A new study from Paragon Software suggests that most people do not properly protect the data found on old hard drives and a smaller number of people fail to backup data to a safe location.

Paragon polled users of the company’s Hard Disk Manager to gain insight into their habits. About half of the respondents reported that they did not wipe data from old hard drives before discarding them or, if they did, only re-formatted the disk. Old drives that are discarded in this manner could become a privacy issue if they are recovered by another person.

Keep Reading »

File system fragmentation is a major cause of sluggish performance on Windows. The default Windows Disk Defragmenter does a passable job of the basics, but Auslogics Disk Defrag Pro ($29.95) goes above and beyond. We’re giving away 25 copies of Auslogics Disk Defrag Pro for Windows worth a total of $750 to 25 lucky readers this week! Read on for your chance to win.

Keep Reading »

At $49.95 per license, Paragon Hard Drive Manager 12 Suite may be out of reach for some of you. Through this giveaway, we’ll be dishing out 25 copies of the ultimate disk management and partitioning tool, Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Suite retailing at $1250, for free! If you’re interested, read through this review of the software and learn more about the participation details of this giveaway near the bottom of the post.

Keep Reading »

Don’t let a dying hard drive on your Mac catch you by surprise. Be warned before anything happens to your precious data. SmartReporter is a free application for your Mac that can warn you of hard drives problems, thanks to S.M.A.R.T. data. This gives you a heads up, because errors on a hard drive can mean problems are coming soon.

Keep Reading »

Move any Windows program to another hard drive, without breaking the program. If your primary hard drive is full, and what you’ve put on there is software, SymMover is what you’re looking for. Many people add a second hard drive to their computer when the first one fills up. Moving files – such as music, videos or photos – is a simple matter. Moving software, at least on a Windows system, isn’t.

Keep Reading »

The platters of a hard disk drive are spin around at 5400 or 7200 PRM (and sometimes even faster) for countless hours. You would do well to check on their health every now and then. Even if your hard drive is perfectly healthy, it may still pose a performance bottleneck on your system. So how can you tell if your hard drive is healthy, and how can you tell how fast it is?

Keep Reading »

Easily make a copy of your entire hard drive . Don’t just back up your data: back up all of your software, your settings and everything else by cloning your entire hard drive. Redo Backup makes cloning your system easy, but also gives you access to file recovery and a variety of other tools. You can even browse the web while everything’s happening.

Keep Reading »

As large as our world is, industries sometimes converge geographically because of local policy, labor prices, and convenience. Such is the case in Thailand, a place that hosts many of the world’s hard disk manufacturing facilities – and a place that’s recently been struck by tragic flooding. Because of the floodwaters, companies like Western Digital have had their supply of products drastically cut.

Keep Reading »

This must have happened to you often enough: while working on something from your hard drive (no matter if internal or external), the system eventually puts it into a “sleep mode” where it’ll take a while to wake up again before it’ll finally be able to do what you actually want it to do. This problem is now solved thanks to an open source developer who had a simple idea that honestly works quite well.

Keep Reading »

Ah, the external hard drive. This unsung hero of the gadget world can be found on almost any geek’s desk, usually tucked away behind a monitor or stuffed in a drawer. Yet it’s of great importance, as it’s often used to back up critical data or store a library of music, videos and photos. There are plenty of drives available, but most of us only need one or two, so let’s narrow down the choices.

Keep Reading »