disk

SanDisk announced today its latest solid-state drive, the SanDisk Extreme.

The company says the new drive offers up to 10 times the speed of a 7,200rpm hard drive and will greatly improve the boot and shutdown time as well as overall performance of a computer.

According to SanDisk, the new SanDisk Extreme SSD delivers up to 83,000 maximum random write input/output operations per second (IOPS) and up to 44,000 random read IOPS. The drive also offers fast sequential read and write performance up to 550MBps and 520MBps, respectively. This means apart from improving a computer's … Read more

The memory in your system, commonly referred to as RAM, is the work space the system uses to store executable code and loaded data. If your system is slowing down then you may be low on RAM. Although you can install more or free some up by quitting some running programs, first it may help to analyze how much RAM your programs actually are using.

If you open up the Activity Monitor utility on your system and go to the Memory section, you can see a pie chart of the system's physical memory usage, where generally the larger the … Read more

Nvidia has lowered revenue expectations for the period ending January 29, citing the hard disk drive shortage in Thailand.

Revenue for the fourth quarter is expected to be lower than the company's previous outlook provided with its financial results for the third quarter ended October 30, 2011, the company said this afternoon.

Revenue is now expected to be $950 million, plus or minus 1 percent, compared with original expectations of $1.066 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, provided on November 10, 2011.

"The global disk-drive shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand had more impact on the … Read more

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

This week people wrote in with questions about a change to system colors, how to access lost e-mails in Time Machine, cursor repetition not working after upgrading to Lion, and DiskWarrior not being able to fix damaged file resource headers. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your own suggestions in the comments.

Question: Restoring system colors MacFixIt reader Margo asks:

LookDisk is the sort of search tool we like: fast, no-nonsense text, file, and duplicate searches, including wildcard and file attribute searches, of any disk or directory you specify, including networks. It uses few system resources. And you can save your searches and return to them later. It also displays disk and system information.

LookDisk opened with an optional tool tip with an advisory about duplicate files. This feature can find duplicates by content or name, but it can't verify that any two files are actual duplicates. The program recommends backing up any files before you delete them, and … Read more

It's likely that your hard drives are all formatted with one large partition.

The major advantage to splitting up individual disks into multiple partitions is to soften the blow when you need to reinstall your OS. This is achieved by putting your OS and applications on one partition and your media on a separate one.

For Windows users, there are several third-party programs that you can download/purchase that will assist you with this process. In reality, none of these are really necessary because Windows comes with a built-in (and well-hidden) disk-management system. Let's get started.

It's flash card season at CES (especially given the shutterbug boost by the conjoined Photo Marketing Association show), and SanDisk has a contribution with high-capacity mid-range SDXC cards.

The two SanDisk Extreme models, 64GB and 128GB, can transfer data at 45MBps. That's less than half the speed of the company's top-end Extreme Pro line of SD cards at 95MBps, but it should be good enough for many photographers and videographers.

The high capacity comes with a price premium--prices for the cards are $200 and $400--but could be useful for those shooting lots of video or traveling away … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Synology, the makers of the most robust and feature-rich NAS servers on the market, now looks to the sky, too.

Despite the fact that by the end of 2011, most NAS vendors used the "Cloud" designation for certain features of their products , Synology has refused to use it for its NAS servers which in fact have many Internet-based features. The company changed its mind today at CES 2012.

It showed off that the show the latest build of its Linux-based operating system for its DiskStation NAS servers, called Disk Station Manager (DSM). Version 3.2 … Read more

Lexar announced a 1000X-rated CompactFlash memory card line today that the company guarantees can keep pace with professional-quality video recording.

The 1X speed from days of yore meant 150KBps, and the new line of 1000X cards reaches sustained read speeds of 150MB per second. Write speeds are a smidgen slower--966X, or 145MBps--but still enough to keep up with the Video Performance Guarantee (VPG-20) "to enable professional-quality video capture at high frame rates with no dropped frames," the company said.

The cards are priced for professionals, too, with retail prices of $169.99 for 16GB, $299.99 for 32GB, $… Read more