Is my hard drive dying?

I remember back like 10+ years ago, one way to tell if a hard drive was dying is the number of bad sectors on the drive.  Occasionally you scan your drive, and if that scan comes back with bad sectors you know your drive is slowly dying and you might want to consider a new drive.

Recently at work a drive in a server machine had been causing problems, and sometimes even crashing the machine.  When you reboot the machine, the BIOS reported a hard drive failure.  So I ran a sector scan which came back with 0 bad sectors.  I wasn't expecting that, I was for sure there would be a lot of bad sectors.  Well it turns out, most newer hard drives employ a little technique to make you think the drive is still doing great when in fact it is dying.  They have extra sectors on the hard drive which are held in reserve, there is no way for the operating system to access these sectors.  When the hard drive detects a bad sector, it stops using that sector and replaces it with one of these reserved sectors.  So to the outside world the drive is still running great, but internally the failures have begun.

It turns out there is a way to detect and track this.  Newer hard drives have what is called S.M.A.R.T. (or Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology).  Basically the drive tracks statistics about it's own operation; number of hours in use, number of reads and writes, etc.  One of the stats it tracks is number of reallocated sectors.  Checking the S.M.A.R.T. stats on the failing drive I found over 5,000 reallocated sectors.  Indeed, the drive was failing.

So how do you read these stats?  There are tons of free and commercial tools that read and display this info.  I like Defraggler by Piriform.  In addition to reading and displaying S.M.A.R.T. data it is a great disk defragger, and it's free!

XBMC

For a while now I've been considering creating a Home Theater PC (HTPC).  I've definitely been dragging my feet on this, there's no big rush here.  I've even considered a Roku as a cheap box that will do 80% of what a HTPC does.  A friend of mine said I should look into a free open-source piece of software called XBMC.  Without even trying XBMC I brushed it off as something I wouldn't be interested in.  Several weeks later, for some reason I decided to install it and give it a try.  And I'm glad I did because I sorely misunderstood what XBMC is.

In short, XBMC is a media playing software for your TV (or computer).  You provide it "media" and it "plays" that media on your TV.  So what media can it play?  Well here's where I was in the dark.  I assumed there were two main types of media it would play.

1. Pictures, music, videos, and DVDs on your network.  It's very common for people to store these types of media on their computer or something like a NAS box.  Whereas I do have some of this media, I don't want to watch it on my TV.  I already have a computer and I can view it there.
2. A TV tuner card for broadcast TV.  Hook up an antenna and watch, pause, and record live TV.  This is something that very much interests me, but I don't have a TV card yet.

That's what I *thought* XBMC did.  And like I said, I don't need it for media on my network, and I don't have a TV tuner card.  So I assumed XBMC was useless for me.  Boy was I wrong!  What I didn't know is XBMC has a third source of media - the Internet!  There are dozens of official plugins and hundreds of unofficial plugins that grant you access to pretty much any video source on the Internet.  You can view TV programs from major networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Spike, History Channel, MTV, SyFy, HGTV, etc.  The list of channels, both broadcast and cable, surprised me.  You can also view content from Internet sites like YouTube, Hulu, Amazon, VEVO, Revision3, etc.  There is so much Internet content available through these plugins you could never watch it all.  If you want to get rid of cable/satellite TV then you should seriously consider XBMC.  Even without a TV tuner the amount of content you can watch is overwhelming.

Is the PC industry dying?

If you read a lot of technical news articles and commentary like I do, then you've probably seen predictions that the PC industry is dying.  They all point to the rise of smart phones and tablets as the leading killer of the personal computer.  I'm not going to argue, these devices have taken away market share from the PC, and these newer devices have their place.  But I think people are overreacting.

To me, I think the underlying issue here is how people "use" data.  I think that working with a computer you are either "consuming" data or you are "creating" data.  Consuming data would be tasks like reading a webpage, checking your email, watching a video, playing a video game, etc.  All of these tasks, the main flow of data and information is toward you the user.  Creating data is obviously the opposite.  If you're writing a paper for school, editing video/audio, putting together a business presentation, etc.  With these tasks the flow of information is opposite, from you the user.

So what does this have to do with smart phones, tablets, and PCs.  Simple, I strongly believe (and I think most people would agree) that smart phones and tablets are great "consumers" of information but awkward at best at producing data.  If you have to write a 20 page paper for a class in school, are you really going to compose it on a phone or tablet!?!  No, you'd sit down with a real computer and a real keyboard.  So as long as people need to create data, the need for PCs will there.

Again, it is true that smart phones and tablets are eating away at the PC segment.  But I predict this will be a temporary trend.  A lot of people only use their home computer for "consuming" tasks like checking email and surfing the web.  For these people, a smart phone or a tablet makes sense.  So when the time comes for them to buy a new PC because their current PC is outdated, they will buy a smart phone or tablet instead.  But once everyone who should have been using these devices over a PC has made the switch, the market share will stabilize.

There is one more really big thing that most people are oblivious to.  Most people don't realize that the single biggest market segment for computers is businesses.  Corporations spend a lot more money on PCs than the home user.  And most businesses need computers to do their job.  Most employees sitting behind a computer are "creating" content and not consuming it.  Therefore that computer is hard to replace with a smart phone or tablet.

This is why I firmly believe the PC segment will be around for a long time.  It may take a small hit in the short term, but the industry will go on and thrive.  What's more, Windows continues to be far and away the world's most used platform with >90% of the total computing market share.  So everyone is hot to trot over new things like Android and iOS, but these have a long way to go to catch up to PCs and Windows.