Tuesday, October 16, 2007

This Road is not Taken, so I will take it !!

Sometimes you just know what is right and what is wrong. But most of the times you don't know what to do. You tend to take a decision anyhow and keep your fingers crossed. Every decision maker would have faced the same dilemma. But the reason he is a decision maker is because he makes that choice. The choice may be right or wrong, but he dares and takes it. That's why he is there for and that's why he gets paid for. If that's a wrong decision he will pay for it, but if its the right decision, boy he is going to get paid for it. For this displays his guts/hunch/talent/intuition/courage and whatever name you want to put. My name for this is curiosity. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but being curious is one forte which drives geniuses ahead of ordinary men. The way the 'Road not Taken' might inspire hundreds/thousands of others to follow you.

Theodore Roosevelt from a 1910 speech given in Paris, draws a great analogy such 'Risk Takers':

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.


Great one, isn't it ? Go, try to become a 'Risk Taker', because living such a life is definitely worth it.

Monday, October 01, 2007

Some thoughts on Improvizing the Hard Drive Design

By far we have seen that using a hard disk for storage is bound to dome, one day or the other. A sudden power crash or a power surge can damage your hard disk. Reason, there are mechanical parts which rest or land on the sensitive magnetic media when something like this happens.

I happen to lose three hard disks (all due to power fluctuations) and that too in a span of around ten years [PS: I also lost another hard disk full of data, due to human error but the hard disk was fine]. That too after a lot of precautions, because I am a little bit of paranoid of such stuff. I make sure everything gets its worth. But that too cannot stop the hard disks on crashing and giving up on me. Why ??

Recently I thought, why not keep a small battery just to part the heads when there is a sudden power surge or power down. This would make the hard disks almost fool proof and highly reliable. It is not that this is going to stop people replacing their hard disk. Because, eventhough I lost two hard disks I upgraded them twice too, because of need for more space. If possible, I would be having all my hard disks at this time with my system, if I had more power capacity on my SMPS. But the fact that the hard disks have crashed have made it difficult to do so.

I believe the above should be a very minimal work and that would make the hard disks live more and be more reliable for their users. We at India, due to frequent power cuts/surges, know that we have to have a UPS(power backup), but I heard from some of my friends that a power backup at US is not even heard off.

One more idea I had in mind is a type of hybrid hard disks just similar to hybrid cars. This is a little bit more complicated as this involves the latest solid state devices (SSD) hard drives to the magnetic media. Now, magnetic media is cheap to make it more acceptable in the market. But the SSDs are faster and mainly don't have a moving parts, hence are not easily prone to the power down problems. But the price of a SSD is near triple the amount of normal Disc Drive that too at a lower capacity.

Can we combine the advantages of the both and provide a hybrid hard drive (both the magnetic media and the SSD) in the same drive. One holds the hot data as cache for faster processing and the other has a permanent storage. This will boost the computer performance without drastically affecting the packet. This type of device should be a tremendous hit based on the hard disk drives getting sold nowadays. With much less latency period and efficient storage capacity (price per GB), these devices will be ideal for the recent multi-core processors hitting the market.

I believe if the both of the above ideas get implemented, they should be smash hits. But, now who will do this ??