disk

Yandex cloud service offers 10GB of storage for free

A new Web site is offering 10GB of online storage for free. The catch? It's only in Russian...at least for now.

Launching today as a beta version, Yandex.Disk (English translation) is the latest in a growing lineup of cloud storage sites, letting people store files online and access them from computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Files stored locally and online can be synchronized among multiple devices to ensure that the versions stay consistent. So the same document you save on your desktop PC can be accessed and edited on your mobile device. You can view and launch your … Read more

Did SanDisk just rain on tech's 2012 parade?

What with sky-is-the-limit predictions very much in vogue -- Apple's shares hitting $1,000 is now the stuff of research reports from serious analysts -- who can't see that these are boom times for tech?

Everyone knows that the party won't last forever. That's the easy part. The hard part is figuring out when to pack up and head out of Dodge.

SanDisk's surprise earnings warning on Tuesday afternoon may be that troubling harbinger for which the worrywarts were all waiting. In advance of the company's official April 19 earnings call, SanDisk said today … Read more

Spring cleaning tips to revive your Windows PC

It's always exciting when you bring home a new computer. It feels so powerful and fast; you can't imagine ever needing to buy another one again. Unfortunately, neither your excitement nor your PC's performance lasts.

Whether your hard drive is running out of space or your system takes forever to run simple tasks, it might be worth your time to try and revive it before replacing it. Here are some spring cleaning tips to revive your Windows PC:

Free up disk space The enormous size of modern multimedia files can eat up your hard-drive storage quickly. What … Read more

PerfectDisk Free Defrag knows how to treat an SSD

Talk is cheap but bytes are cheaper: speed is the need with multiterabyte hard disks. It's too easy to leave high-capacity disks badly fragmented, robbing your system of critical performance advantages. There's one type of storage that delivers on speed, but at a high cost (as in money): SSDs (solid-state drives) don't use disks and should never be defragmented. But SSDs can be optimized, with care. PerfectDisk Free Defrag is a powerful disk defragmentation utility that can tell SSDs from HDDs. Its unique SSD Optimize feature consolidates the free space on SSDs with minimal impact, extending their … Read more

OS X Disk Utility missing options to erase free disk space

Erasing free disk space is an easy (albeit not quick) way to help prevent the recovery of files you have erased from your system. Conventionally when files are deleted from storage device, the system only removes their entries from the file system's directory, thereby flagging blocks containing the data as being free to use. While this offers a quick way to delete files from the drive, the data is technically still intact on disk and thereby leaves open the possibility for recovery using special software.

To prevent this from happening, one option that Apple has offered in OS X … Read more

OS X FileVault questions answered

Apple's FileVault technology is a method of automatically encrypting your files so you do not have to worry about data theft should your system be stolen. In its first iteration FileVault was just used to encrypt the user's home directory, but in OS X Lion Apple introduced a second-generation full-disk encryption scheme that has been dubbed FileVault 2.

Many people who are considering using FileVault 2 have been asking about questions such as whether or not the encryption is needed, and expressing concerns about its security.

Is FileVault needed? This is perhaps one of the most common questions … Read more

View your disks' content with JDiskReport

JDiskReport is a free Java-based tool that displays the size, capacity, free space, and other parameters of your files, folders, and directories. You can display data in different views and rapidly switch between them. To use it, you must have an up-to-date version of Java installed, but of course that's free.

JDiskReport starts by scanning either a selected tree directory or your C drive; we chose the latter. We could save and reopen scans, too. JDiskReport displays a folder tree view in the left-hand panel and five tabs in the main window: Size, Top 50, Size Distribution, Modified, and … Read more

SanDisk Extreme SSD review: Standard and affordable

There's not much that's extreme about the SanDisk Extreme solid-state drive.

In fact, it's very standard, with a 9.5mm 2.5-inch design like most laptop hard drives. In my testing, the drive boosted the test machine's overall performance a great deal.… Read more

Real-world disk benchmarking with Disk Bench

Benchmarking your hard disks tells you how fast they transfer data. There's no shortage of free benchmarking tools, but most of them run a single specific test that often doesn't tell you much about how your disks perform in a real-world situation, such as copying large files and even whole directories. Disk Bench is a free benchmarking tool that lets you choose which files or folders to copy. It then copies the data, benchmarks the speed, and deletes the copied data from the destination, though you can also keep the copied data. It also creates test files with … Read more