Malware and steganography in hard disk firmware

The hard disk drive remains the most commonly used form of storage media in both commercial and domestic computer systems. These drives can contain a vast range of data both of personal value and commercial significance. This paper focuses on two key areas; the potential for the drive operation to be impacted by malicious software and the possibility for the drive firmware to be manipulated to enable a form of steganography. Hard drive firmware is required for the correct operation of the disk drive in particular for dealing with errors arising due to natural wear as the drive ages. Where an area of the drive becomes unreliable due to wear and tear, the disk firmware which monitors the reliability of data access will copy the data from the failing area to a specially designated reserved area. The firmware remaps this data shift so the old data area and the original copy of the data are no longer accessible by the computer operating system. There are now a small number of commercially available devices, intended for data recovery, which can be used to modify the hard drive firmware components. This functionality can be used to conceal code on the disk drive, either as a form of steganography or to potentially include malicious code with the intention to infect or damage software or possibly system hardware. This paper discusses the potential problem generated by firmware being manipulated for malicious purposes.     

Shock analysis of non-operating hard disk drives based on a multibody dynamic formulation

Dropping, striking, or bouncing a hard disk drive (HDD) against a hard surface can damage it internally without external evidence of damage. Contact with a hard ground will lift the slider off the disk surface and then slap back on the surface. A drive that is subjected to this type of shock may fail on initial use or the reliability of the drive may degrade over time. Therefore, industry has a lot of interest on the shock conditions that cause a slider to lift off the disk surface. Finite element software such as ANSYS/LS-DYNA is often used to analyze this shock problem. However, this method consumes a great amount of time. It is also difficult to perform design parameter studies because it requires re-analysis of the model of the entire HDD system when certain design variables are changed. This paper presents a flexible multi-body dynamics formulation to analyze the shock problem of non-operating HDDs. Governing equations of motion of the voice coil motor (VCM)–actuators assembly and the disks–spindle system are derived using a Lagrangian formulation. By introducing constraint equations between the slider and the disk surface, the shock response of the whole HDD system has been obtained. Numerical results show that the method is reasonable and the acceleration amplitude which makes the slider lift off can be determined in a significantly shorter time than by the conventional approach. Finally, the effect of drive parameters on shock resistance, such as shock duration and slider resting location are analyzed.     

一种从逻辑死锁的硬盘上恢复数据的有效方法

硬盘在受到某些病毒或恶意代码的攻击后，可能会出现逻辑死锁现象。本文分析了硬盘逻辑死锁的原理，提出了简单而又行之有效的解除死锁方法，详细介绍了重建正确的分区表的方法，它能有效恢复故障硬盘上的数据。     

Dual-stage servo systems and vibration compensation in computer hard disk drives

This paper discusses two mechatronic innovations in magnetic hard disk drive servo systems, which may have to be deployed in the near future, in order to sustain the continuing 60% annual increase in storage density of these devices. The first is the use of high bandwidth dual-stage actuator servo systems to improve the precision and track-following capability of the read/write head positioning control system. The second is the instrumentation of disk drive suspensions with vibration sensing strain gages, in order to enhance airflow-induced suspension vibration suppression in hard disk drives.     

基于FPGA的新型虚拟逻辑分析仪的设计

提出了一种基于FPGA的虚拟逻辑分析仪的设计.该系统对采集到的模拟或数字信号进行存储、处理和逻辑分析.通过FPGA控制数据单次或连续采集、缓冲,通过PCI总线将缓冲区数据转移到硬盘管理卡,由硬盘管理卡将数据存入海量硬盘.     

Sparing for redundant disk arrays

One of the main advantages of a redundant disk array architecture is that it provides fault tolerance against disk drive failures. This improvement in reliability can be further enhanced if spare drives are also added to the array since a failed drive can be expeditiously replaced. Furthermore, even though data can be reconstructed from the other drives of a redundant array in the event of a drive failure, performance is degraded substantially in this mode of operation. Clearly it is desirable to get out of this degraded mode of operation as quickly as possible. Again, having spare drives in the array will facilitate that. The purpose of this paper is to study some of the issues related to sparing in a redundant disk array. In particular, we will try to understand the effect on reliability of different sparing schemes. We will also examine the economic trade-offs of having spare drives in a system. Recommended by: M. Kitsuregawa     

