Dropbox, one of the world’s leading cloud storage providers, has announced plans to use hard drives featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) in its data centers.  HAMR uses a heating component attached to the hard drive actuator head assembly. By heating...

No, magnets will not damage solid-state drives. However, changes in magnetic fields might cause data loss under certain circumstances. Strong magnetic fields can destroy data on hard disk drives (HDDs) and data tapes, for a simple reason: Those devices use...

With help from Datarecovery.com, an award-winning filmmaker and television producer has digitized some of his earliest work — including a rare 1979 interview with Chris Frantz, then-drummer for the Talking Heads. Greg Crutcher has had a storied career, serving as...

The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line Utility (WMIC) is a simple tool that allows users to manage their Windows operating system.It runs through the Command Prompt and can access information from Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART), a monitoring system...

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...