Tag Archives: hard disk

SMARTReporter: Get Alerts For Impending Hard Disk Failures [Mac]

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If your Mac suddenly stops responding while performing a read and write operation, then you may need to put your hard drive through a series of read and write tests to identify the root cause of the slow read/write operation. One of the reasons why hard disk starts experiencing read/write issues is frequent use of low-level hard disk utilities and data recovery tools. Although Mac OS X native disk utility lets you apply both basic and advance fixes to prevent hard disk damages, it doesn’t notify you about imminent hard drive failures. SMARTReporter is a tiny app for Mac OS X that deploys an efficient S.M.A.R.T-based monitoring system to keep you updated about your hard disk health as well as, performance. The workability of this hard drive monitoring tool is based on consistent polling the S.M.A.R.T status of hard disk. You can set it to perform S.M.A.R.T tests silently in the background, and send email to specified recipient, display warning message or launch an application when an impending hard drive failure is anticipated. Details to follow after the jump. Read More

PerfectDisk Free: Defrag Disks & Optimize Solid State Drives (SSD)

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Disk defragmentation is vital to keep your computer up and running steadily. Not only does it boost the processing performance of a computer, but also keeps the hard disk drive in healthy state. Installations, copying and moving files here and there, other similar activities leave a lot of fragmented data on your disk that create performance bottle necks due the fact that your data gets scattered around the hard disk platters. To cope with this problem, Windows’ default defragmentation utility pretty much handles the job. However, if you need something more reliable and quicker, then meet PerfectDisk Free, developed by Raxco Software. The application packs in some powerful features with handsome interface, and automatically starts running with your windows to always keep drive fragmentation in check. It comes with a special focus on SSDs (Solid State Drives), which do not need regular defragmentation and may get damaged if subjected to such a process. Read More

Jwansoft Disk Defrag: Defragment Your Hard Disk Using Multiple Methods

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Regularly defragmenting your hard disk is necessary if you want your PC to be running smooth at all times. Fragmentation of data stored on the hard disk is one of the many reasons of a PC slowing down. Fragmentation means that data is stored into many pieces, which are not placed close together on the hard disk, resulting is higher read times when they're accessed. Defragmenting your hard drive can speed up a system, as it rearranges the file fragments. As you might have noticed, the default Windows defragmenter takes a lot of time to achieve the said purpose. Jwansoft Disk Defrag is an application for Windows that allows you to defragment your hard drive better than what the native utility has to offer. The application also supports Master File Table defragmentation on systems running Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Read More

Disk Investigator: View MFT Zone, Check Raw Data Saved On Disk Sectors & Clusters

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Disk Investigator is a multi-purpose, powerful hard disk tool that lets you find raw data saved on disk partitions, and check unreadable disk clusters and sectors. The application is built to navigate through the disk sectors, while showing the raw data in HEX, TEXT, and Decimal form. This not only helps you identify identical data written on the disk partitions, but also verify the performance of data shredding utilities. If you’ve recently used a file shredder to securely delete data from disk partition, it lets you view the current raw data present on the disk. Moreover, the application gives detailed insight into disk structure, including total logical sectors, bytes per sector, sectors per cluster, cluster size, MFT start cluster, MFT zone clusters and more. Additionally, it includes a simple, yet feature-rich file explorer that lets you view files and folders saved on disk, check raw data (in Text, Dec, and Hex form) of selected file, and check CRC-32, and MD5, Hash, RipeMD, and SHA hash value. Read More

DiskBench: Real-Life Hard Disk Benchmark Tool With Multithread Support

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Disk benchmarking and information tools are a dime a dozen, and you’ll find so many of them out there that it becomes to make the right pick. We at AddictiveTips have ourselves covered a lot of such tools, generic and specific both, such as DHE Drive Info for detailed hard drive statistics, AS SSD Benchmark particularly for SSD drives, and even a guide on performing benchmark testing on your hard disk, USB drive and optical drive. The problem with most of these tools, however, remains the fact that they present you with synthetic benchmarking numbers, figures that you are most unlikely to meet in real life situations. For a more realistic and accurate measure of how your disks will perform in real time under stress, try DiskBench. It is a portable Windows application that uses your current filesystem to save, read and manipulate data. Details after the break. Read More

How To Backup Files To BitLocker-Enabled Virtual Hard Disk [Beginner's Guide]

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Microsoft’s VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) format is widely used to contain and run guest operating systems using Microsoft virtualization software, MS Virtual PC. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 natively supports creating and mounting virtual hard disk using Disk Management utility. Not only does it create MBR partitions, it also allow creating GUID partition on VHD to store large amount of data. With Windows 7, you no longer need an additional tool to attach VHD files for accessing virtual hard disk data and backing up files and folders to virtual hard disk file. When you attach a virtual hard disk file, you can access and modify its content just like the way you use physical hard drive’s volumes. Since Windows 7 provides all disk-related features with attached virtual hard drive, you can use it as a secured backup storage. In this post, we will guide you through the process of creating a virtual hard disk and encrypting it with BitLocker to securely backup files and folders. Read More

