Hard drive failure...

So Lynn's Sony VAIO laptop started failing S.M.A.R.T last week. I put in a rush order for a replacement drive on Newegg on Wednesday after spending a day or two backing up data from her laptop to mine and waiting on a response from Toshiba about whether they're able to replace the drive under their warranty or if I have to go through Sony.

After I got no response, I decided to just replace the drive myself. I really don't want to ship the laptop off to Sony and wait weeks for it to get sent back. My girlfriend in particular isn't too thrilled with that idea.

So Friday the new drive (a 320 GB Seagate Momentus) arrived. Yesterday morning, I attempted to clone the data on the Toshiba drive (250 GB btw) to the Seagate drive. Clonezilla refused to do this, stating that the drive was flagged for disk checking. Unfortunately, ChkDsk freezes when attempting to repair the drive. I tried cloning with Ghost, and while it allowed me to run the clone process, it froze not long after reporting the detection of a few bad sectors. Last night I fired up HDD Regenerator and began recovering the bad sectors. Frankly, I should probably have done it earlier; but this stuff ain't easy when you've got a 2-year-old running around.

So HDD Regenerator is about halfway done after approximately 12 hours. It's recovered 3 bad blocks on the Toshiba HDD. My girlfriend was frustrated last night about not having a laptop to use, so I burned an Ubuntu 10.04 CD and booted direct from CD. A little unnerving running an OS with a gaping hole in the bottom of the laptop where the HDD is supposed to be; it feels a little unnatural! In any case, by the time I'd burned the disc and come back to the bedroom, she was fast asleep. But hey, now she can use the laptop until I get her new drive cloned.

Hopefully once the drive is repaired, Ghost won't have any issues cloning the damaged drive. Once the damaged drive is copied over, I plan on pulling it apart and taking a look inside. I'll report back here on my progress. :)

UPDATE: After 24 hours of rebuilding data, I've given up. 12 hours has seen about another 1/6th of the data on the drive recovered, and even then, only about 2 out of 3 bad sectors are being successfully restored. I've copied the hidden Sony Recovery Volume to the new drive and I'm simply reinstalling from factory default that way. I've saved the most important data to my own laptop and I'll move it back after a clean install (once I've gotten rid of the Sony bloatware).

UPDATE 2: All went as planned. Killed all the VAIO crap bogging down startup and copied the important data back onto the drive. Lynn's happily using Windows once again. :)

Help me pick my Galaxy S...

Alright folks, I need your help. I have to decide which Galaxy S phone I'm going to buy this fall.

Currently, I'm torn primarily between the Verizon Fascinate and the Sprint Epic 4G. Here's the Pros vs. Cons for me:

Fascinate


Pros:
Already on Verizon (and so is my girlfriend)
Better network
Thinner and lighter

Cons:
Bing Search (Per Engadget it can't be changed to Google either!)
No front-facing camera.
Expensive monthly payment
Only 3G connection


Epic 4G


Pros:
4G connection (available in my city too)
QWERTY keyboard
Front-facing camera

Cons:
Would have to switch carriers (and my girlfriend doesn't really want Sprint)
Less reliable network
Still a fairly expensive monthly payment, and $10 extra for 4G data service.
Phone is heavier and thicker

HTC Glacier and my friends over at AlienBabelTech.com...

A couple weeks back, I was checking on a comment posted in response to my Android Benchmark blog post regarding some interesting performance values for the Droid X on GLBenchmark.com.

GLBenchmark has been a useful tool for me in the past; specifically I used iPhone 3GS performance values to estimate graphics performance in my Hummingbird vs Snapdragon article. I replied to the comment and noticed something strange, a new contender named "HTC Glacier" sitting on GLBenchmark's results list above the Galaxy S phones which were reigning supreme at the time.

It made me raise my eyebrows... an HTC phone of that power could only contain a new Snapdragon of some sort. I started to dig into the specs a bit... and then I was pulled away from my computer by the joys of fatherhood. HTC Glacier was forgotten as I scraped up food flung all over the place by my misbehaving daughter. I remember being tired that night, heading to bed soon after I managed to get my temperamental child down for the night.

