Thursday, December 04, 2008

Hard drive sounds

Datacent Data Recovery has recorded the sounds of failing hard drives.
Read more about each product and common problems, or listen to the sounds. They advise if you hear the sounds and your drive is still working, to back it up immediately. An interesting site.

PDF/A Competence Center.

The PDF/A Competence Center is a cooperation between companies and experts in PDF technology. The aim is to promote the exchange of information and experience in the area of long-term archiving in accordance with ISO 19005: PDF/A. The site contains links and information about the standard.

Transmitting data from the middle of nowhere.

Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. December 2, 2008.
Interesting look at a marine survey company and the ways it has developed to transmit large amounts of data from remote locations. They have set up servers that reduce the amount of information transmitted by removing duplicate information then replicate the information. The data is backed up using IBM's Tivoli software and a StorageTek tape library with LTO-3 and LTO-4 tape drives for archiving data. "So data movement is the number one problem for anyone in the survey or field scientific world." They use Data Domain storage appliances for data backup / disaster recovery; it has a compression algorithm that is supposed to make sure that transmitted does not already exist on the system at the San Diego data center. It can also stream the data for maximum performance.