Tag: HARDDRIVE

One of the best ways to identify a failing hard drive is to simply listen to the sounds it makes. It might seem crazy, but it's true. A disk on the verge of disaster makes telltale noises that could tip you off in time to save your data. The trouble is knowing what to listen for. Some are obvious -- like beeps, clicks, scratching -- but others are much more subtle. Data recovery company Data Cent ...

ioSafe loves its gimmicky demos at CES. In years past, the company has drowned drives and run them over, just to show how durable they are. This year, ioSafe fired four 12-gauge shotgun shells into one, and, needless to say, it survived. We wish ioSafe would have invited us to shoot a drive, but we'll just have to make do with the video below. ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. As the ...

This is John Boldt, a graduate student at the University of Calgary. This past Wednesday, he was out for a run in Edworthy Park when some heartless thief (or thieves) broke into his car, and stole his laptop, which contained his research, notes and partially complete thesis. Now, Boldt was smarter than many users, and backed up all of his work to an external hard drive. But it too was swiped. ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Yelp Yack is an adorable new blog (if you care for a side of spite) by San Francisco-based illustrator Jessica Wassill. She happens to think that angry Yelp reviews ...

By the end of January 2011, almost all new hard drives sold will have switched to a new format that will increase their size and efficiency, but will leave those clinging to Windows XP frustrated. Traditionally, data on hard disks has been broken up into 512 byte chunks. Each broken-up sector requires additional space on a physical disk to mark the beginning and the end of each piece. Extra ...

Whether it's the trickle down of a bad economy or simply an effort toward conservation, more and more people are using old electronics to create amazing works of art. To produce these creations, you don't have to attend art school, but it does help to know your way around a computer. Enter Miguel Rivera. According to Wired, he's a systems administrator and, judging by his art, a little bit of ...

Other than adding as much RAM as possible, a quick, relatively cheap way to gain noticeably better performance from your aging PC is to upgrade the hard drive to a faster model. The faster a hard drive spins (measured in revolutions per minute or rpm), the more quickly it can access data and pass it back and forth to the processor. For desktop computers, you should get at least a 7,200 rpm ...

The folks over at TechDealDigger are letting us know about some of the best deals they find on gadgets every day, so we're going to pass that information on to you. After all, in these tough economic times, every little bit counts. We may not be buying Swarovski-covered iPods any time soon, but everyone needs essentials like a computer. So take a look at what the online deals site sent us today. ...

Rather than throwing away that old, dusty hard drive gathering dust in the back of a drawer, put it to work as a quick and easy backup storage unit. In lieu of dedicated external hard drives, companies like Brando and Newertech offer cheap adapter cables and hard drive docking stations for USB or Firewire, allowing you to plug in an SATA drive and instantly use it like a regular old external ...

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo. Looking for a more exciting way to delete files from your computer other than simply dragging them into the trash bin? Game designer Zach Gage has created a space shooter that not only makes cleaning up your hard drive fun, but it makes the user ponder "choice and consequence, and by extension what it means to succeed or fail." Don't worry, 'Lose/Lose' isn't ...

You deserve no pity when your hard drive dies if you don't bother to regularly back-up your music, photos and important documents. The average drive dies after 3.1 years, so plenty die before then. A CD or DVD sells for pennies, and easy-to-use external hard drives abound for under $100, allowing you to quickly (and cheaply) set up automatic backups of all your prized files, so you don't have to ...

Before you ditch your PC, be sure to completely clear all of your personal info from the hard drive. Unfortunately, simply deleting things doesn't really erase them. (They're still somewhere on your hard drive). So, short of smashing your computer with a hammer, use a program that overwrites the entire drive several times with unreadable gibberish, such as Summit Computer's free Hard Disk ...

A new application available from the iTunes App Store promises to turn your iPhone or iPod touch into a powerful tool. DataCase transforms your Apple mobile device into a wireless networked hard drive that can be accessed from any Wi-Fi equipped computer, whether it runs OS X, Windows, or Linux. DataCase is $6.99 and, once activated, allows other PCs on your wireless network to access two ...

Best Buy's Geek Squad isn't exactly known for respecting people's property. This time, however, instead of us catching them, they caught a guy with child porn. A middle school custodian sent in a hard drive back in August of 2007 to recover lost data. Upon performing their usual search (and invasion of personal privacy), the Geek Squadders at a Twin Cities location found over 800 images of young ...