disk

You were born in a great family, had a fun childhood. Then you grew up, went to school, spent an exhilarating time at college, learned a whole bunch, and fell in love. Then you had a job that you loved, got married to a partner of your dreams, and continued to live a happy, exciting, stimulating, and healthy life.

Now, that's a great success story, but guess what? Then you died. And your story, the true details of it, might last a bit longer and would die, too. In a hundred years or so, nobody would have any real … Read more

Apple releases a tool to automatically create recovery disks for Mac OS X Lion, researchers at the Black Hat hackers conference say that you should change all of your passwords if your laptop gets stolen, and the BlackBerry Colt will be the first QNX-powered smartphone from Research in Motion in early 2012.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Solid-state drive prices continue to fall, and SanDisk is doing its part with a new 240GB laptop drive for $450. But don't expect to pay that kind of price when getting an SSD directly from Apple or Hewlett-Packard.

Flash memory-based SSDs are the storage of choice in cutting-edge, weight-sensitive designs. They're standard in all the new 2011 MacBook Airs and will populate the new wave of Ultrabooks due later this year. Drives of 256GB capacity from first-tier suppliers such as Micron Technology were more than $500 earlier this year, so a new drive from SanDisk with comparable capacity … Read more

Apple's Disk Utility program is a useful tool for managing hard drives and volumes; however, in Snow Leopard, Leopard, and other past versions of OS X, when you would run a drive verification routine it would only access the format structures of the volumes on a drive and check them. For instance, if you have a drive that is partitioned into two volumes, then if you select one of those volumes in Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk routine the program will check the volume's formatting in a routine similar to the following:

If on the other … Read more

OS X comes with a variety of tools and utilities for managing your system (available in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder), including those for observing OS activity, network and disk activity, and also those for managing some aspects of the hardware in your system. One of the most commonly used utilities is Disk Utility, which allows you to create disk images, burn DVDs and CDs, as well as manage the partitions and formatting of your hard drives. Disk Utility comes both in the form of the Disk Utility application, but also as the "diskutil" terminal command.

The Disk Utility … Read more

Ever since its introduction in OS X 10.3, Apple has maintained its FileVault encryption technology for securing home folders in an encrypted disk image that mounts when users log into their systems. Apple's only major changes to this technology were in Leopard with the implementation of Time Machine, where sparsebundle disk images were used to facilitate incremental backups. In OS X 10.7 Apple has introduced a full revision of FileVault, that approaches file encryption from a completely different standpoint.

With FileVault 2, Apple has done away with the standalone encrypted disk images in OS X, and replaced … Read more

Have you ever copied files from one folder to another and had to open each folder's properties to compare their sizes and file counts because "something happened" during the copying process? Or wished there was a quick way to see which files and folders are taking up the most space? That's what file and disk space utilities are for. They're fairly passive in that they usually don't "do" anything beyond scanning your system and telling you the size and space used by your files and folders. Minh's Free DiskSpaceExplorer is portable … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers. This week readers wrote in asking questions about ways to spin down network hard drives, the differences between Mac App Store updates and those in Software Update, options for dealing with noisy iMac fans, and how necessary it is to run maintenance routines. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: Spinning down AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule drives MacFixIt reader &… Read more

The boot menu that Apple includes in Mac systems is convenient, especially if you manage multiple operating systems on your computer or if you need to boot to an alternative boot volume. To activate the boot menu, upon starting up you just need to hold the Option key after hearing the system's boot chimes, and then select your desired boot drive from the automatically detected options. While convenient, in some instances the boot menu may start appearing at random times after the system is restarted.

By default, Apple's computers will boot to the hard drive that is selected … Read more