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Monster Cables- The World should know!
oldfart:
This conversation reminds me of my days around wine connoisseurs. An old line French winery ran into difficulties and lost a bunch of grape vines. For the three years it took them to grow new vines they simply bought bulk wine from wholesalers and bottled it under their label.
The truth came out finally and there was a great deal of trouble about it. It seems that the winery had won a number of awards and high praise for their vintage when they were bottling the bulk stuff. The funny thing about this is that even though this experience proved that the so called ''experts'' couldn't tell bulk wine from vintage wine, the experts continued grading wines and the connoisseurs kept listening to them.
Armando:
Er, because it's easier for everyone and provides definitive answers, as audiophiles tend to base their ideas on audio quality on what they "hear" (and they spend and read and... well, you get the point), setting aside any possible technical explanation.
-Lashiec (March 23, 2008, 12:34 PM)
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I agree, and BTW there have been some double blind tests in past. No one has ever been able to prove the superiority of these super high end cables (or even super high end amps, for that matter... but that's another story) whether for digital OR analog signal. See my earlier post
Rover:
Hirudin: please don't bring spinrite into this, it's snake-oil :), and mr. Gibson only has buzzwords and "it's super secret advanced tech!" to say, nothing quantitative.
-f0dder (March 22, 2008, 01:27 PM)
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Slightly off Topic. Just wanted to call BS on your snake-oil comment. Spinerite actually does work in some cases. I have used it to recover 1 or 2 drives. See the article here:PC World Mag
Fortunately, SpinRite 6 is less ambiguous when it encounters a distressed drive. I put the app to work on four magnetically damaged floppy disks, and it lit up the screen with flashing graphics as it worked to recover my data. It saved three of the four.
SpinRite 6 is no substitute for regular backups. Still, having the software around for maintenance--and knowing it's there in an emergency--makes it worth the price.
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f0dder:
Rover: did you write that article?
The problem with SpinRite is all the techy mumbo-jumbo and "quire of believers" "real life stories" presented, and the pretty complete lack of any technical information. Steve Gibson also has a tendency to make it seem like he's doing really amazing stuff (like mentioning a big list of filesystems supported, instead of simply stating that SpinRite accesses the disk directly and thus doesn't care about filesystems).
Documentation is sparse (even though SpinRite 6.0 is... how many years? old, there's still only 5.0 docs available), and Steve Gibson has no interest in informing people what his application is actually doing, but instead uses made-up words like "data scrubbing", claims that SR can detect bits that are "between" 0 and 1 state, et cetera.
Oh, and if SR "magically repairs a drive", well sorry, it's simply the sector reallocation that all drives have incorporated the last many years that kicks in. So why does it kick in on SR and not windows chkdsk? Because drives only reallocates sectors that are written to - chkdsk doesn't re-write bad sectors, it notes down the bad sector in the NTFS $BadClus file.
Add to the mix that SR is pretty aggressive at trying to re-read bad sectors... this is obviously a good idea so you can retrieve the data, right? Yeah well, just how smart is it to stress a disk that's dying? You risk going from "I lost a few sectors of data" to "the read/write head crashed and now I have to pay OnTrack systems $insane to get physical reconstruction".
Instead of spending $89 on snake oil, the sane thing to do with a dying drive is creating an image file of the sectors you can read, as fast as possible. Then you can do aggressive re-read of the problem sectors, because with a partial image file, at least you don't lose the entire drive. Once the remaining sectors have been read/given up upon, you re-write the bad sectors to have the drive reallocation kick in.
Presto, $89 saved. And obviously, whether you used SpinRite or just did a sane image + format, as soon as S.M.A.R.T reports a non-zero reallocated sector count, you should consider the drive dead, and never use it for anything but scratchpad. It might last months or years before dying, but it could just as easily be a matter of weeks.
CWuestefeld:
At the risk of going off on a snake-oil tangent...
If you have a hard read error on a hard disk, there's one free, easy remedy that I've seen work on several occasions: take the drive out and put it in the freezer for an hour or two. Then take it out and copy whatever you can before it warms up.
I've heard various explanations: electronics work better cooled, or physical tolerances of moving parts match better at low temperatures, etc. Whatever, I have personally witnessed drives that were physically unreadable give one last effort, enabling desperate workers the chance to get their dying data.
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