disk

SanDisk Memory Zone not only lets you poke into your internal and removable memory sources, it also integrates with several online storage services, making it the ultimate hub for monitoring and managing your mobile device's memory.

The app opens up to a list of your device's memory sources, including internal memory and memory card (if available). To dig into a source, simply tap an icon and scroll through its contained files. Here, you can see exactly what's consuming all your memory, and even view files by type (music, photo, video, document, app, etc). From the home screen, … Read more

Think 2.5-inch spinning hard disk drives are slow compared with the solid-state variety? Not always, Toshiba seems to be saying with today's announcement of drives that top 10,000rpm.

Toshiba launched four 2.5-inch HDDs, ranging up to 900GB in capacity, that boast speeds of 10,500rpm.

That's faster than the 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm 2.5-inch HDDs typically found in laptops.

The internal transfer rate for Toshiba's AL13SEB900 family of HDDs is 286 MB/s (megabytes per second), a boost of approximately 32 percent over the previous generation of drives "due to improved liner recording density," according to Toshiba.

Though slower than the fastest solid-state drives on the market, that kind of transfer rate approaches some less-expensive SSDs in speed. … Read more

Synology announced today that version 4.1 of its DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system (firmware) for DiskStation NAS servers, such as the DS1511+ or the DS712+, is now in beta state. This means the final update will be available in a month or so.

DSM has been one of the main reasons why Synology NAS servers are the best among network-attached storage devices, thanks to its vast amount of features and robust and easy-to-use interface.

The new version offers some major additional features to the already feature-rich OS, including a Video Station and mobile apps for Windows Phone 7. The … Read more

Condusiv's Diskeeper 12 Professional is the latest iteration of a premium file fragmentation utility that is suitable for home, enterprise, and server applications. It actively prevents file fragmentation and can defragment your drives regularly.

It doesn't defragment your SSDs, which shouldn't be defragmented, but they're not left out; a feature called Hyperfast optimizes I/O to maximize SSD performance and lifespan. Diskeeper also places our most frequently accessed files in the fastest area of the volume. Among the other new features in Diskeeper 12 are improved Alerting and Reporting mechanisms, a Disk Health feature that monitors … Read more

USB drives are convenient for storage and for transferring data to other computers. This convenience also makes them a great delivery system for malware. If you're comfortable with the Windows Registry or know how to set Group Policies, you can lock down your PC's USB drives. A much simpler way is by using USB Disk Manager.

USB Disk Manager is a small Windows program that can help you manage the permissions of USB drives. The portable app doesn't need to be installed and can be run from a folder on your hard drive or from a USB … Read more

PanteraSoft's HDD Health is a compact piece of freeware based on a good idea: monitoring your hard drives' S.M.A.R.T. data to alert you when temperatures get too high, disk space gets too low, or signs point to impending disk failure. HDD Health then issues pop-up, audible, or e-mail alerts in any combination you choose. But while the latest build claims compatibility with Windows 7, we found that HDD Health wouldn't display S.M.A.R.T. data in 64-bit Windows 7 installations, something other users have had issues with as well.

HDD Health is … Read more

One of the commonly recommended maintenance routines in OS X for tackling system slowdowns and other performance problems or odd behavior is to run a "permissions fix" on the boot drive. This is done with Disk Utility, and because it will not hurt the system to perform it is often one of the first suggestions people offer for troubled systems.

Permissions in OS X are file and folder attributes that grant a specific user or group access rights to that file or folder. There are two types of permissions in OS X, the first being traditional UNIX permissions, … Read more

WiseCleaner's Wise Disk Cleaner Professional is now free to all home users, so we took a look at it to see how it fared against the large and growing field of freeware system cleaners. We found it easy to use but thorough, with expert options (and frequent warnings to keep novices from trying them) though most users will find Wise Disk Cleaner's default settings perfectly safe.

Wise Disk Cleaner's interface leans toward the "clean and simple" end of the system utility style chart, with none of the huge fonts and overbearing logos found in some … Read more

If you have been a subscriber to Apple's MobileMe service, there is little doubt you've missed news on Apple's transition to iCloud, but if you are still using the older MobileMe service, then Apple is issuing reminders to get your data off of the service before it shuts down.

While iCloud has been around for a while now as a replacement for Apple's less-than-stellar MobileMe services, you may have held off on the transition in order to keep using features like Web hosting and the iDisk online storage options. These and similar features are currently not … Read more