail during calibration or detect an out of scope parameter and shut down. Reverse engineering and reprogramming the firmware it outside the scope of what I would attempt without significant time and funds.
  If I had a drive or two to sacrifice I could try something.
Done already! by allanw · 2011-06-30 12:10 · Score: 5, Funny

http://www.afrotechmods.com/hdoc.htm
1. Re:Done already! by ooshna · 2011-06-30 15:38 · Score: 1
  
  You sir have the hair of Ariel and the muscles of Schwarzenegger for linking to that awesome site.
2. Re:Done already! by arth1 · 2011-06-30 16:09 · Score: 1
  
  You're sure it's not the hair of Schwarzenegger and muscles of Ariel?
Fizzzzzzttt by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:17 · Score: 0

Oh dear, hosting 500Gb drive dead already, I guess they not getting $10K... :-)
1. Re:Fizzzzzzttt by blair1q · 2011-06-30 12:32 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Maybe that's what they mean.
  "If you can get anything off our 500 GB drive in the next hour, we'll give you $10K."
Seems a bit silly by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 12:29 · Score: 1

If any hard drive is allowed, then there's nothing to stop you using a 15K RPM drive.
If any format is allowed, then have one sector per track (so there's one seek per track and you make absolutely maximum use of buffers, minimizing latency). Structured disks are rather unnecessary with smart controllers and huge memory sizes. Read the whole track, modify in memory, write the whole track. Back when disks were actually much larger than machine memories, it made sense to have formatted disks. These days, you can buy flash that's comparable in size that could fit on a controller easily and a single bank of RAM is more than sufficient to handle track-at-once operations on individual drives.
If any controller is allowed, roll your own. You want the lowest-level operations offloaded from the CPU (which is slow) and you want the buffers written direct to memory rather than via the kernel (so you want a bus controller on there).
In short, there's a multitude of ways of speeding disks up, and some of them are actually interesting.
1. Re:Seems a bit silly by FlyingGuy · 2011-06-30 12:41 · Score: 1
  
  I think they are referring to things like we used to do. change a crystal, perhaps a cap or two and add a bigger heat sink, not re-engineer the thing.
  
  --
  Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
2. Re:Seems a bit silly by qubezz · 2011-07-01 12:01 · Score: 1
  
  I have a better idea, one track, no more random access. Like an LP record. Drop the head at the beginning and let it read a spiral inward. Have two 'side tracks' read by sub-heads on the same head chip as formatting to keep the main head in the groove. 100% ECC blocks. 2tb drive -> 500gb drive at same density. Now spin the drive at 50,000rpm and drop the needle and get back your 500GB in about five minutes.
3. Re:Seems a bit silly by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-02 13:23 · Score: 0
  
  Am I the only person that remembers the story of the poker playing computer? Back in the days of drum memory, optimizing performance meant locating instructions and data relative to each other (and the drum speed) so that there was no seek time spent waiting for the drum to complete another rotation.
Solution by gatkinso · 2011-06-30 13:03 · Score: 1

Post a bounty on slashdot, watch your drive fry.

--
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
SSD? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 13:56 · Score: 0

I haven't been able to get to the linked article but why not just use an SSD? Specs of a Crucial 512GB SSD:
512GB Crucial m4 2.5" SSD with Data Transfer Kit
Part Number: CT512M4SSD2CCA
The fastest SSD on the planet.
Groundbreaking SATA SSD performance
Read speeds up to 415MB/s
Second-generation SATA 6Gb/s w/ Native Command Queuing (3Gb/s backward compatible)
1. Re:SSD? by jones_supa · 2011-06-30 19:38 · Score: 1
  
  Because that would be like putting a sports car in a tractor competition.
do not do this by JonySuede · 2011-06-30 14:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is an attempt by a forensic company to crowd-source the development of a product on the cheap. I you can do this, you can make a fortune selling to the different LEAs around the world. But please don't do it, we do not need more efficient spooks.

