In the context of this article, "safe" concerning a hard drive means "least likely to have mechanical failure". While true you can buy 1TB drives new for under $150 easily, there are tens of thousands of platter-based hard drives out there that are used and much cheaper – but which are the safest? Laptop HDDs Rich’s...

Yesterday, Western Digital announced they’re shipping the world’s first 3TB hard drives. While that in itself isn’t really big news (at least not to me), what is big is that the 3TB drive uses the 4096-byte sectors instead of 512. That means it won’t work in Windows XP without additional special software. It also means that Windows 7...

For a while now it’s been possible to map an internet FTP shortcut in Windows Explorer, with emphasis on shortcut and not drive letter. Most of you out there are very familiar with the "Map Network Drive" feature of Windows, but when mapping an FTP location as a shortcut, the steps to take are slightly different. Here’s how to do it in...

You’ll notice that the title of this article does not say format a hard drive but rather erase. Most people are under the assumption that formatting a hard drive erases everything on it. Not true. A formatted drive can have its data recovered easily with utilities like this one. Residual data that remains on a hard drive after it’s been formatted is...

USB sticks are hitting rock bottom prices these days. A 16GB stick is now under $30. And 8GB sizes are easily available for under $15. However this is nowhere near as cost effective as burning DVDs. In fact it’s not even close. The 16GB stick is $30. Put into cost per gigabyte, each gig costs $1.88. A 100-pack spindle of Maxell (a mid-grade brand) 16x...

Make no mistake, hard drives run hot. Granted, they’re not a hot as the processor or the RAM, but processors have big fat heat sinks and a fan cooling them down and you can get RAM with heat spreaders. So what can you do to cool off the hard drive? Attach a fan to it. How much do they cost? They can be as little a 3 bucks or as expensive as 30 bucks. The...

Periodically I am asked whether it’s “safe” to leave a computer on all the time. The answer is yes if it’s a desktop (meaning not a laptop). Chances are if you’ve been using computers long enough you’ve encountered at least one instance where some type of hardware failure occurred right as you turned on the box – and...

Situation: You’ve decided that you’re going to build a new computer. You put your part list together (case, mainboard, RAM, hard drive, processor, etc.) and then come to the point where you have to purchase an optical drive. Seems like a waste of money, doesn’t it? On the Linux side of things, it has been proven that you can install a full...

In previous articles and videos I’ve discussed how to get a "Live" mode (i.e. as if your computer were booting from CD) of Linux on a USB stick. Some people think this is cool but would rather have a full CD-sized distribution installation instead. And when I said "CD-sized" I’m referring to distributions that take up the entire...

There are more than a few people out there who would find it quite handy to be able to run Windows XP off a USB stick (or hard drive in a caddy). I was also interested to know if this was possible to do. The Big Question: Is it possible? Answer: Yes. However it is a humongous pain in the butt to get working. The best write-up I found on how to get XP running...