Vibro-acoustic interaction of components in hard disk drive under seek process

With the increasing use of electro-mechanical systems such as hard disk drives, CD-Rom drives, and DVD drives in the consumer electronics industry, there is a growing demand for quieter products. The noise emitted from these devices may originate from the vibration of mechanical components in operation, such as bearings, gears and actuators. The vibration is then transmitted to other parts of the devices, such as the cover, and the noise emitted may then be amplified. This paper aims to develop a method for identify the acoustic noise emitted from hard disk drive seek process. In order to determine effective noise and vibration control of seek noise during the seek process, we first investigate the dynamic characteristic of the head actuator assembly under the different electrical drive signal using finite element method. In this paper, a bearing stiffness matrix (6 × 6) is adopted and performed using ANSYS element (Matrix 27). Using this method, we can understand the vibro-acoustic characteristics of hard disk drives and their components, and the mechanisms of vibration and sound transmission. Experiments are being conducted to demonstrate its validity through experiments. The method will also enable design optimisation for noise to be carried out at the design stage, before a new product is built, or help guide design changes on an existing device.Paper presented at the 13th Annual Symposium on Information Storage and Processing Systems, Santa Clara, CA, USA, 17–18 June, 2002     

硬盘常见故障处理与维护

硬盘已成为最重要的数据载体和系统程序载体,它随时会有出错的风险,轻则硬盘的数据丢失,重则整个硬盘报废,将造成不可预料的损失,为了有效地保存硬盘中的数据,除了经常性地进行备份工作以外,还要学会在硬盘出现故障时如何救活硬盘,本文结合自己的维修经验介绍了计算机硬盘的管理、维护以及常见故障的处理。     

Hard disk drive seek-arrival vibration reduction with parametric damped flexible printed circuits

Seek-arrival track-mis-registration (TMR) is one of the most critical dynamic design factors for modern hard disk drives to achieve high data transfer-rate performance goal. With its flexible structural nature, the flex cable itself inevitably renders low-frequency natural modes which have been a challenge with respect to balancing design efforts among servo control, mechanical design, and manufacturing process in disk drive industry. In this paper, particular focus will be given to vibration damping approach to reduce flex cable related seek-arrival dynamics in a state of the art magnetic disk storage drive. Experimental parameter studies of a typical constrained-layer damped flex cable vibrations are presented with cable exposed to various damper length and fold in different geometries. Effectiveness of the damper is also demonstrated by frequency responses with random excitation from actuator arm. Several design options toward reducing the flex circuit related arrival TMR will also be discussed in this paper.     

Effects of temperature on particle trajectories inside hard disk drives

The presence of particles, which can intrude into the gas bearing, is one of the most common factors in the failure of hard disk drives (HDDs). Previous works investigated particle trajectories inside air-filled drives without considering temperature effects on the distribution of particles. Actually, especially for the submicron particle, particle trajectories and trapping status are affected by the temperature gradient since the thermophoretic force cannot be ignored. In this paper, considering major heat generation components such as the spindle motor and voice coil motor (VCM), trajectories and trapping status for Al₂O₃ particles inside a 2.5 inch helium-filled drive are simulated by the commercial computational fluid dynamics solver FLUENT with user-defined functions (UDFs). The trapping criterion for Al₂O₃ particles is used as boundary conditions for different colliding surfaces. The results reveal that particles in the air-filled drive will more likely degrade the head–disk interface (HDI) reliability. In addition, after considering the temperature, the particle trapping rate by the disk decreases both inside the air-filled drive and the helium-filled drive. And its reduction inside the air-filled drive is larger. Moreover, small particles will more likely degrade the HDI reliability since they can follow the rotatory flow well and have more chance to collide with the disk surface, and then easily attach onto the disk surface.

     

Profit data caching and hybrid disk‐aware Completely Fair Queuing scheduling algorithms for hybrid disks

