Chances are pretty good most of you out there will be installing a solid state drive soon or within the next year or so. However we’ve been told for almost 18 years (MS-DOS 6 was released in 1994 which featured the DEFRAG.EXE utility) that we’re supposed to periodically "defrag" our hard drives to optimize performance. But is this necessary...

It’s easy enough to tell when a hard drive is beginning to fail because the way in which it happens at least gives you warning signs. You’ll either hear the infamous click-click-click or maybe a click-whirr-click-click, or in more brazen fashion a CLICK that sounds almost like a slap right before the drive dies for good. Flash memory on the other...

The system requirements for Windows 7 state that you need a minimum 16 GB available hard drive space to run the OS properly. Remember that figure as you read through this. Solid State Disk or SSD for short is fast because there’s far less wait time compared to HDD. This is because SSD has no moving parts while HDD does. If I were in the market to build a...

"Footprint" in relation to an operating system simply means how much space it takes up after being completely installed and completely updated. Windows XP example fits on a CD uninstalled, however after installation and having Service Pack 3 applied, it grows to 1.5GB and goes up from there. Does footprint matter now? Yes. Many of you would like to...

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...

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...

Two quad core QX9775 processors, 800MHz FBDIMM 4GB RAM.. doesn’t sound like anything out of your grasp, right? But how about if you put in 24 SSDs totaling 6TB in a RAID setup? Yep, that’s a bit extreme. The crazy thing is that it worked. It could break a speed of 2GB per second. It could open the entire MS Office Suite – all programs –...

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...

When your Windows operating system reads a file off a hard-disk, it’s reading a file stored in lots of little bits -usually 512-bit chunks in NTFS. Your operating system doesn’t always, in fact rarely does it, write to the disk putting all of the separate 512-bit chunks next to each other. Sometimes different chunks get put far away from one another,...

Solid State Drives (SSD) are inevitably what are going to replace our existing hard disk drives. For those not aware of what the difference is between the two, traditional hard drives have moving parts on the inside while SSDs so not. You can consider them "big flash drives". SSD is above and beyond superior to HDD in every way except space for the...

PCMech readers and PCMech Live viewers have heard me wax on about how SSD is going to be the next big thing with computers. Why? One reason: Speed. And lots of it. Solid State Drives are where computers are going. If you wanted any indicator as to when to upgrade, SSD is it – no question. And Samsung appears to be the company that’s going to bring it...