DHE Drive Info: Portable Tool To View Detailed Hard Drive Statistics

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Preventing hard drives from failures and crashes can avert the loss of important data, but assessing the health of your hard disk manually can be time consuming. When a hard disk is working, temperatures increase during processing and read/write operations. Heavy applications, such as virtual machines, put a lot of stress on the hard disk. In order to keep the hard disk working fine and making sure that it does not crash, you have to keep an eye on how it is performing. DHE Drive Info is a portable application for Windows that lets you view the detailed information about connected hard disks according to their partitions. The application has options to view the basic information, S.M.A.R.T. data, S.M.A.R.T. Logs, Control different settings of the hard disk, view Hidden Areas and access the Sector Browser. Moreover, the system tray of DHE Drive Info shows the current temperature of the hard disk. Read on to find out more about DHE Drive Info. Read More

HDDScan: All-in-One Hard Drive Tool To Perform Surface Scan & SMART Tests

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Do you often face hard drive crashes and read/write issues while dealing with enormous volumes of data? Perhaps, it’s the time to put your hard disk through a series of tests to measure its overall performance. It happens quite so often that hard disk suddenly halts without showing any type of errors. Using conventional hard drive diagnostic tools in such cases don’t help identify the read/write faults and other like issues. What you probably need is a low-level hard disk diagnostic utility that can perform surface scan of all hard disk volumes to find the potential issues. HDDScan is a powerful, low-level hard disk scan and diagnostic program, which is developed to perform numerous hard disk performance-specific tasks. It supports all types of conventional hard drives including IDE, SATA, SCSI, RAID arrays and external storage mediums including, SD cards, USB, and external hard disks. Read More

What Are Physical & Logical Bad Sectors Of Hard Drive And How To Repair Them [Guide]

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Amongst all the potential hard disk faults and errors, bad cluster is one that doesn’t make it completely non-functional. Hard disk bad cluster, casually known as bad sector, is a small sector which doesn’t respond to read and write requests, and therefore, the device software, which is operating the hard drive, reports it as unusable sector. Bad sectors are usually categorized into two broad types; Physical bad sectors and Logical bad sectors. The former type of clusters on disk need to be mapped out to continue read and write operation on disks, whereas the logical bad sectors are usually reported by the operating system due to its inability to access the cluster on hard disk. In this post, we will briefly discuss each type of bad clusters, and look at some tools that may help you repair bad sectors on hard disk. Read More

Benchmark PC Hardware To Diagnose System Issues With Ubuntu Live Disk [Guide]

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There are certainly sheer number of benchmarking utilities available for PC, which put primary system components, including CPU, Main Memory, GPU etc., through a diverse range of tests to measure their health, ability and performance. The benchmarking apps are generally built to diagnose PC problems and check the actual ability of a component and its performance in presence of other installed system devices. For instance, a high-end GPU may not be able to perform at its peak ability with one or more incompatible system components. Similarly, main memory requires compatible motherboard and CPU to give its best performance. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple way to benchmark all the system components, and therefore, one needs to manually check each component’s performance while using the installed OS. Read More

[Giveaway] DaisyDisk: Visualize Disk Space Usage & Memory Hogging Folders [Mac]

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On a Mac, you have one solitary disk, no matter what the size is, and you still get only one drive with no partitions whatsoever. This means, all your data will get organized in folders, and although this would hold true even if you had disk partitions, they would at least let you separate work and personal files/folders. With so many folders inside a folder inside another folder, you often save files that hog space, and forget them later on. If you ever get down to freeing up some space on your disk, you’d probably spend a lot of time trying to find what’s eating it up before deleting it. DaisyDisk is a Mac app available for $9.99 in the Mac App Store, that lets you visualize how space is being consumed on your hard disk. All folders are shown in disc-like graphs, and each component can be clicked to view memory usage in a particular folder. Read More

How To Recover Lost Partitions And Hard Disk Data [Guide]

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In our previous guide on securely wiping the hard disk and removable media via Ubuntu Live and DBAN boot CD, we discussed that Windows based disk shredding applications don’t allow wiping the disk partition where Windows is installed. Similarly, there are a great deal of data recovery applications available for Windows such as Recuva, Power Data Recovery,  Undelete 360, RecoveryDesk etc, which can seamlessly perform the data recovery operations over not only auxilirary disks, but also removable disks including USB drives, external hard disks, SD cards and so on. What if you want to recover data from disk partition that holds Windows? What would be the most convenient way to run disk recovery operation over an entire disk (including all basic, extended, logical partitions and unallocated space), especially when system fails to boot up? Read More

