Articles tagged: hard drive

An external USB hard drive positioned vertically on its side, with a carrying handle attached to its top. The hard drive has a 'Moving' sticker prominently displayed.

Can I Move My Old Hard Drive to My New Computer to Transfer Data?

You can take the internal hard disk of an old computer and install it as an additional drive in a new one, or consider a more flexible alternative.

Padlocked Hard Drive

How Do I Secure a Hard Drive Before Sending It in for Repair?

When sending your computer out for repair, you’re handing over everything on it, including your data. Options to secure a hard drive are limited.

RAID array

Should I Use RAID for Backup?

RAID is a valuable technology for improving disk speed and fault tolerance, but it is in no way a replacement for backing up.

External Hard Drive

Tip of the Day: Your Backup Drive Can Be Slow

Hard disk under a stethoscope

Is My Hard Disk About to Die?

There are signs we can use to determine if a hard drive is about to fail, but it’s also common for a drive to fail without any indication at all.

How do I get data off of the hard drive in a dead computer?

How Do I Get Data Off of the Hard Drive in a Dead Computer?

Extracting data from a hard drive in a dead computer isn’t typically difficult, unless it’s the drive itself that caused the problem.

SATA and PATA interfaces

What’s the difference between SATA and PATA and IDE?

SATA and PATA are two different and incompatible disk drive interfaces. PATA’s the old guard, but SATA’s taking over. I’ll look at the differences.

NAS - Network Attached Storage

NAS Drive Failure: How I Dodged a Bullet

I had an impending NAS drive failure. I’ll share how I got there, the mistakes I made, the things I did right, and the lessons I learned.

External Backup Drive

How do I protect the files on a portable hard drive?

The answer to this is simple. If it’s only in one place… it’s not backed up!

SSD & HD

How Should I Use My SSD and HD Together?

The thing to consider is: what do we love most about solid state drives, and conversely, what would we worry about?

An Active Hard DIsk

Can I stop an “idle” computer from hitting the hard disk at all?

I’ll show you how to reduce the last little bit of disk activity happening on your computer, but is that really going to help?

Disk Drive

How hard is it to change a laptop hard disk?

It ‘s impossible to say how hard it may be for any one person, but, let me go down a list of things that you need to think about it when it’s time to replace a hard drive in a laptop.

Does Having Multiple Partitions Shorten My Hard Disk’s Life?

Hard drives get laid out in fairly complex ways. Second-guessing how your disk heads move as part of a decision whether to use multiple partitions is not really a practical way to save a hard drive from failure.

Hard Disk

Should I update my hard drive?

I like to follow the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But there are some considerations here where replacing the hard drive would make sense.

Healthy Computer

How Do I Keep CHKDSK from Running on every Start Up?

There are times when the disk checking utility needs to run before you boot into Windows. Sometimes it seems to get stuck and does so every time.