disk

Western Digital, already one of the largest hard-drive makers in the world, has signed a deal to pay $4.3 billion for its counterpart at Hitachi.

The resulting company will keep the Western Digital name and will appoint Steve Milligan, currently president and CEO of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, as president of the new business. Milligan will report directly to Western Digital President and CEO John Coyne. Hitachi GST is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi.

The combined company will offer "significant operating scale, strong global talent, and the industry's broadest product lineup backed by a rich technology … Read more

When setting up a hard drive or even after using one for a while, sometimes it is useful to partition it so sections of its space can be used for different purposes. These purposes can be to set up a multiboot environment, separating system files from user files, or for segmenting used data from scratch and backup disks. For instance, if you use a drive to back files up, it may be beneficial to create one large partition for Time Machine, and have a second partition be used for manual backups since Time Machine will eventually use most of the … Read more

With computing devices not only becoming smaller and more portable but also holding a lot more data, the security of that data is more of a concern. While in the past a lost floppy disk might have held a few important files, some people keep their entire home directories and other large collections of data on small portable hard drives, thumbdrives, and even online disks.

The use of various forms of storage media is not a problem, but if you lose your drive or decide to erase confidential data, in some situations your data may not be fully secured. As … Read more

Intel announced a completely new I/O peripheral protocol today called Thunderbolt, which had previously gone by the code name Light Peak. In a nutshell, Thunderbolt is a superfast peripheral standard with the speed of 10Gbps (1.25GBps) and almost no overhead. This means devices can be connected at a real-word throughput speed of around 1.25GBps. Thunderbolt is compatible with DisplayPort 1.1 and later.

Currently, the technology is available only in Apple's new MacBook Pro (which comes with one Thunderbolt port) and can be used only with DisplayPort devices, such as Apple's Cinema display. But that will change soon.

Today, LaCie announced an external hard drive, the LaCie Little Big Disk, that will be one of the first storage devices to support Thunderbolt technology. A prototype of the drive was used at the Intel demo today. The Little Big Disk has two solid-state drives inside.

The drive comes with two Thunderbolt ports and can be used to daisy-chain with other Thunderbolt-enabled devices, such as a display or additional storage device.… Read more

KCleaner is a free system-cleaning utility that offers automatic and manual modes, data scrambling, and multipass deletions. It targets temporary files, browser caches, installers, update caches, and unneeded log files, including the caches for a wide range of programs, including Google Earth, COMODO System Cleaner, AdAware, and TomTom.

KCleaner opens with the tiny interface that serves for automatic mode, and its settings dialog also opens, allowing us to set the interval for automatic cleanups, Expert mode, deletion methods, security settings, and select file types for cleanup from a lengthy list in the main view. There's also a panel for … Read more

The computing industry is seeing dramatic growth in the use of "shared nothing" database architectures where each node functions independently of one another and is self-sufficient (Hadoop Distributed File System for example). For the sake of performance, contention among nodes for shared disk resources (SAN and NAS) is one of the things these architectures avoid by dedicating storage resources to each node, i.e. no shared disk.

While these computing architectures are best-known in the context of Web-based applications and development activities, they are no longer confined to the Web. EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and ParAccel are all … Read more

Crystal Disk Info Portable is a fully portable version of a compact, free disk information utility. It displays a lot of information, including SMART data for compatible disks, firmware version, RPM, power on count and hours, and even advanced options such as Automatic Acoustic Management/Advanced Power Management (AAM/APM) settings.

Crystal Disk Info's properties-like interface opened with our selected drive's name, model number, and capacity in gigabytes prominently displayed. A large, color-coded Health Status display indicated our PC's health was Good, while a similar window below it displayed the drive's temperature in Celsius, the cool … Read more

There are more disk-cleaning utilities available online than you can shake a memory stick at. They range in price from totally free to double digits, and in performance from excellent to lousy. We looked at a good one, Moo0 DiskCleaner. It's fast, flexible, and can run at startup or whenever you like. You can customize its function as well as its look. It supports some 130 targets, including temporary data, browser caches, and private data.

The Moo0 installation wizard offered to install a free autocomplete search tool as well, but we opted just to install DiskCleaner, which opened when … Read more

AML Free Disk Defrag automatically scans your brain waves...no, of course; it's a freeware disk defragmentation utility. We know what you're thinking (just kidding about the brain waves): what makes this free disk defragger different from the rest? It's compact; they're compact. It's easy to use; they're easy to use. It's fast. The others? Not so much. The difference is under the hood; AML FDD has a powerful engine and smart algorithms that make for blistering defrag speeds. It doesn't have a scheduler, the feature that compensates for the slowness of … Read more