It is no secret that I am a big time supporter of reducing our impact on the environment, so I enjoy reading tech related items on the subject. One article that caught my eye recently was an Ars Technica post titled "Ask Ars: are "green" hard drives really all that green?" This article is a great read and breaks down the "green"...

With solid state drives (SSDs) having been here for a couple of years, it would make sense that the price point would be much lower than what we see today. While the price has certainly come down since SSDs were introduced, they are not yet at the “commodity” price point and are a rather expensive option when compared to their traditional...

Since I heard a blurb about it several years ago, something I have always kept in the back of my mind are observations of any noticeable impact the orientation of hard drives have in their respective systems. While my methodology is certainly nothing scientific I have not really experienced anything which would lead me to believe it makes a difference. After...

I’ve been using Windows 7 since the RC was released, then upgraded to the full Home Premium edition later upon its release. While using my PC today, a thought occurred to me: I had never defragmented the file system since installing the OS. I launched the Disk Defragmenter program, which to the best of my memory was the first time I’d ever done so in...

When I first read that some Seagate 500GB FreeAgent Go portable HDDs would come preloaded with a popular movie (such as GI Joe), I thought it was a good idea. That was until I read that the movie was digitally locked and would cost $9.99 to unlock. Y’know.. it’s bad enough when you buy a pre-built PC that it comes with a bunch of crap in Windows that...

The Windows Disk Management utility (available in Computer Management) is a very easy to use tool for basic partition creation and deletion on secondary drives. However, it struggles whenever there is a partition with an ‘unknown’ or ‘foreign’ format, such as on OEM utility partitions. Using Disk Management, you can delete/format all...

Most new laptops come shipped with an HDD from 160GB to 320GB in size. This is small compared to a new desktop, most of which ship with a 500GB HDD or greater. If you want the big-big space in your laptop, it’s available. However it’s probably true you can’t use the largest size. More on that in a moment. In the big-big range for 2.5-inch HDDs...

If there’s one thing that forces people into using newer operating systems, it’s when only the latest OS offerings support current hardware. In first and second quarter 2011, hard drives are going to start shipping that use 4K sectors instead of the now-ancient 512 byte. For Windows XP users this presents an issue because that OS was released before...

As you probably know, your hard drive is the device which is most likely to fail. While a hard drive can fail at any time without warning, the S.M.A.R.T. sensors build into modern hard drives are a good indicator of your overall drive health. A very simple tool which allows you to view this data is Nirsoft’s DiskSmartView. DiskSmartView is a small utility...

For those that have built PCs long enough, you probably remember a time when several hard drive manufacturers routinely offered 7-year warranties. Western Digital was one of them. They proudly stated that their HDDs would last that span of time easily. Then at one point, most of the 7-year warranties on HDDs vanished. What happened? What happened is that some of...

You are probably very familiar with the hard drive activity LED that seems to constantly be blinking on either your desktop or laptop case. As a better alternative to this simple indicator, FloatLED puts this information directly on your desktop. Something FloatLED does that your case light cannot is it can tell you want drive is actually working. If you have...

If you have a hard drive with some unallocated space on the end of (i.e. not currently assigned to a partition) and want to use that space to add to an existing partition, a simple and effective tool you can use is Diskpart. This tool is included with Windows XP and later. The documentation is pretty easy to follow, but for example suppose you want to extend the...

I saw an interesting post on Slashdot not too long ago where someone asked the a question regarding a RAID setup. What I found interesting was not so much their question, rather the comments from the replies. If you are considering using RAID in your setup, this is a great thread to read. One commenter put it best: [T]he reason for using RAID is NOT as a backup....

Using NewEgg, here’s the scoop on what hard drives cost right now. Cheapest of the cheap: Hitachi Deskstar, 80GB, $32.99. And yes it is a SATA 3GB/s. Bear in mind a Western Digital flavor is just one dollar more. King of the hill (price-wise): HP 347708-B22 147GB, $499. What makes this hard drive expensive is its 15,000 RPM. If you feel inclined to buy one...

When one thinks of a hard drive, style doesn’t usually come to mind. That’s because most people don’t care about that sort of thing. However when the style is actually functional, that’s a different story and is desirable. Enter the My Passport portable hard drive from Western Digital. This is a 500GB portable drive that connects via USB...

One thing I have noticed when reading some articles across the Internet regarding data destruction is many recommendations are on the ‘paranoid level’. I have seen articles/forum posts where people talk about 0 writing their hard drive 5+ times and then taking it apart and smashing the disks. First of all, 99.999% of the data out there is worthless...

Chances are very high that other than USB sticks and optical discs, you’re using a fixed disk drive (a.k.a. the hard drive) that stores digitally encoded data on platters with magnetic surfaces. The fixed disk drive you have is guaranteed to fail someday. I’m not saying this to scare you because it’s common knowledge. You already know...

If you happen to own a 1TB or 500GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive, you’re most likely familiar with the firmware error at boot. So, naturally, what people will do is download the latest firmware update from Seagate to fix the problem. The only problem with that is that when applied it seems to be bricking the 500GB versions of the drive. Seagate is very...

If you ever have the need to make changes to your hard drive partitions, rather than immediately going to the commercial options, check out the open source GParted. GParted fully supports NTFS and FAT as well as the two major Linux file systems (ext2/ext3) along with lots of other files systems. You can shrink, grow, copy, move (and more) partitions which should...

There are those who need big honkin’ hard drives and those who don’t. Typically, those that need the big-big drives do one or more of the following:Video editing. Camcorder, DV, DVR, Tivo, DVD ripping, etc. Multitrack audio editing. The raw WAV files are quite large. Gaming. Many newer games require a significant amount of space. Photography....