Hard Drive suddenly became unresponsive, recovered on reboot. What to do next?
Question: So I have a desktop PC with an SSD and an HDD. Windows 10 is installed on the SSD, all my data is on the HDD. Today while I…
Do harddrives slow down with age?
Question: My (windows based) laptop is coming up to six years old now, and it still has semi respectable specs – Core 2 Duo 2.6ghz, 1gb Ram, 500gb HDD, 256mb…
Can I trust a hard drive that has had to reallocate sectors?
Question: I ran this HD utility called CrystalDiskInfo that displays some of the S.M.A.R.T. information on my drives. ?It is displaying a “Caution” warning on one of my drives because…
Can a USB hub be used to access a drive from two devices?
Question: So let’s say, I get a USB hub, and I plug it into a hard drive for example (as in, I plug the USB cable that typically goes in…
Is my hard drive failing?
Question: I’m beginning to worry about my ~3yr old WD Green drive. In the last few days i’ve noticed that my media player is acting weird, it won’t move to…
Why is FAT32 limited to just under 2^28 clusters?
Question: With FAT16 the maximum partition size is 2GB when your maximum cluster size is 32K. This is calculated by multiplying the number of addressable units by the cluster size.…
Can I set up a RAID 5 with a bunch of drives of different sizes?
Question: I currently have 3 1TB drives, a couple 500GB ones and some 750GB ones. Can I put them all in a RAID 5 configuration or do they need to…
Do hard drives really have open cases now?
Question: I’m shopping for new hard drives and all the stores (Amazon, Overstock, Newegg, etc.) now show product pictures like this: I can find no information in the product descriptions…
Determining if a hard disk has been removed and data copied from it?
Question: Is there a method or a tool that can detect if someone has separated my hard disk from my computer, copied data from it, and returned it back? I…
Copying files: does Windows write to disk if files are identical?
Question: I have a directory with a lot of books in PDF format (around 2GB in size). While reading I often leave notes and annotations in the files. Occasionally I…