Hard Drive Help

Basic information about hard drives to help you keep your data safe...

The PS3 Hard Drive is Easy to Upgrade

The PS3 hard drive can easily be upgraded with a larger hard drive. If you're handy with a screwdriver, you'll make easy work of this upgrade. Of all the game consoles, Sony makes it the cheapest and easiest to add lots of extra hard drive storage.

Booting From a USB External Hard Drive

Are you looking to boot from a USB external hard drive? If so, here are three distinct ways of creating a bootable USB drive. Even if you don't have a need for a bootable hard drive right now, having such a drive available can be quite valuable when your regular hard dive decides not to boot anymore.

Hard Drive Temperature

A software hard drive temperature monitor can help you protect your data. Of all the key components in your computer, the hard drive requires the lowest operating temperature. Because of this, it's important to know if your hard drives are running too hot. If your disk is too hot, you have a couple of good ways to cool it down.

Firewire Harddrive

The Firewire harddrive is an excellent choice for a portable interface. It enables you to share drives between the PC and the Mac. Being much cheaper than SCSI, and yet enabling you to daisy-chain devices is a great benefit.

Xbox 360 Hard Drive

The Xbox 360 hard drive is an indispensable part of a high performance gaming system. Don't buy an Xbox without a hard drive.

Terabyte Hard Drive

Getting a terabyte hard drive is an easy way to consolidate your various smaller drives. If you're running out of hard drive space, you'll find it worthwhile to look at the roomy terabyte hard drive.

Unformat After an Accidental Hard Drive Format

If you accidentally formatted your hard drive it’s possible to still unformat and recover your data.

Undelete

Looking to undelete an accidentally erased file? I can't guarantee a recovery but I can give you some advice to help prevent this problem in the future. My best advice is to sign up for a free online backup service that you can use to protect your important files. I also provide a link to the best free file recovery program.

A Clean Hard Drive Will Thwart the Identity Thief

With identity theft on the rise, you can't be too careful in making the effort to get a clean hard drive. Don't give away your old PC or hard drive without first scrubbing all the data on the drive. You've likely forgotten much of what you put on there over the years, so don't rely on your memory, clean it all.

CHKDSK Utility

CHKDSK is a Microsoft supplied utility that comes with your windows system. This utility has been around since MS-DOS but it has been continually updated to work with the latest windows system. Use it on a regular basis to monitor the health of your hard disk drive.

Samsung Hard Drives

Samsung hard drives are starting to be serious competition to Seagate and Western Digital. Consider their late entry into the terabyte market. The Samsung SpinPoint F1 terabyte drive easily bested these competitors.

Are you considering partitioning your hard drive?

Two big reasons to partition a hard drive are to separate your data from the operating system, and to create a dual boot system. Don't partition your hard dive just because you think it will make your system more efficient, because Windows will always run better on a bigger disk. Over the past year the prices of hard drives have fallen and the sizes have increased. It almost doesn't make sense to go through the trouble of partitioning a drive when you can just get a cheaper and larger drive to either replace or supplement your growing storage needs.

Cheap External 500gb Hard Drive

I was just browsing the hard drives at Amizon.com and couldn't resist telling my readers about this great deal I saw. If you're looking for an external hard drive, consider this 500gb LaCie USB drive. For $114.95, you get a 500gb hard drive in an external case with a power supply. The external power supply is considered a disadvantage if you want a portable external drive, but it can't be beat if you're only going to be connecting it to your desktop. So, take a look, they have other deals if the LaCie drive doesn't appeal to you. I'm going back to browsing on Amazon.com.

Free Hard Drive Copy Utility From Seagate

If you have a Seagate or Maxtor hard dive, you can download the free MaxBlast 5.0 disk imaging utility. The utility checks for any Seagate or Maxtor hard dive and it will even work if one of those drives is only connected via USB.

This utility contains some powerful features. One is the ability to create disk images that can later be used to restore individual files without having to write to entire image to a new disk. The images can also be mounted as a virtual disk. This is really good for a free program.

Hard Drive Humor

A little bit of hard drive humor. This is a brief video of someone having fun with old hard drives. But on a serious note, make sure you don't leave any personal data on drives you're getting rid of.