Is it possible to set the logical sector size of a USB hard disk drive?
Question: I have two supposedly identical 3TB Western Digital USB hard disk drives. One contains nearly the full 3TB of data. I want the other to be a backup of…
How to *quickly* get a list of files that have bad sectors/blocks/clusters/whatever?
Question: My wife’s Windows 7 (64-bit) box has suddenly developed a SMART “disk is bad” status. ?I’m attempting to copy everything off (no admonishments about lacking a backup regimen, please,…
Is SATA bandwith per Port or per Controller?
Question: I always assumed that it was per Controller channel, and that If I have 4xSATA 3.0Gb/s ports on my Motherboard then I should have a potential 12.0Gb/s of bandwidth.…
Seeking (somewhat) better explanations about supporting >2 TB hard drives
Question: Today while Googling about I stumbled across posts claiming that Seagate plans to ship a 3TB drive sometime later in 2010. Unfortunately, the stuff I looked at all seemed…
SSD cache to minimize HDD spin-up time?
Question: short version first: I’m looking for Linux compatible software which is able to transparently cache HDD writes using an SSD. However, I only want to spin up the HDD…
Windows 7 startup repair with Truecrypt
Question: I have many computers encrypted with Truecrypt 7.1a (current version) with the whole drive encrypted. ?Today one of them shows the Windows 7 splash screen for a moment and…
What are High Fly Writes?
Question: What are High Fly Writes that are tracked by SMART on a hard drives? Does a creeping number indicate issue or upcomming issues? And, why is it not tracked…
How to mount a .vmdk VMWare virtual harddisk outside of the virtual machine
Question: I’ve got the virtual harddisk (VMWare .vmdk file) of an old (crashed) virtual machine. How can I open this to extract files without booting from it or attaching it…
What are the differences between Host Protected Area (HPA), Device Configuration Overlay (DCO), and service area of a HDD/SSD?
Question: I’m confused about the differences between the Host Protected Area (HPA), Device Configuration Overlay (DCO), and the service area of a HDD or SSD. From what I gather on…
How to expand the WINDOWS partition when the Recovery one is in the way?
Question: My partitions on my primary disk look like this: I would like to expand C: with the Unallocated space but the 946 MB Recovery partition is in the way.…