Hard drive crashes remain a leading cause of data loss, and while solid-state drives (SSDs) offer better performance and (arguably) better reliability, they’re still a single point of failure.  If an HDD or SSD fails, you lose data — unless...

Hard drives contain actuator heads that float just above the surface of the platters (discs coated in magnetic material that stores data).  When the actuator heads fail, data is inaccessible — and in many cases, the heads need to be...

If you’re not willing to trust a single hard drive (HDD) with your data — or if you need faster performance than you could reasonably attain with a single HDD — RAID makes a lot of sense.  RAID stands for...

USB flash drives are convenient, but if you’re carrying a storage device in your pocket, you’re taking certain risks. We frequently receive flash drives that have been cracked open, snapped in half, or washed in the laundry — obviously, those...

If you’re buying a new data storage device, you’ll need to do some research. This is particularly true if you’re buying a solid-state drive (SSD). While SSDs provide better performance than hard risk drives (HDDs), different models have different features...

Modern hard drives use error correction codes (ECCs) to make sure that data is readable, even when the write process is imperfect.  Hard disk drives store information through magnetic charges, and while actuator heads (also called read/write heads) are extremely...

The hard drive spindle is a shaft that holds the platters in place. The platters are disks coated with a thin magnetic material — that magnetic material stores your data. Modern hard drives often have multiple platters, and part of...

Recovering deleted data from a solid-state drive (SSD) is difficult, but not necessarily impossible. To explain why, we need to provide a basic overview of how SSDs work — and compare that to the way that hard drives operate. When...

Solid-state drives offer numerous advantages for consumers: They’re faster than hard drives, more reliable (although still susceptible to failure), and more energy efficient.  However, they’re also much more expensive. According to Diskprices.com, the least expensive internal hard drives have a...

This week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) discovered records indicating that Morgan Stanley Wealth Management failed to secure the data of 42 servers, potentially risking the private data of 15 million customers. Morgan Stanley allegedly stored data without ...