disk

The MP3 player will never die. You can show me your smartphones and your tablets and all of the dozens of ways we have now to listen to music, but there will always be a place in the world for a cheap, reliable MP3 player.

SanDisk's latest Sansa Clip Zip is proof of this point. Starting at just $49 (4GB) and decked out with an enviable array of audio format support (including AAC and FLAC), an FM radio, a voice recorder, a stopwatch, and a 1.1-inch color screen, the Clip Zip is destined to become the same kind … Read more

A little while ago I made a case that you should keep your hard drive when upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD). That case is even more clear with the SanDisk Ultra.

This is the first SATA 2 (3Gbps)-based SSD I've reviewed since the Samsung 470, and it's also the first that trailed behind hard drives in terms of data transfer speed. In our testing, the Ultra was actually the slowest among all internal storage devices we've seen when it comes to copying files.

This doesn't mean the drive is slow in other operations. According to SanDisk the Ultra is optimized for random access, which helps boost the performance of applications, especially during launch. And indeed the drive helped improve the overall performance of a computer a great deal in our trials. Games and large applications took much less time to fully load when compared with a traditional hard drive. The drive also cut down the boot and shutdown time significantly. … Read more

You were born in a great family, had a fun childhood. Then you grew up, went to school, spent an exhilarating time at college, learned a whole bunch, and fell in love. Then you had a job that you loved, got married to a partner of your dreams, and continued to live a happy, exciting, stimulating, and healthy life.

Now, that's a great success story, but guess what? Then you died. And your story, the true details of it, might last a bit longer and would die, too. In a hundred years or so, nobody would have any real … Read more

Apple releases a tool to automatically create recovery disks for Mac OS X Lion, researchers at the Black Hat hackers conference say that you should change all of your passwords if your laptop gets stolen, and the BlackBerry Colt will be the first QNX-powered smartphone from Research in Motion in early 2012.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Solid-state drive prices continue to fall, and SanDisk is doing its part with a new 240GB laptop drive for $450. But don't expect to pay that kind of price when getting an SSD directly from Apple or Hewlett-Packard.

Flash memory-based SSDs are the storage of choice in cutting-edge, weight-sensitive designs. They're standard in all the new 2011 MacBook Airs and will populate the new wave of Ultrabooks due later this year. Drives of 256GB capacity from first-tier suppliers such as Micron Technology were more than $500 earlier this year, so a new drive from SanDisk with comparable capacity … Read more

Apple's Disk Utility program is a useful tool for managing hard drives and volumes; however, in Snow Leopard, Leopard, and other past versions of OS X, when you would run a drive verification routine it would only access the format structures of the volumes on a drive and check them. For instance, if you have a drive that is partitioned into two volumes, then if you select one of those volumes in Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk routine the program will check the volume's formatting in a routine similar to the following:

If on the other … Read more

OS X comes with a variety of tools and utilities for managing your system (available in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder), including those for observing OS activity, network and disk activity, and also those for managing some aspects of the hardware in your system. One of the most commonly used utilities is Disk Utility, which allows you to create disk images, burn DVDs and CDs, as well as manage the partitions and formatting of your hard drives. Disk Utility comes both in the form of the Disk Utility application, but also as the "diskutil" terminal command.

The Disk Utility … Read more

Ever since its introduction in OS X 10.3, Apple has maintained its FileVault encryption technology for securing home folders in an encrypted disk image that mounts when users log into their systems. Apple's only major changes to this technology were in Leopard with the implementation of Time Machine, where sparsebundle disk images were used to facilitate incremental backups. In OS X 10.7 Apple has introduced a full revision of FileVault, that approaches file encryption from a completely different standpoint.

With FileVault 2, Apple has done away with the standalone encrypted disk images in OS X, and replaced … Read more

Have you ever copied files from one folder to another and had to open each folder's properties to compare their sizes and file counts because "something happened" during the copying process? Or wished there was a quick way to see which files and folders are taking up the most space? That's what file and disk space utilities are for. They're fairly passive in that they usually don't "do" anything beyond scanning your system and telling you the size and space used by your files and folders. Minh's Free DiskSpaceExplorer is portable … Read more