Recently, a hybrid disk drive that integrates a small amount of flash memory within a mechanical drive has received significant attention. The hybrid drive extends the storage hierarchy by using flash memory to cache data from the mechanical disk. Unfortunately, current caching architectures fail to fully exploit the potential of the hybrid drive. Furthermore, current disk input/output (I/O) schedulers are optimized for rotational mechanical disk drives and thus must be re‐targeted for the hybrid disk drive. In this paper, we propose a new data caching scheme, called Profit Caching, for hybrid drives. Profit Caching is a self‐optimizing caching algorithm. It considers and seamlessly integrates all possible data characteristics that impact the performance of hybrid drives, including read count, write count, sequentiality, randomness, and recency, to determine the caching policy. Moreover, we propose a hybrid disk‐aware Completely Fair Queuing (HA‐CFQ) scheduler to avoid unnecessary I/O anticipations of the CFQ scheduler. We have implemented Profit Caching and HA‐CFQ scheduler in the Linux kernel. Coupled with a trace‐driven simulator, we have also conducted detailed experiments under a variety of workloads. Experimental results show that Profit Caching provides significantly improved performance compared with the previous schemes. In particular, the throughput of Profit Caching outperforms previous Random Access First and FlashCache caching schemes by factors of up to 1.8 and 7.6, respectively. In addition, the HA‐CFQ scheduler reduces the total execution time of the CFQ scheduler by up to 1.74%. Finally, the experimental results show that the runtime overhead of Profit Caching is extremely insignificant and can be ignored. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust IDA‐PBC for underactuated mechanical systems subject to matched disturbances

The problem of robustification of interconnection and damping assignment passivity‐based control for underactuated mechanical system vis‐à‐vis matched, constant, and unknown disturbances is addressed in the paper. This is achieved adding an outer‐loop controller to the interconnection and damping assignment passivity‐based control. Three designs are proposed, with the first one being a simple nonlinear PI, while the second and the third ones are nonlinear PIDs. While all controllers ensure stability of the desired equilibrium in spite of the presence of the disturbances, the inclusion of the derivative term allows us to inject further damping enlarging the class of systems for which asymptotic stability is ensured. Numerical simulations of the Acrobot system and experimental results on the disk‐on‐disk system illustrate the performance of the proposed controller. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Track-following control of a dual-stage hard disk drive using a neuro-control system

This paper describes the track-following control of a dual-stage hard disk drive system using neural-networks. A neural-network approach to on-line learning control, and a real-time implementation for a dual-stage hard disk drive, are presented. The use of the dual-stage actuator in hard disk drive systems has become a means of achieving increased servo actuator bandwidth. The dual-stage actuator presented here uses a voice-coil motor (VCM) as a coarse actuator, and a piezoelectric actuator (PZT) as a fine actuator. The control system consists of a series combination of both a plant with a feedback loop and a neural-network with a feedforward loop. The neural-network functions as the reference input filter, and it organizes a new reference signal to the closed-loop circuit. Numerical and experimental results for the track-following control system of the dual-stage hard disk drive show the validity of the proposed neuro-control system.     

基于Kalman滤波的滑模控制在磁盘驱动系统中的应用

针对磁盘驱动伺服系统中存在的诸多随机干扰和随机噪声等特点,常规的PID控制在该类系统中存在滞后或超调,以及传统的滑模控制要求系统不确定因素的边界为已知等缺点,本文提出了基于Kalman滤波算法的指数趋近律滑模变结构控制方法,以指数趋近律作为到达条件设计滑模变结构控制器。该方法能够较好地处理磁盘驱动伺服系统中的不确定性问题,而且对外界干扰不敏感。在MAT-LAB环境下对该算法进行了仿真试验研究,结果表明,该方法能够很好地削弱抖振和抑制伺服系统的随机干扰。将该方法应用于磁盘驱动伺服系统可以显著地改善系统的动态特性,并能使系统的稳定性和控制精度大大提高。     

一种改进的安全文件系统模型设计

如何彻底删除计算机中的数据是当前亟待解决的信息安全问题之一。分析了文件删除的原理,在文件系统驱动层引入了安全访问控制策略和数据覆写技术,提出了一种改进的带有安全删除机制的文件系统模型,解决了数据安全销毁的问题。     

Measurement of contact potential difference in head disk interface by readback signal spectrum

The contact potential difference leads to electrostatic interaction between the slider and disk in a hard disk drive. The effect of electrostatic force on slider’s flying height and flying stability becomes more significant with the decrease of flying height. A method of measurement of contact potential difference in head disk interface by readback signal spectrum is demonstrated in this paper. When a voltage with DC and AC was applied in the head disk interface, the amplitude of readback signal at the first harmonic frequency of applied AC voltage is proportional to the sum of contact potential difference and applied DC voltage. The contact potential difference in head disk interface is equal to the negative of DC voltage when the amplitude of readback signal at the first harmonic frequency is minimal.     

