Madshrimps Forum Madness - Unused space on hard drives recovered

the article has been /.'ed
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/10/0341237

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The 200JB, or BB or whatever is clearly impossible. There is no hidden space on them to recover at all, let alone 310GB! I can't imagine what kind of idiocy provoked someone to believe that was even possible. Western Digital doesn't make drives with more than 3 platters! The 200GB Western Digitals are only available with 80GB/platters. They only have 5 heads. It's therfore impossible to recover any capacity from them at all (5*40GB=200GB).

Some of the other drives are known to short stroke their platters. This raises the more serious problem of this idiocy... The problem is modern drives store important information on those hidden inner areas of their platters (firmware, disk information, reallocated bad sectors), who knows what you could be overwriting whenever you use that space. Put something down in the wrong place and the drive will never start again or corrupt data at certain sectors. It's a lottery ticket everytime you write data in that partition. That's not what I call useable capacity.

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The drive is more than full. The initial disk load was ~18GB (the Windows XP on my "game" computer, complete with some games and applications). I added 10GB of extra stuff (the AVIs) on the extra partition. The AVIs play, and I'm playing "Simpsons Hit and Run" from the original data set right now.

http://www.storageforum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3437