News

• Free Tools to Wipe Your Drives Securely

  By Alex Wawro | 26 April, 2012 23:29

  Your PC's hard drive is packed with your personal data. So when you want to get rid of your system or drive, you should permanently erase your storage device drives before you get rid of them. If your drives are encrypted and you trust the encryption protocol (full disk encryption is pretty safe), all you have to do is delete your encryption keys. If you want to safeguard your privacy further--and prevent data theft down the road--here are a few cheap and simple tools designed to wipe your hard drive, solid-state drive, or USB flash drive thoroughly before you dispose of it.

• Western Digital Puts 2TB of Storage in Palm of Your Hand for $250

  By John P. Mello Jr. | 21 March, 2012 06:50

  Who needs the cloud when you can have two terabytes of storage in the palm of your hand?

• Need more storage? Reach for the Cloud

  By Tony Bradley | 31 January, 2012 06:21

  When you start out with a fresh new hard drive, it may seem like it has virtually unlimited capacity. The reality, though, is that it won't take nearly as long to max out that drive as you might think, and you will need to find some way to expand your storage.

• Five high-tech items that will cost you more in 2012

  By John P. Mello Jr. | 18 January, 2012 01:29

  Every day, stories appear about a price drop for this or that tech gadget. As a result, consumers have a tendency to delay spending. After all, why buy something today that will be cheaper tomorrow?

• Build Your Own Network-Attached Storage System

  By Nate Ralph | 18 October, 2011 00:35

  With cheap storage readily available, the temptation to build vast libraries of music, movies, photos, and documents is ever present. But when each PC in your home is packed to its aluminum gills with gigabytes upon gigabytes of digital goods, managing all of that data can be a hassle.

• Seagate offers data recovery with hard drive purchase

  By John P. Mello Jr. | 09 August, 2011 03:43

  Hard drive crashes are a nightmare for computer users for many reasons. Not only can data held dear to one's heart be lost, but trying to recover it can cost an arm and a leg, if not more. Hard drive maker Seagate attempts to address both those problems with the release today of its GoFlex Turbo drive with SafetyNet data recovery services.

• 5 more PC upgrade mistakes (and how to avoid them)

  By Robert Strohmeyer | 29 July, 2011 00:08

  As PCs get more powerful and easier to use, the challenges involved with upgrading them have remained about the same. For the novice, a hard drive upgrade can appear downright daunting. For more experienced tinkerers, the upgrade itself may be easy, but it's easier still to overlook factors that could streamline the whole process and better protect both the hardware and the data stored on it.

• Seagate GoFlex Satellite portable hard drive

  By Melissa J. Perenson | 21 May, 2011 09:16

  The Seagate GoFlex Satellite hard drive takes the shackles off your tablet, freeing it to connect to a greater amount of storage capacity -- without having to go through any pesky wires. But although the hardware implementation is adequate, the software app struggles. A lot. At launch, Seagate is offering a messy, limited app for iPad and iPhone; an Android app equivalent is still in the works, so for now Android users must access the hard drive's contents using a comparatively crude Web-browser interface (admittedly, one not unlike the browser interface for standard network-attached drives).

• TestDisk, PhotoRec fix disks, recover files

  By Jon L. Jacobi | 21 March, 2011 01:56

  If you're a fan of character-based interfaces -- such as DOS -- and free data recovery, you're going to love TestDisk and its companion utility, PhotoRec (a brother program included in the TestDisk download). Both free programs run in a DOS box or from a command line and test, report on, fix common disk boot problems, and recover files from damaged hard drives. All this is done at low level, below the operating system.

• New Seagate solid state drives mean business

  By Tony Bradley | 16 March, 2011 07:06

  Seagate has unveiled new models of its Pulsar line of solid state drives (SSD) -- delivering performance, endurance, and reliability that business can trust. The new drives bring the benefits of SSD to organizations with demanding data storage needs.

• Erase data permanently with SecureClean

  By Ian Harac | 07 March, 2011 07:48

  It's well-known that "deleting" a file from Windows doesn't fully remove it, but you may not understand just how much data can remain on your disk after a file is gone. Even fragments of a file such as a crucial e-mail or spreadsheet can contain valuable data. Browsing histories, cookies, and more can linger a long time. SecureClean ($US50, 14-day free trial) will remove all such detritus permanently.

• Cloud storage ahead: Proceed at your own risk

  By Tony Bradley | 03 February, 2011 08:26

  The IT mantra for the past few years has been all about the cloud, and the myriad benefits of cloud-based servers and storage. While there are some advantages, there are also some serious drawbacks that you should consider carefully before entrusting your valuable and sensitive data to the cloud.

• Need large-capacity data storage? Try your intestine.

  By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal | 20 January, 2011 02:57

  If you needed to score 900,000GB of data, how much do you think your storage system would weigh?

• Rocstor Embraces USB 3.0 For New Hard Drives

  By Elizabeth Fish | 05 January, 2011 12:51

  Storage company Rocstor has added two new USB 3.0 devices to their product line up, just in time for CES 2011.

• Seagate debuts fast green drive

  By John P. Mello Jr. | 15 December, 2010 04:24

  Seagate has introduced a new high-speed, eco-friendly hard drive for low-power personal computers. The 3.5-inch desktop drive spins at 5900 RPM and includes the company's SmartAlign technology.