--
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
1. Re:do not do this by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 14:30 · Score: 0
  
  Any modification that's performed on the drive would invalidate the evidence extracted from it in court. Tampering with the disk is verboten. Any good lawyer would know that (IANL).
  This will allow them to go on a faster phishing expedition when they do things like seize the laptops of travellers. Not evidence in court, but enough to evict you from the country perhaps.
2. Re:do not do this by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 16:55 · Score: 0
  
  I agree. This probably will be used at the airports. Good money making scheme. Do not sell yourself for so cheap. 10K for a forensic breakthrough is peanuts.
3. Re:do not do this by Paska · 2011-06-30 20:31 · Score: 1
  
  This is another hidden benefit of Apple hardware that people don't readily consider.
  Apple hardware is very hard to get in and out quickly, covertly, and without a few red flags being noticeable.
  A couple of years (4+ now) ago when I sat in with Apple's instructor led hardware certification labs there were a small team of high tech crime investigators for the Australian Federal Police, and Australian Attorney Generals department attending.
  They weren't interesting in passing the test, they had absolutely *no* interest in OS X, and they hated Apple hardware with a passion - why? Because it was damn hard to get in and out to get access to the hard drive. The '06 model iMacs (which at the time, was the current model) caused this guys to be furious with Apple, given you had to rip/tear the heat shield to get to the hard drive.
  Being a predominate Apple technician at the time in Canberra, and given my reputation as being half decent I stayed in contact with a few of these departments, and still do to this day.
  Even a little under a year ago I was (2010) I was personally requested to attend on-site to an unnamed department, to get a hard drive out and back in. What was normally a 45 minute on-site, turned in a *2 day* on-site as the team I was with (I was heavily supervised) had never worked on an Mac before, the matter was clearly urgent, and after removing every screw, the LCD panel, every cable, photos were taken and I was providing on-site training as to what every step I was taking.
  Placing the iMac back to gather took the longest as I was stopped every few moments, asked to leave the room and then asked to come back into the room to continue. I suspect they were comparing the pull-apart photos to how I was placing the machine back together to ensure the machine was being placed together exactly as it was before.
  While I never asked questions, a few months later the Australian Federal Police busted one of Australian's largest children pornography rings in Australia. I have the niggling feeling I was somewhat involved in this operation.
  Disclaimer: I am now an owner of an Canberra, Australian based Apple Mac managed services business.
4. Re:do not do this by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 22:31 · Score: 0
  
  You just earned yourself a spot on the dreaded list Mr. JonySuede!
5. Re:do not do this by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 01:54 · Score: 0
  
  because you need terrorist blowing up your world, drug dealers getting your kids smacked, robbers taking your life savings.
6. Re:do not do this by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 15:26 · Score: 0
  
  read his sig, the drug dealers serve a purpose.
Smells like marketing... by znerk · 2011-06-30 14:40 · Score: 1

Has anyone considered that this is simply a high-profile device for:
A: Selling amazing amounts of the specified WD 500GB HDD?
B: Giving WD some free (or nearly so, $10k is pennies in the pot) development of a product line, via a third-party agent?

--
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
1. Re:Smells like marketing... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 18:06 · Score: 0
  
  Sometimes Even giving it free, is not enough when... "Educated" people regarding business leadership gets their hands on the stuff... "your saying were getting 10% material savings but ONE added part... can't do! should reform whole production line.."
  theres stuff even where patents have expired and still not used widely, despite superiority.
  Also in sport's large manufacturers lobby even the olympic rules to keep out new inventions...
Smells like marketing... for the university itself by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 14:52 · Score: 0

No. It's more likely the Edith Cowan University "Security Research Centre" advertising itself. It's cheaper to pay a $10,000 bounty, than to buy advertising space, in order to put the university's name in front of prospective students.
Ideas for success by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 15:22 · Score: 1

