Conventional wisdom holds that a hard drive lasts for about 3-5 years — and most manufacturer warranties tend to support that assumption.  But it’s important to remember that despite precise engineering, hard drives are profoundly sensitive devices. Recently, we’ve seen...

Solid-state drives (SSDs), like all other data storage devices, can fail.  In fact, SSDs have a set lifespan — eventually, the floating gates SSDs use to store data become less reliable, as we discussed in our article about SSD wear ...

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are often considered more reliable than conventional hard drives — and there’s some truth to that.  Hard disk drives (HDDs) have moving mechanical components, so they’re much more susceptible to physical damage than SSDs. But both storage...

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...