harddrives and storage

Is your computer or laptop feeling a little sluggish lately? One of the best upgrades available for adding a whole new level of performance to a PC is to replace its hard drive with a solid state drive. SSD capacities continue to increase even as prices fall, so adding new life to your older PC is easier than ever.

What do you get the PC or Mac user who has everything? Storage! Even in the days of cheap cloud storage, nothing beats having all your data—pictures, videos, files and music—available quickly and on demand. And no-one ever has too much storage. I’ve put together a list of great, storage-themed gift options.

SSD and HDD: Two acronyms you’ll frequently see during discussions of computers and their specs. What’s the difference between the two, which one is better and why is SSD showing up more frequently these days? In this post, I’ll tackle those questions and provide the details you need to make an informed choice when it comes time to choose between the two computer storage options.

Many of us have more data than we know what to do with. Digital photos, digital movies, MP3s and old school stuff like documents and spreadsheets can start to take up a lot of space on your PC. On your smartphone or tablet, it’s even worse —a lot of those photos get snapped on a smartphone and with limited storage, it doesn’t take long to fill them up. Cloud storage is always an option, but then you’re at the mercy of the provider and there may be charges associated with the service. Western Digital offers a compelling alternative —a “personal cloud”— with its My Cloud series of network hard drives. I tested a 3TB My Cloud drive and came away convinced that this is the best thing to happen to hard drives since USB.