This is an attempt to explain to you why your computer tells you "conflicting" (but not really) information on exactly how much usable space you have on any given storage medium. In my possession I have a really old 512MB Sandisk cruzer micro USB stick. To make absolutely sure I was going to get the maximum space out of it, I low-level formatted it...

So, you want a bit more storage space for your files, do you? Got too much music? Too many movies? Too much material of an illicit nature? Whatever the reason, you’re going to want an external hard drive. And in much the same way as a computer, you’re going to want to care for it and maintain it. External drives might not require as much maintenance...

There are those who thankfully take the time to record quality audio of what failing hard drives actually sound like, and moreover what certain sounds mean when you hear them. If you think about it, how would you know the sound of bad HHD heads from a stuck spindle from a bad preamplifier clip to bad bearings? Data Cent, a data recovery service, has put together...

Hard drives have a processor on them; it’s job is to figure out the best paths for the drive heads. Western Digital now has dual-processor hard drives, and that initially sounds great because two is better than one, right? Maybe. Western Digital recently started offering dual-processor hard drives like this one. It has some beefy cache at 32MB and promises...

If you ever read the throughput numbers on your hard drive, you probably know that most SATA drives claim a data rate of (typically) at least 150MB/s. Of course these numbers are simply theoretical maximum transfer rates which you will never realize. So to help analyze your actual data rates your hard drive is giving you, check the free HD Speed...

For those of you that have tried out Linux the install-it-for-real way (meaning not virtually or using Wubi), the GRUB boot loader is installed. Side note: There’s also LILO, but the one I see more often than not for most Linux distros, namely Ubuntu, is GRUB. If using Microsoft software to remove GRUB from a hard drive, you would either use FDISK or...

If your hard drive is getting full or you notice the space is filling up fast, a handy tool to use in order to find where all your space is going is TreeSize. TreeSize is a free utility which shows a “rolled up” view of all the space consumed on your hard drive by particular folders. By drilling down into the folders, you see the size of all the...

As you probably know, your hard drive is the most important component in your computer because it houses all your data. Unfortunately it is the most likely device to fail. While virtually all modern hard drives have S.M.A.R.T. technology built in to detect failures, one important factor you can monitor is your hard drive temperature with HDD Temperature. HDD...