hard

Apple announced at its October 23 event its first hybrid drive, called Fusion Drive, initially available as an option in its new iMac and Mac Mini.

Apple's Fusion Drive combines 120GB of solid-state storage and a regular platter-based hard drive of either 1TB or 3TB. Apple says the operating system and software will be installed on the flash memory part while all other data, such as media and documents, stays on the hard-drive part. However, users can move apps and files between the two sides of the drive to improve performance.

Apple claims that the Fusion Drive will offer … Read more

Once again risking the wrath of Apple, HardCandy Cases has announced an iPad Mini case in advance of Apple's press conference today. Apple typically doesn't like when other companies trot out accessories ahead of its hardware unveils, so HardCandy clearly feels the publicity benefits outweigh the repercussions.

The $49.95 case is in HardCandy's ShockDrop line, and while rumors and leaked photos strongly suggest Apple will debut a smaller iPad today, it's unclear what it will be called or whether HardCandy's new case will fit whatever Apple product is introduced.

This is not the first … Read more

Seagate announced today a new version of the Backup Plus portable drive designed especially for Macs.

The new Backup Plus family was first introduced back in June, initially available for Windows. The drive offers USB 3.0 and comes with the HFS+ file system out of the box.

The Backup Plus family replaces Seagate's GoFlex family but still offers a flexible design thanks to the Universal Storage Module (USM) standard, which basically allows you to use any type of connection standard (USB, FireWire, eSATA, or even Thunderbolt) just by swapping out the adapter part of the drive. The drive … Read more

Wondering if you should upgrade to Windows 8? WD has teamed up with Microsoft to offer a quick solution for business users.

The company announced today that its My Passport Enterprise portable drive is now Windows To Go-certified and will be available on the same day as Windows 8, which is Friday.

In a nutshell, the drive comes with Windows 8 Enterprise environment pre-configured on it and makes it possible to provision a fully featured Windows 8 work space on a bootable USB drive. In other words, you can take this drive, plug it into any computer running Windows 7… Read more

Secondary volumes such as external USB and FireWire hard drives are often used with multiple computers, and if the drive contains a permissions-aware filesystem such as Apple's HFS+ (the default Mac filesystem) then it can inherit various permissions settings from the systems it's used with. While that's not usually an issue, these permissions can sometimes block access to parts of the hard drive so it can't be read from or written to.

To deal with this problem, Apple includes an option to ignore permissions on secondary drives, which can be invoked by selecting the drive and … Read more

It's official: solid-state drives are awesome-sauce.

They're fast, shock-proof, battery-friendly, cooler-running than traditional hard drives, and, finally, affordable.

Case in point: Today only, and while supplies last, TigerDirect has the OCZ VTX3-25SAT3-120G Vertex 3 120GB SSD for $59.99 shipped. That's after redeeming a $20 mail-in rebate (PDF).

That's one of the lowest prices I've seen on a 120GB SSD, especially one with this pedigree. The Vertex 3 is a 2.5-inch SATA III drive that would make a mighty fine replacement for the pokey old HDD in your pokey old laptop. Of course, because … Read more

WD announced today that its My Book Thunderbolt Duo now offers up to 8TB of storage space, up from the drive's initial cap of 6TB of when first released in March.

The My Book Thunderbolt Duo, which we've already reviewed, is WD's first Thunderbolt storage device. So far it's been the most affordable Thunderbolt storage device on the market in terms of cost per gigabyte. The new 8TB-capacity drive follows that tradition with a price of just $850, and it now comes with a Thunderbolt cable included.… Read more

What do you do when you have a 1,000-unit-per-month hard-drive habit -- then Thailand floods wipe out your supply?

In the case of online backup specialist Backblaze, whose business could have been crippled when the natural disaster last year raised the price of a $129 3TB drive to $349, you improvise.

The company turned employees, their friends, and their families into an ad hoc supply chain who scoured Best Buy, Costco, NewEgg, B&H Foto, and other retailers across the country for drives. And when they learned that external USB storage devices were actually cheaper than the drives … Read more

Hard drives are easily surpassing 3TB storage capacities, either individually or when used in RAID arrays, and have become attractive options for external storage on various Mac users, not only for various data libraries (i.e., iTunes and iPhoto), but also for Time Machine backups. However, some people have encountered an apparent bug in which using some drives in Mountain Lion results in partitioning errors and the inability to access data on the drives.

When the problems happen, the drive becomes inaccessible, and when checking with Disk Utility users will see an error that states, "Error: Partition map repair … Read more