Posted under anon cause I'm at work
Theoretically
-There are dc electric motors (brushed and brushless) that can run at 30k+ rpm
-The electronics on the drive are running on a clock (you'd assume)
-There is some firmware that governs the parameters of the hdd
-some large forklift motors @ 36VDC can run on 120vDC - meaning that you can in theory put more power in without frying
-Electronic voltage constraints are due to heat/power dissipation.
Quick and dirty Thoughts:
1. Chips should be able to handle data being fed at a quicker rate
2. Remove logic board from drive to help cooling both logic board and motor
3. Measure voltage across the terminals of the motor in use, wire it up to a linear regulator that outputs 20% greater voltage.
4. Main concerns will be heat of the motor (heatsink case, blah)
5. Pray that the stepper motor in the arm and the head can handle the higher spindle rate
Way out there ideas:
1. Replace motor with 30000+ rpm motor
2. Replace hardware in drive with 15k rpm hardware - doubt this will work.
1. Re:Ideas for success by Skal+Tura · 2011-07-01 03:30 · Score: 1
  
  You can almost certainly overvolt an electric motor, unless it's already at it's peak RPM rating. Especially true with brushless.
  I would bet the motors used in HDDs would run fine for years even at 36V, assuming they are 12V. Thus tripling the RPM rating. Just avoid stopping & starting the platters often (highest peak of power used). Question is can platters do it. HDDs are meant to work for years upon years, so they should be working at rather low end of their potential capability, in terms of wear & tear plus heat. Heat is the killer for electric motors.
  I guess, at it's simplest just increase the motor voltage might actually work. Unless the controller electronics are relying on being at exactly correct RPM rating.
  Could be even rather simply to test, regularly PSU supplies upto 12.35V, change this to car battery charger which will give you 13.6V or thereabouts, see what happens :)
  Motor replacement is not viable option, unless you got a lab to work in.
  Replacing with 15k RPM hardware -> why not just use the 15k RPM drive then? ;) (well platter size ...)
  
  --
  Pulsed Media Seedboxes
2. Re:Ideas for success by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 04:15 · Score: 0
  
  The reason that CD burners did not advance to speeds beyond 52x was the fragility of the write medium. Discs would spin so fast they shattered, sending high-velocity plastic shards through anything nearby. I'm no HDD engineer, but I would not like to be anywhere near the drive you've pushed that far beyond its specifications.
3. Re:Ideas for success by MrKaos · 2011-07-02 03:26 · Score: 1
  
  You can almost certainly overvolt an electric motor, unless it's already at it's peak RPM rating. Especially true with brushless.
  I would bet the motors used in HDDs would run fine for years even at 36V, assuming they are 12V. Thus tripling the RPM rating. Just avoid stopping & starting the platters often (highest peak of power used). Question is can platters do it. HDDs are meant to work for years upon years, so they should be working at rather low end of their potential capability, in terms of wear & tear plus heat. Heat is the killer for electric motors.
  I guess, at it's simplest just increase the motor voltage might actually work. Unless the controller electronics are relying on being at exactly correct RPM rating.
  Could be even rather simply to test, regularly PSU supplies upto 12.35V, change this to car battery charger which will give you 13.6V or thereabouts, see what happens :)
  Motor replacement is not viable option, unless you got a lab to work in.
  Replacing with 15k RPM hardware -> why not just use the 15k RPM drive then? ;) (well platter size ...)
  Your forgetting that the heads are separated from the platter by the turbulence in the air from the surface of the spinning disk. Changing the speed of the spinning disk changes the distance the head is from the platter thus increasing the read error rate. I suspect you could do it but you would have to be accessing some of the diagnostic mode of the drive where reads could be performed at reduced current.
  You might be able to increase the platter speed and the electronics will probably support the increased read rate, but will the data read from the drive look like one big square wave.
  Increase platter speed, reduce read current.
  
  --
  My ism, it's full of beliefs.
links broken in comments? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 15:53 · Score: 0

seems once again, the latest slashcode update has broken some fundamental stuff... anyone else seeing the site scripts breaking links inside comments? the links in the story summaries are fine. actually, maybe it's all mouse clicks in the comment area are broken. can't even right click within the border of a comment. wtf guys...!?
1. Re:links broken in comments? by farseeker · 2011-06-30 17:22 · Score: 0
  
  Double-right-click and the menu shows up in FF5
Re:Smells like marketing...+++ by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 16:12 · Score: 0

Maybe someone knows that HDs are purposely crippled in performance because:
1) they need to last past their warranty
2) overheating
3) to segment the market and offer premium products even though technology employed is the same
linear array of reading heads by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 17:09 · Score: 0

