harddrives and storage

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.  

   Is your computer crawling along at a snail’s pace when you boot it up? Avoid the aggravation, save yourself some time, and try these tips to bring your machine back up to speed.

 As you build an impressive collection of movies, music and photos, digital storage space becomes a priority. Does the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS provide enough room for your current needs, and enough expansion space for your 4K video future? What about ease of configuration and use? 

If you're looking to improve your PC performance without breaking the bank, I'll show you how hybrid drives are an affordable blend of SSD speed and HDD mass storage.

When you think of data backup plans, you may think of work, business and office solutions. However, home data backup is more important than ever —think of all your digital photos, personal e-mails and music that could disappear if you don’t have them backed up. For students, backup is just as important, if not more so. A crashed hard drive has turned into the new “my dog ate it” when it comes to late assignments, so you don’t want to be faced with trying to convince a teacher or professor that your hard drive did crash and take your essay with it. The idea of a backup is to make recovery as fast and as painless as possible, should you lose your data in any way. Here’s my take on the perfect backup plan.

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.

 Does your laptop seem a little sluggish? Replacing its hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD) is a big performance win. Even better, the procedure takes just minutes and just about anyone can do it. Here’s how.

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.

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.

Storage is something that’s often taken for granted, yet it can have huge implications in terms of performance and usability of your devices.