I am thinking of speeding up my Windows system with a SSD (Solid State Drive). I have some questions about it. How much would a SSD typically speed up a Windows system? I currently use Windows XP Home. Would a SSD work better with Windows 7? What files are usually put on the SSD? What is...

Somehow I never get rid of all my problems and questions. How do I know how big my flashdrive is? Today I went to use my NIB flashdrive and it says there is no room to copy AVG11 to it (to install on another computer *before* going on the net.) PowerDesk shows my drive is only 1.07 gig big. I...

My motherboard doesn't have SATA support so I would have to get a controller for it (I think they're like $50). Would doing this be worth it for the increase in speed of SATA-II drives or should I just get an IDE drive? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Anyone have any thoughts on which is going to give me better write speeds.. I know raid0 should be much better and if i combine it with raid1, redundant.. But I'm assuming when I backup my servers to (this backup server) across the gigabit network, my write speeds would max out at say 60 MB/ s...

I have two identical 750 GB Samsung HDs on this Quad Core 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM PC, under Win XP. C: holds my OS and main data and I: is mainly backup. I also have two external WD HDs, 1 TB and 2 TB. I'm trying to find the reason for slow performance in several applications (I could provide more...

So I was looking at AVCHD cameras the other day. With my current MiniDV camcorders I can store the tape for over a decade without a problem. I have proven this with old 8mm tapes recorded in 1987, and stuck in a Digital8 camera and Firewired into a PC ad a DV file. There I was at 9 years...

Something strange just happened recently, under Windows 7, although I have seen it happen under Windows XP before too. A hard drive that's internal (i.e. always there, not physically removable), just disappeared from Windows sight. No longer accessible, HD Sentinel didn't see it either....

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Ant wrote: I woke up overnight (about six hours since I last used my computer without any problems) and noticed my old Debian/Linux box was acting weird (IRC chat bot/rbot gave errors about corrupted database, detached screen...

I've just bought a couple of these F4 2TB drives (the 4k ones), now given I'm still running XP I had to use there "Acronics Align Tool" so I downloaded it, installed it and ran it and it done what it needed to do and came back saying drive was now fine. Now I took a drive image before I done...

I have 3 PCs which each have a variety of internal SATA drives, and all of which have external eSATA ports. The external eSATA ports were either factory-provided (Dell) or added by me with controller cards from Addonics and Rosewill with PCI-Express or PCI interfaces. Regardless of which...

Hello :) I have a mighty large ZFS array (19*2TB) which has two drives that are currently having a few too many sector reallocations for my taste. So, I went looking for replacements. These days, drives are about twice as expensive as last I bought any. But one drive is really cheap (apparently...

Does anyone know how many spare clusters there are typically on a 120 Gig Travelstar please? I suppose it IS safe to use them? Isn't that what they are for? I have a 120 Gig Travelstar which was continuously failing. When it failed the computer wouldn't POST, giving a hard drive failure error...

I have one PCI IDE controller card installed, and I'm trying to add another IDE channel to my PC. It turns out that both makes of PCI IDE controller cards that I bought use the same chipset (SIL680) and so they use the same BIOS and IRQ and memory adrs, etc. Naturally, the resource conflict is...

Well the price did improve, though not to the level before the Thailand floods. My theory is the NSA Prism program is sucking up the supply of 4TB drives. While this may sound far fetched, if you look at the history of the U-2 spy plane, it used a fuel similar to an oil used to kill mosquitoes...

Intel 160 GB ssd drive now $425: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167017 OK, this is getting very close to my buy point. Very close. Lynn

When I right-clicked a hard disk in Window$ and hit Format, was it the hard disk controller that took over to format a particular sector on the disk? Or was it the OS? I wanted to reduce the fault tolerance level of the formatting process such that it would mark a sector as bad when there was...

Gary wrote: What does it usually mean when I run a disk scan for bad sectors on c drive and the result is "Windows was unable to complete the disk scan" The symptom is a blue screen saying that there is most likely a bad piece of hardware. Download the free Everest utilities, from the...

Without taking pc lid off - is there a software way to indicate if sata or ide ? maybe a smart indicator function ? its so i can help someone find out which theres is and then i'll get them a new one thanks

Hi: Why do hard disc drives use magnetic discs? Since non-volatile flash RAM chips are not yet feasible for HDD- substitution, why not replace the magnetic platters with optical ones that use 400 nm lasers to write, read, erase, and re-write data? Optical platters using 400 nm lasers would...

Hi, I have a maxtor 120GB drive which developed bad sectores on all partitions. the drive has 3 partitions. I deleted 2 of the partitions and reformatted using partitionmagic and got rid of the bad sectors in these partitions. The third partition is the system and is quit large so I dont want to...