Fortunately, someone else was paying better attention; my good friend MrK over at AlienBabelTech.com who has hosted my article and several of my blog posts, and with whom I communicate regularly. He spotted the HTC Glacier as well, and wasted no time in doing some sleuthing, finding that the person who posted the HTC Glacier was a T-Mobile Design Manager... quickly answering the question of which carrier Glacier will end up on. He also theorized that the Glacier contains the 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8672, and it wasn't long before his article was being linked on tech blogs across the web.

Is the future of gaming in the cloud? OnLive tested; my impressions.

Today, I walked into Burger King while Lynn's car was in the shop, plunked down my laptop and played a game that can't even be run on the laptop's hardware, much less at the resolution, frame rate and graphics quality I was playing it at. How? The cloud, my friend, the cloud.

It seems like the future of everything exists in the cloud, those huge server farms that process and store massive amounts of data. Video games have taken advantage of key elements of the cloud, such as with online gaming and MMOs, but they've almost always required that some sort of application or client run on the PC that the player is using. The landscape is changing quickly however, and I believe that the future of gaming also lies within the cloud, allowing players to play games that they don't actually run on their PC.

Android phones benchmarked; it's official, the Galaxy S is the fastest.

Consider this post a follow up on my ruminations post, in which it turns out I was likely completely wrong.

But hey, you can't win 'em all, and at least I was right about one thing; the 1GHz OMAP 3640 3630 isn't terribly different than the 550 MHz OMAP 3430 on the Droid, and at 1 GHz doesn't really give us any surprises when it comes to performance.

Then why did it score so well in this test? Taylor Wimberly, owner of AndroidAndMe.com (yes, the same website I've frequently complained of putting bad data in its articles), has performed a series of benchmarks that explains why.

Hands-on with T-Mobile's Galaxy S: the Samsung Vibrant.

Took a pit-stop by T-Mobile on my way home today to finally take a hands-on look at T-Mobile's Vibrant, the original Samsung Galaxy S.

All-in-all, very impressed. The phone was playing Avatar when I came in, no stutter whatsoever, and the display truly was amazing. The colors just popped from the phone, and alongside other phones displayed nearby, it definitely stood out.

Ruminations on various benchmarks for the OMAP 3600s, Hummingbird, and Snapdragon.

EDIT 7/17/2010 - The benchmarks have been explained for the most part, see my post "Android phones benchmarked; it's official, the Galaxy S is the fastest." Or, feel free to read on, but I was probably wrong. :)

I've been thinking about some of the performance benchmarks I've been seeing on AndroidAndMe.
http://androidandme.com/2010/05/news/high-end-android-phones-benchmarked-with-quadrant/
http://androidandme.com/2010/06/news/high-end-android-gpu-showdown/
http://androidandme.com/2010/06/news/hands-on-the-motorola-droid-2/

CPU performance from the new TI OMAP 3630 3640 (yes, they're wrong again, its 3640 for the 1 GHz SoC, 3630 is the 720 MHz one (TI disagrees) is surprisingly good on Quadrant, the benchmarking tool that Taylor is using. In fact, as you can see from the Shadow benchmarks in the first article, it is shown outperforming the Galaxy S, which initially led me to believe that it was running Android 2.2 (which you may know can easily triple CPU performance). However, I've been assured that this is not the case, and the 3rd article seems to indicate as such, given that those benchmarks were obtained using a Droid 2 running 2.1.

Now, the OMAP 3600 series is simply a 45 nm version of the 3400 series we see in the original Droid, upclocked accordingly due to the reduced heat and improved efficiency of the smaller feature size.

If you need convincing, see TI's own documentation: http://focus.ti.com/pdfs/wtbu/omap3_pb_swpt024b.pdf

So essentially the OMAP 3640 3630 is the same CPU as what is contained in the original Droid but clocked up to 1 GHz. Why then is it benchmarking nearly twice as fast clock-for-clock (resulting in a nearly 4x improvement), even when still running 2.1? My guess is that the answer lies in memory bandwidth, and that evidence exists within some of the results from the graphics benchmarks.