All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

Hard Drives


Did you really delete your files?

Today, on the KTLA morning news, Kurt the Cyberguy featured a news story, “Dangerously Dirty Drive“.
“In order to ensure that no data can be retrieved, it does take a number of hours, typically, to go through and erase the drive effectively.” - Joe Gugel, GeekSquad *
“Everybody needs to take it in to a professional, and [...]

New owner of SpinRite 6.0

Thanks to a new customer that needs a computer built, I finally got the extra $89 I needed to purchase one copy of SpinRite 6.0. (It’s not for her, it’s for me.)
Why? For preventative maintenence. (That is a term, right?) Anyway, if a HD is going to fail, I’d like ample to time buy a [...]

Finally with new hard drive and external enclosure

I finally bought a new hard drive for my computer. It’s a Seagate 120GB 7200RPM hard drive, and that replaced the Western Digital 60GB 5400RPM that’s about 5-6 years old. I installed the HD, partitioned it, moved my data onto the larger partition, removed the older HD, then did a clean Windows XP install onto [...]

Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.9B

Reuters reports that Seagate Technology would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion. Seagate is already world’s largest hard drive manufacturer and Maxtor is the third largest after Seagate and Western Digital.
On a side note, StorageReview is the place to find reviews on all hard drives.
Source: Slashdot

Loving Karen’s Replicator

Like I was saying a few days ago, I’m probably going to be purchasing a new HD. Well, I’m loving Karen’s Replicator! Before, I plugged my laptop into my router. This time, I’m trying it out wirelessly. 802.11b, baby! The sync took 28 minutes this time around, but only because I had a few torrents [...]

Second hard drive close to dying

I powered up my desktop system this morning, only to hear an odd sound (probably from the hard drive). When I looked at the monitor, a blue screen was smiling at me. I didn’t write down the error, but I’m convinced that this 60GB Western Digital (like my IBM Deskstar 120GXP) is about to bite [...]

Almost lost my hard drive

I don’t know what happened to my hard drive, but it wasn’t being detected a few hours ago. I tried to boot into Windows, but I had no such luck. I was running Knoppix 3.3 off a CD for a bit, thinking I was doomed. I had some data on that hard drive that I [...]

Easier multi-system maintenence

Back in January, I posted “Defrag automatically in minutes“. I should try to make it easier on myself to maintain systems here at work, too. (I think we have over 50.)
I was thinking that I could setup the batch file on each system and have it run once a month at a specific day in [...]

Good Sync

Is Good Sync really good?

Maxtor 200GB HD for $80

Outpost has the Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Hard Drive at $79.99 [PriceGrabber]. No rebate hassles. Free shipping. (Golf clap: Passwird Deals)

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