Tag: HARDDRIVE

Auslogics Disk Defrag has been part of my system maintenance toolkit for quite some time. With the release of version 3.2, it's now even better at tidying up and optimizing your system's hard disk drives. In addition to a cleaner, easier-to-use interface, Disk Defrag 3.2 offers improved single file and folder defragging, better processing of multiple disks, a simplified scheduling screen, and ...

Today's the day, folks! In case you haven't heard, today is the not-quite-official-but-still-a-good-idea World Backup Day 2011, which is all about awareness -- awareness that your hard drive and all its data are vulnerable to the harsh realities of this world we live in today. The idea may have started as a simple post on Reddit, but it's bloomed into a full-blown initiative, and it's a ...

GParted is an extremely handy LiveCD to keep in your technician's toolbox, and its new version features one very major addition: GParted 0.8 can now help you recover data from lost partitions. After analyzing your drive and doing its best to resurrect missing information from the partition table, GParted will now let you mount partitions it finds in read-only mode so you can copy your data to ...

Setting up a new external hard drive for use with your PlayStation 3 should be a simple task. Maybe, however, when you plugged the drive into your Windows system and attempted to right-click and format it you only had two options: NTFS and exFAT, neither of which plays nice with your PlayStation. While you could use diskpart to take care of things, not everyone enjoys command-line tinkering. ...

It's taken a while to get there, but Defraggler 2.0 is finally ready for download -- at least in beta form. The new version is more efficient and faster than ever, and Defraggler can now perform boot-time scans. Using the expanded configuration options in Defraggler 2, you can choose to run a one-time defrag, or you can set it to run each time you reboot your system. Defraggler's Drive Map has ...

Erez might have been less than thrilled with Acronis Drive Monitor the other day, but I have a feeling he'll like Passmark's DiskCheckup a lot more. They're the same people who produce the awesome app BurnInTest -- one of my all-time favorite technician tools. It's a simple little tool which keeps an eye on the SMART status of your hard drives. In addition to displaying an exhaustive amount of ...

xPud is a slick little live Linux distribution. Apparently, it also makes a nice foundation for a backup and recovery tool. Redo Backup is just that: a small, speedy Linux live CD that provides an easy way to backup and restore the entire contents of your hard drive. Redo utilizes Partclone for the heavy lifting, and it also provides automatic mounting of Linux and Windows shares so that ...

My first computer was a used IBM 80286 with 640k RAM, a 10MB hard drive, running MS-DOS 3.0, and a sporting stylish 5.25" floppy drive on top of a 3.5" drive. The computer was brought home by my father, from work, when I was 6 years old. He'd bought it from the company when they upgraded to 386s that were brand new that year. When he carried the massive box into the living room that evening, I ...

From the massively-nerdy-but-really-quite-cool news department, I bring you the coolest thing I've seen since unwrapping my presents on Christmas Day. 120 years of amazing discoveries, eye-opening editorial and mind-expanding stories form The Complete National Geographic. Maps, stories and every single damn photo, all lovingly reproduced in 'stunning high resolution'... and distributed on a hard ...

Size isn't everything when it comes to useful downloads, and Tray Disk Free is a perfect example. The 29k Windows only app goes resident in your system after launching and monitors the free space of any drive on your system. You'll barely notice the 1mb of ram it consumes. Click the tray icon and Tray Disk opens its main window behind your other apps. Its taskbar button gives you a full display ...

Hard drive prices are so low now that it really makes sense to use an imaging program. That way you've got a perfectly cloned backup of your system exactly the way you have it configured in case of a crash, which is much more convenient than reinstalling Windows, activating, and loading all your applications all over again. Here are four great apps to get the job done - without spending a ...

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive. Once installed, Windows ...

Knowing the status of your hard drive is a great way to prepare for problems that may potentially arise. And thank to CrystalDiskInfo obtaining this information from your hard drive couldn't be any easier. CrystalDisk will gather data from your hard drive and will let you know its current temperature, the number of power cycles and even the number of hours the drive has been on. All this ...

There's more evidence that the mythical GDrive, Google's mysterious Google storage hard drive, could be real. Google has apparently updated the name servers on GoogleDrive.com as noted by Garett Rogers. This could be one of the final steps necessary in launching the online storage solution. Could it be built into Google Apps? Or maybe a standalone service? We will have to wait and see. ...

Lifehacker has updated their Windows Janitor script for keeping your Windows "junk drawer" clean. Most of us have a folder or two on our hard drives that are filled pretty much with things we don't need. This could be your web browser's default download directory, which fills up with e-mail attachments, installer files, music, and videos. But whatever directory it is, odds are it's taking up more ...