A Polynomial Time Solution to Minimum Forwarding Set Problem in Wireless Networks under Unit Disk Coverage Model

Network-wide broadcast (simply broadcast) is a frequently used operation in wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs). One promising practical approach for energy-efficient broadcast is to use localized algorithms to minimize the number of nodes involved in the propagation of the broadcast messages. In this context, the minimum forwarding set problem (MFSP) (also known as multipoint relay (MPR) problem) has received a considerable attention in the research community. Even though the general form of the problem is shown to be NP-complete, the complexity of the problem has not been known under the practical application context of ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present a polynomial time algorithm to solve the MFSP for wireless network under unit disk coverage model. We prove the existence of some geometrical properties for the problem and then propose a polynomial time algorithm to build an optimal solution based on these properties. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first polynomial time solution to the MFSP under the unit disk coverage model. We believe that the work presented in this paper will have an impact on the design and development of new algorithms for several wireless network applications including energy-efficient multicast, broadcast, and topology control protocols for WANETs and sensor networks.     

A concurrency control scheme for mobile transactions in broadcast disk environments

Broadcast disk technique has been often used to disseminate frequently requested data efficiently to a large volume of mobile clients over wireless channels. In broadcast disk environments, a server often broadcasts different data items with differing frequencies to reflect the skewed data access patterns of mobile clients. Previously proposed concurrency control methods for mobile transactions in wireless broadcast environments are focused on the mobile transactions with uniform data access patterns. These protocols perform poorly in broadcast disk environments where the data access patterns of mobile transactions are skewed. In broadcast disk environments, the time length of a broadcast cycle usually becomes large to reflect the skewed data access patterns. This will often cause read-only transactions to access old data items rather than the latest data items. Furthermore, updating mobile transactions will be frequently aborted and restarted in the final validation stage due to the update conflict of the same data items with high access frequencies. This problem will increase the average response time of the update mobile transactions and waste the uplink communication bandwidth. In this paper, we extend the existing FBOCC concurrency control method to efficiently handle mobile transactions with skewed data access patterns in broadcast disk environments. Our method allows read-only transactions to access the more updated data, and reduces the average response time of updating transactions through early aborts and restarts. Our method also reduces the amount of uplink communication bandwidth for the final validation of the update transactions. We present an in-depth experimental analysis of our method by comparing with existing concurrency control protocols. Our performance analysis shows that it significantly decreases the average response time and the amount of uplink bandwidths over existing methods.     

Exploiting the performance gains of modern disk drives by enhancing data locality

Due to the widening performance gap between RAM and disk drives, a large number of I/O optimization methods have been proposed and designed to alleviate the impact of this gap. One of the most effective approaches of improving disk access performance is enhancing data locality. This is because the method could increase the hit ratio of disk cache and reduce the seek time and rotational latency. Disk drives have experienced dramatic development since the first disk drive was announced in 1956. This paper investigates some important characteristics of modern disk drives. Based on the characteristics and the observation that data access on disk drives is highly skewed, the frequently accessed data blocks and the correlated data blocks are clustered into objects and moved to the outer zones of a modern disk drive. The idea attempts to enhance spatial locality, improve the efficiency of aggressive sequential prefetch, and take advantage of Zoned Bit Recording (ZBR). An experimental simulation is employed to investigate the performance gains generated by the enhanced data locality. The performance gains are analyzed by breaking down the disk access time into seek time, rotational latency, data transfer time, and hit ratio of the disk cache. Experimental results provide useful insights into the performance behaviours of a modern disk drive with enhanced data locality.     

Design and Implementation of the Stony Brook Video Server

The system architecture of the Stony Brook Video Server (SBVS), which guarantees end-to-end real-time video playback in a client-server setting, is presented. SBVS employs a real-time network access protocol, RETHER, to use existing Ethernet hardware as the underlying communications media. The video server tightly integrates the bandwidth guarantee mechanisms for network transport and disk I/O. SBVS's stream-by-stream disk scheduling scheme optimizes the effective disk bandwidth without incurring significant scheduling overhead. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we have implemented a prototype called SBVS-1, which can support five concurrent MPEG-1 video streams on an Intel 486DX2/EISA PC. To our knowledge, this system is the first video server that provides an end-to-end performance guarantee from the server's disks to the each user's display over standard Ethernet. This paper describes the implementation details of integrating network and I/O bandwidth guarantee mechanisms, and the performance measurements that drive and/or validate our design decisions. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.