drives

Anyone who has ever had to send enormous files across the Internet has a new option. Google announced today that it has integrated Google Drive with Gmail, allowing users of both services to insert files from Drive directly into their messages.

Notably, file sizes can be up to 10GB, or 400 times larger than is allowed in a traditional attachment.

The team also built some "smart assistant" technology into the feature to make sure recipients of your shared files have the necessary permissions. Product manager Phil Sharp explains in a blog post:

A year ago, flooding in Thailand factories lead to some pretty insane prices on hard drives, but it seems things are starting to ease now. Cyber Monday is greeting us with some great deals on hard drives, including the wireless 500GB Satellite Flex. When CNET's Dong Ngo reviewed the drive last year he found that it was a flexible, well-performing drive and a "must-have for those who frequently travel with Apple's iPad."

Originally selling for $200, it's currently going for $99 at Newegg and Best Buy.

Now this is my kind of deal day: lots of killer bargains, no circling for 20 minutes just to find a parking spot.

Rather than highlight a single deal on this Cyber Monday 2012, I've cherry-picked a bunch I think you'll like. Let's get to it:

What's a Kindle without a case? AmazonLocal is offering a free voucher good for 30 percent off any qualifying Kindle accessory. These include cases, screen protectors, reading lights, and the like.

In what promises to be the first of many such discounts, the Microsoft Store has the Acer Iconia W510-1674 10-inch Windows 8 tablet for $399 shipped, … Read more

For the first time more women in the U.S. have a driver's license than men. Its just one of the major shifts in modern driving.

According to the same University of Michigan study, the proportion of teens and young adults with license is down, especially for males. Men 25-29 showed a big 10.6% drop in license holdership in the 15 years up to 2010.

That leaves a greater share of women out there driving, and they tend to buy smaller cars that use less gas and they tend to have lower fatality rates on the road.

Another … Read more

Western Digital announced today that it's now shipping the 4TB WD Black (model WD4001FAEX) hard drive.

This drive is the highest-capacity hard drive on the market, and spins at 7,200rpm to offer fast data speeds. WD says the WD Black comes with 64MB of cache memory, and supports dual-stage actuator technology and the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard. The drive's integrated dual processor is designed to deliver a high level of performance.

Like other hard drives from WD, the 4TB WB Black supports WE's IntelliSeek, StableTrac, and NoTouch technology. IntelliSeek calculates optimum seek speeds to lower … Read more

After making changes to the drive configuration in OS X you may run into an issue where the system will not boot as fast as it previously did. In these cases the system may sit at the gray boot screen for a while before the OS loads, but when it finally does, the system will otherwise run just fine.

This problem can happen after several types of drive configuration changes, which include replacing a faulty drive, upgrading the drive to a larger or faster one, or migrating to a new storage approach such as a custom Fusion Drive setup in OS X Lion or later.… Read more

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series. For the other parts, check out the related stories.

Now that you have some ideas about internal storage vs. memory after reading Part 1, here in Part 2 I'll talk about the two main types of external storage devices: direct-attached storage (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS).

DAS and NAS share a few things in common. They both use one or more internal drives (hard drives or SSDs) on the inside, and they utilize the same methods to combine drives' storage space (when multiple drives are used). But before we … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about hiding the menu bar in OS X, a "formatter failed" error when erasing hard drives, alternative configuration possibilities for Apple's Fusion Drive technology, and whether or not a Mini DisplayPort cable can be used for Thunderbolt connections. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Hiding the menu bar in OS X MacFixIt reader Shawn asks:

Tons of options exist for which cloud storage service to choose from. You've got Google Drive, Box, SugarSync, DropBox, Apple's iCloud, and more. A new report by tech support site FixYa, which sourced data from its 25 million users, studies which service best fits different customers' needs.

For starters, DropBox and Box users have security concerns as well as complaints of lagging response time, according to FixYa. This isn't a huge surprise considering DropBox was hacked in July and hundreds of users were sent spam e-mails about online casinos and gambling sites. However, users also say they … Read more