I've been wondering for awhile now why there still is a mechanical arm with a single reading head. Why not just span a linear array of reading heads over the disk, one for each track.. you'd be able to read out an entire disk in one rotation. that'd be some impressive speed. it'd kick ssd's ass.
my-lptp:~ fred$ ls -l /dev/sda1 by Anonymous Coward · 2011-06-30 18:10 · Score: 0

OK I didn't descend into directories. ...What?
You wanted me to write the data somewhere?
IRONY by roman_mir · 2011-06-30 19:28 · Score: 2

What is ironic is that this story precedes the one, that gives the actual reason for this one.
It's not too saddle, is it:
'Federal Wiretaps On The Rise'
'Hard Drive Overclocking Competition from Secau'

--
You can't handle the truth.
1. Re:IRONY by roman_mir · 2011-06-30 19:31 · Score: 1
  
  subtle, I meant subtle. I didn't have a good night rest and am still slippy....
  
  --
  You can't handle the truth.
Obligitory: You must be new here... by rts008 · 2011-06-30 19:43 · Score: 1

For saving confusion in the future, Grasshopper, you should automagically append "GET OFF MY LAWN!!!" to every comment from a six digit /. UID.
See, sometimes the Geritol hasn't had time to kick in yet, and adding that to our comments gets overlooked in the frenzy of typing the reply.
Oh yeah, and...GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

--
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Sarcasm filter broken? by rts008 · 2011-06-30 20:01 · Score: 1

Whooosh!
I think you need some PF Flyers[1], AND a trampoline to catch everything flying over your head.
[1]From the wiki on PF Flyers:

...were very popular in the 1950s, renowned for helping you "run faster and jump higher..."

emphasis mine
Oh yeah, and 'Get off my lawn!!'

--
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
1. Re:Sarcasm filter broken? by MurukeshM · 2011-06-30 23:36 · Score: 1
  
  "Seagate Barracua 7200.11 500 Gbytes"
  Emphasis mine. I got the sarcasm perfectly well.
  Your lawn's long since become a desert.
Vary temperature and pressure by sonamchauhan · 2011-06-30 20:35 · Score: 1

Hmmm... HDD have atmosphere seals.
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/hard-drives-hermetically-sealed-t2014655.html
wonder if varying temperature and pressure will help.
E.g. doing this in a cold, low pressure environment.
Or a cold, high-pressure environment.
Settings settings settings. by leuk_he · 2011-06-30 21:12 · Score: 1

Yes, I think you are on the right track here. If some people manage to reverse engiceer those dirty details how the HD works, then with that info a lot of HD could be recovered.
e.g. now a HD is considered dead if you do nog have a identical controller chip. If you can figure out how that controller chip is actually working, you can retreive a lot of data more simple.
The problem is that everybody still considers the HD a black box. If it works, fine, if it not works buy a new one.
However there might be a lot more tunable to a HD, or (what their goal might be), retreive data from a HD that is perceived dead.
1. Re:Settings settings settings. by flappinbooger · 2011-07-01 03:45 · Score: 1
  
  Well overclockers take a "cheap" low end processor (especially back in the C2D days, take a "Pentium Dual Core" and crank it up, get 99% of the performance of a C2D EE chip many times the cost. Why not figure out how to take a "cheap" 5400 RPM drive and figure out how to crank it up.
  
  Chip makers are known to sandbag their chips especially after a design is mature. They detune chips and sell them as low performance pieces to fill the market, and the performance is there for the taking with no real risk to the chip.
  
  The question in my mind is whether such a thing can be done with Hard drives?
  
  As a mechanical engineer I would wager "no" because with electronics the "parts" are more yield based qualitative results. With a hard drive there are real physical mechanical components that may simply not be present. But.... If the firmware is tweakable, and the motors are adjustable, why not crank up a 5400 RPM drive to 10k rpm, tweak the firmware, and see what kind of throughput it can do? Will it burn out? Yep. But it might pass the test put forth in TFA and also might work after. For a while!
  
