disk

SanDisk said Monday that it is shipping memory chips that will allow consumers to store more data on tiny Secure Digital flash cards.

The Milpitas, Calif., company's X4 technology packs four bits of data into each memory cell. To date, flash memory chipmakers typically stored one bit or two bits per cell. Each individual die--or chip--holds 64 gigabits of data, or 8 gigabytes. This is the highest capacity per die in the industry, according to SanDisk.

The technology is not yet shipping in cutting-edge retail products, however: it is currently being used in 8GB and 16GB SDHC (Secure Digital … Read more

DupeRazor Duplicate Files Removal Kit offers to help clear up space on a computer by seeking out and destroying duplicate files. While it provides great results, its speed was a major concern.

The duplicate remover's interface is very simple and only offers a few variations, which kept us on task. There is a brief Help file, but the program is intuitive enough that we didn't need it. The program offered us the option to alter the size of our scan from the entire C: drive down to a single folder through a simple file tree. The scanning process … Read more

I've gotta hand it to SanDisk. The company doesn't shy away from honesty. Recently, a handful of Sansa Clip users reactivated a forum topic having to do with apparent pitch issues on the device whereby music plays back ever-so-slightly slower than normal. The concern was that the problem may have carried over to the new Clip+. (Incidentally, based on my testing, it hasn't. If anything, it plays tracks a fraction faster when stacked up against my sound card and Sony Walkman.)

The interesting part, however, is not the existence of some exceptionally discerning listeners--neither CNET testers nor … Read more

Hard Disk Sentinel monitors and tests the health of your computer's hard disks. Although casual users may find some of the information helpful, this tool is better left to those already familiar with the metrics associated with PC performance.

The application monitors hard disk activity and performance. To do so, it integrates information from disks that use Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART), which measures mechanical failures during such processes as seeking and spin-up/spin-down. Hard Disk Sentinel also provides several tests to run through these processes. Errors are logged, and you can save or e-mail reports. Registered users ($… Read more

It has become conventional wisdom in the PC industry that periodically reinstalling Windows can restore an old PC's youthful vigor. Unfortunately, the process has become a challenge—and a real time-sink, to boot. Better to create a disc image of your hard drive when everything's working well and restore that image when things turn sour.

Recently, my nearly new laptop PC froze in the middle of Windows loading. After a forced shutdown, Vista repaired itself and reverted to a saved restore point. Things were back to normal in no time, but the event reminded me that I hadn'… Read more

Some people have been in situations where they would like to repair their hard drives and permissions on systems that they do not have an installation disk for. For instance, if a friend's computer is running OS X 10.4 and all you have are 10.3 and 10.5 installation DVDs, then the question is whether or not you can safely use these to run maintenance on the system.… Read more

A growing number of users are experiencing issues concerning Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's handling of .dmg files. Since upgrading to Snow Leopard these users are not able to mount the files or run packages stored in them.… Read more

Despite its being out of vogue at the moment, I'm still a big believer in the faster-is-better philosophy. That said, I also recognize that it's not always worth the extra cost for some people, and that not everyone can or will always take advantage of it. So that's why I always take announcements about new, high-performance media cards, like SanDisk's 90 megabyte-per-second Extreme Pro line (along with Transcend's similar 600X CF), with a grain of salt. And after running some casual tests on the new card, I've concluded that for now, even only a … Read more

Mac OS X has an option to keep hard drives spinning for quick file access, or to save power and reduce noise by spinning them down when they're not in use. This can be convenient, but is rather limiting for users who would like to customize when their disks should spin down.… Read more