HD Wars Episode 42: The Emperor Speaks Back

Over the past few days, GQB contributors Boris and Eeshu have been slugging it out over, well, hard disks, as you can see here, here, here, here, here and here. My visitors found it pretty amusing, but then, off late the feedback’s been that the mighty Roman Emperor (ahem) should reign in his two gladiators and end the debate. Ah sigh, there goes a stream of posts. So here’s what I have to say about what they both have been saying:

• Boris is right when he pointed out the types of SATA power connectors – SATA hard disk drives generally have 15-pin power connectors, or a 4-pin Molex connector. As for 10-pin or 8-pin SATA HDD power connectors, I’ve no knowledge of those, nor do I think they exist. So it is simply technically not probable to mess up FDD and SATA HDD power.
• When Eeshu asked us to look closely and see the ‘missing part’ on his HDD which Western Digital guys took away, I couldn’t make out any such thing in that fuzzy a photo. Of course, ‘photos taken from 5cm away ARE fuzzy’ but, what are we supposed to look at closely then? Anyway, I don’t think WD hard drives are made out of Lego blocks that they can take away a part of it for servicing.
• The most hilarious one was when Eeshu said ‘it hardly takes 10 seconds to download a 200 KB image even on an ancient 28.8 kbps modem’. Now I know for one that web designing isn’t exactly Eeshu’s forte (he spoke once about ‘run time errors’ in HTML), but then, this one beats them all. If I may point out, ‘KB’ in ‘200 KB’ stands for ‘kilo BYTES’, as file sizes are measured in bytes – KB (or MB, or GB, or TB…). On the other hand, ‘kbps’ in ‘28.8 kbps’ stands for ‘kilo BITS per second. Now, as you may know, 8 bits make a byte. So actually, 28.8 kbps = 3.6 KBps. At that rate, it will take almost a minute to download that ‘small image’ his. I’m pretty sure Eeshu simply divided 200 by 28.8 to come up with that figure of ‘less than 10 seconds’. If that were true, then dial-up modems would be as good as broadband.
• In continuation of the above, I’d also like to point out that data transfer isn’t exactly done at 100% efficiency, because nothing in this world does, according to the laws of physics. Even after transmission losses, do remember that client-server HTTP request mechanism means that data is being transferred BOTH ways, so you can’t really have the full thing being utilized for download.
• This may be very controversial, but my readers asked me for it – what do I think happened. I think Eeshu might have screwed up something while formatting / resizing any partitions. Or, in another scenario, a power surge in his household circuit might have fried something up, although something like the motherboard would have been among the first to go.

Basically, kudos to Boris, who’s proved his high technical competence – just like a Code Warrior should. There had been skepticism initially when I put his name forward last year during Code Wars 2006, when he joined as a photographer. Now I feel contented that I possibly made the right decision. So Boris, I look forward to seeing you as our digital media and hardware event guy this year. As for Eeshu, look dude, I don’t want to be hard (disk) on you, but don’t take this too seriously. Although screw-ups like these (especially the KB vs kb thing) don’t do ANY good for your image, nor that of the Code Warriors.