  This is perfect for the overclocking crowd. To be able to say they got the performance of a high end server drive using a $40 crap drive from newegg - and they're POSTING ON THE FORUM RIGHT NOW USING THE DRIVE! Such pissing match victories would be huge indeed.
  
  --
  Flappinbooger isn't my real name
It's time for a different environment by SEWilco · 2011-06-30 21:40 · Score: 1

Do your reading in a negative-gravity environment, so time has negative dilation and the data can be read at what seems to be a higher speed to an outside observer. Achieving a faster time frame is left as an exercise for the overclocker.
Repost from the site by denobug · 2011-07-01 02:54 · Score: 1

Since I can get to it (after a long delay), perhaps I would just post TFA itself:

Overclocking Competition

CPU overclocking is old school, and GPU overclocking isn't much newer. Memory overclocking? Been there done that. For all of you hardware modders looking for something else to let the white smoke out of, have we got a challenge for you! Hard drive overclocking! Why do you want to do this? Because you can! And, in these days of really big hard drives, getting data off the things can take a long time. So much time that it has created somewhat of a challenge for the digital forensic boffins – some of their lab coats are starting to get cobwebs from standing around waiting for so long (Have you ever tried dusting off a forensics boffin? No thanks). So, what we want to know is, can you modify a traditional mechanical hard drive so that we can pull data off it more quickly than those conservative hard drive manufacturers want us to. So, for example, if it currently takes 2 hours to read an entire 500GB hard drive, we want to be able to do it in 1 hour. Your job is to come up with a method which allows us to read data as fast as possible, which can be reversed afterwards. Oh, and did we mention the prize?

Aim:
Conduct a once only read for an entire 500 GB hard drive in the maximum time 1 hour.

Materials:
Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5" SATA 500GB hard drive (WD5002AALX).

Method:
The method used to modify the drive must be reversible, and the drive itself must not be damaged. It is acceptable to build a "magic box" to put the drive in to make it go faster if that is a viable solution – the drive doesn't have to be plugged into any particular PC. Flashing firmware, increasing voltage, magic cradles are all possible solutions.

Due Date:
1st September 2011

Submission:
Please send all entries to hdoverclock@secau.net we will organise alternate submission methods for uploading of video or other evidence as necessary to verify the entry.

Other information:
We are interested in any viable method which can be found, so even if you don't hit 1 hour, we would still like to hear from you. In the event that we don't get any entry below 1 hour we will consider awarding money to a method which completes a once through read in a time faster than the default "fastest" time. Also in the event of low entries, we will consider an extension to the due date.

The fine print

The prize will be awarded to the highest viable overclocking method which can be achieved at the closing date of the competition.

The method must be verified by ECU and its employees as being viable, and less than or equal to the 1 hour time as stated. A prize of $5000 will be awarded to the entry which achieves the otherwise fastest read time in the event that no viable method under 1 hour is submitted.

Only one grand prize will be awarded.

ECU retains the right to withdraw or end the competition at any point prior to the end date, and also to extend the end date if necessary.

-----
EOTFA
overcloking /sp by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-01 02:58 · Score: 0

One can not say enough or overstress the importance of overcloaking hard drives these days..
Try Stuxnet... by SpaceCracker · 2011-07-01 03:23 · Score: 1

...it was designed to make spinning devices run faster than intended...
...but in order to make it run it needs to be embedded in an Iranian nuclear facility...
...that's not against the rules, is it?...
...but how do I get the disk in there?...
...ah, I know, I'll attach a keyholder to it and claim it's my disk-on-key, that'll fool security officers...
...but then again, Stuxnet is known to overclock things to destruction, i.e. it's not reversible...
...there goes my 10K :-(

--
sigo ergo sum
Re:Obligitory: You must be new here... by PopeRatzo · 2011-07-01 08:45 · Score: 1

I'm in the last batch of 6-digit IUDs, so I like having people on my lawn, preferably naked.

--
You are welcome on my lawn.
Value of the prize? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-02 13:36 · Score: 0

The prize is listed at $10,000. It seems to be from an Australian university (ECU) so is likely to be in Australian dollars, equal to about $10,767.00 USD!