Data recovered from Shuttle Columbia Hard Drive

[krolik]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083718

Wow!

[kenrok1]

Pretty impressive. I am supprised however there isn't some redundancy here on the groud ~ you would think.

[c_rex]

Awesome linkage k... tyvm!

Okay- what NASA rocket scientist sent a hugely expensive space craft to the heavens with only a 400mb hard drive?  Obviously not a member of the Bellevue Community College Model Rocket Club! (neither was I but...) I realize that in 2003 you couldn't get 500gb hdd's for $75 like you can now (after mail in rebate, limit one per customer) but you KNOW they spent at least $25k on that ridiculously small 2.5" drive.   I used to be an auditor for the DoD and I can't tell you how disheartening it was to see the horrible overcharge that contractors put on the Federal Government.  No- really, I can't tell you or I could be shot for treason.  /shrug   Ugh!

[ducati_tim]

I wonder what was on it?

[roy-nexus-6]

Impressive accomplishment.

The fact that my Seagate hard drive has failed after 2 years, and hasn't been exposed to a fiery re-entry is less than impressive. 

[lethe]

Impressive accomplishment.

The fact that my Seagate hard drive has failed after 2 years, and hasn't been exposed to a fiery re-entry is less than impressive. 

Probably not an old one.
I deal with automation equipment that still uses old school stuff and old stuff can be really rugged.

[c_rex]

If DARPA or whatever they call themselves these days hasn't come up with or realized that you can put 40mb on silicone or solid state and wrap it in titanium, asbestos and/or lutefisk so that nothing would touch it... I mean honestly, how are we at the top of the food chain?  I'm just baffled.

[Oldfisti]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083718

Wow!

Amazing how they can recover all that data after the platters have been sitting in mud for months and months in a severely damaged state.

[krolik]

Well played, sir, well played. 

[Oldfisti]

Why, thank you.



                                   

[Drjones]

. . . disheartening it was to see the horrible overcharge that contractors put on the Federal Government Tax Payers. . . .

Fixed it.  The only money government has is YOURS.

[AdmiralKit]

Okay- what NASA rocket scientist sent a hugely expensive space craft to the heavens with only a 400mb hard drive?  Obviously not a member of the Bellevue Community College Model Rocket Club! (neither was I but...) I realize that in 2003 you couldn't get 500gb hdd's for $75 like you can now (after mail in rebate, limit one per customer) but you KNOW they spent at least $25k on that ridiculously small 2.5" drive.   I used to be an auditor for the DoD and I can't tell you how disheartening it was to see the horrible overcharge that contractors put on the Federal Government.  No- really, I can't tell you or I could be shot for treason.  /shrug   Ugh!

If you think about how old the space shuttle actually was, it's amazing they took the time to upgrade it to a 400 MB HD at all in my opinion.  Every time you change a piece of hardware on the shuttle, you have to redesign countless systems that connect to it and test them to make sure that everything is talking properly, which is harder than you might think.  Consider the costs of reengineering everything against NASA's perpetually-slashed budgets, and that doesn't surprise me. 

Amazing how they can recover all that data after the platters have been sitting in mud for months and months in a severely damaged state.

The great thing about mud and fire are that they're not magnetic.  If the platters are physically intact and haven't been run through a highly magnetic field, the data can generally be retrieved.  I've heard of cases where unsavory individuals/organizations attempted to run one of the Boot & Nuke programs with 7 layers of randomly encoded data to cover their tracks and they still got usable data off of there.  Cyberforensics = awesomesauce.

[sno_duc]

Awesome linkage k... tyvm!

Okay- what NASA rocket scientist sent a hugely expensive space craft to the heavens with only a 400mb hard drive?  Obviously not a member of the Bellevue Community College Model Rocket Club! (neither was I but...) I realize that in 2003 you couldn't get 500gb hdd's for $75 like you can now (after mail in rebate, limit one per customer) but you KNOW they spent at least $25k on that ridiculously small 2.5" drive.   I used to be an auditor for the DoD and I can't tell you how disheartening it was to see the horrible overcharge that contractors put on the Federal Government.  No- really, I can't tell you or I could be shot for treason.  /shrug   Ugh!

How many G's does the shuttle generate during launch? How about ips of vibration? How many rad's of cosmic radiation?
That hard drive was propably the only one that would survive a shuttle misssion.
It also means, unlike Microsoft, NASA actually fixes bugs in the software as opposed to throwing a 10,000 line of code "bandaid" at the problem.

[derby]

How many G's does the shuttle generate during launch?

would you believe less than a f1 car while turning or braking?  

(about the same when accelerating)

[kopfjäger]

The Shuttle pulls about 3.5 G's on launch. A Top Fuel Dragster pulls 8 on launch and maintains 4 on a clean run.