How To Completely Wipe/Erase A Hard Disk Drive [Step-by-Step Guide]

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You may know that when you delete a file, it doesn't actually get removed from the hard disk. This is because, when an OS, including Windows, attempts to delete a file, it removes the pointer or reference to the file, making it inaccessible to user. However, the low-level data recovery applications can still be used to view and restore deleted data from storage mediums. When file is deleted from the system, OS makes the space, which was previously used by that deleted file, available for new data write operations, and if OS doesn't fill that deleted space, data recovery application doesn't take long to fully restore the data from unfilled tracks. Therefore, it's always advisable to perform a multi-cycle shred operation over entire hard drive to prevent data theft. You could use CCleaner and other data shred/disk wipe applications (Secure Wipe, Hardwipe, HDShredder etc, for instance), to permanently delete the data, but file shredding can't be performed over the partition where Windows is installed. In this post, we will discuss how to fully wipe out entire hard disk, and make the deleted data unrecoverable.

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Manage Internal, External & Network-Mapped Drives Using Drive Manager

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Each drive that you connect to your Computer, for example the internal hard drive, any external hard drive, USB flash drives etc, has certain data included in it that can be used to identify it. Every time you connect the drive, the information is stored in your computer. However, using the default options provided by Windows does not allow you to fully view this information. Today, we have an application for Windows that lets you view detailed information for any type of drive connected to your computer. Drive Manager is a complete internal, external, network mapped and CD/DVD drive management tool that lets you identify drives in Windows, display volume label and vendor information, show/hide drive letters, view complete hard disk and optical drive information, and scan drives for errors. Information regarding Drive Type, Volume Serial, Capacity, Free Space, Total Clusters, Free Clusters, Partition Type, Number etc. of connected drives can be viewed in Drive Manager. The information is automatically refreshed after every 20 seconds. Moreover, the application lets you benchmark the read speed of, and safely remove, connected drives. Read More

NirLauncher: Launch Any Nirsoft Application With This All-In-One Suite

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We have previously covered a number of applications developed by Nirsoft, all of which have come from a developer named Nir Sofer. Nirsoft has always provided top quality software that have helped many advanced and novice users to perform laborious tasks easily, recover passwords, manage network connections, fix system issues and much more. Now, Nirsoft has released an application suite which contains all the useful Nirsoft applications, known as NirLauncher. It is a portable application that can be used to launch any Nirsoft application, and to get detailed information about each program present within the launcher. Read More

TDP x-Ray Lite: View And Manage Hard Disk Contents Through A Pie-Chart

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It is important to know about the files and folders are consuming your hard disk space. If you have a big hard drive, you might not care about duplicate files stored in your computer, but if you have limited disk space, storage memory management can have a lot of importance for you. TDP x-Ray Lite is a disk space management tool that displays the memory information in a colorful pie-chart, both in window and full-screen modes. The pie chart is divided into pieces of different sizes and colors, according to type of files and the space consumed by them. The application allows you to navigate between the files and folders, and displays the contents of each folder in a graph sized according to the content within them, and is optimized to work with large hard disks with millions of files. TDP x-Ray Lite allows you to open a folder in Windows Explorer, move a file or folder to Recycle Bin and clear the contents of your Recycle Bin from within the application. Read More

Free Disk Defrag: Exclude Folders From Defragmentation Process

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Fragmentation of data stored on the hard disk is one of the many reasons of a PC slowing down. Fragmentation means that data is stored into many pieces, which are not placed close together on the hard disk. Defragmenting your hard drive can speed up a system as it rearranges the file fragments. As you might have noticed, the default Windows defragmenter takes a lot of time during the defragmentation process. WinUtilities Free Disk Defragmenter is a Windows defragmentation application that can defragment hard disks efficiently, and at a much faster rate. The application lets you choose the desired disk drives, and provides a detailed report after the defragmentation process. It allows you to choose the speed of the process, and exclude files and folders from the defragmentation process. Read More

Test Mac Hard Disk Read & Write Speeds With Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

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Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a hard disk benchmark test tool for Mac which deploys a classic method of determining hard drive read and write speeds; it fills free space with sample data to measure the total write speed, once data is written to the disk, it starts reading the data to evaluate disk read speed. It was developed to check if a user's hard drive write and read speeds are suitable for working with high quality video editing and like tasks, including ultra high quality video playback, live encoding of HD videos, etc. Unlike other hard disk benchmark tools, it consistently performs write and read operations, so you can check both performance and reliability of your hard drive in real time. Read More

Monitor CPU, RAM, Network & Disk Usage In Ubuntu With SysPeek

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When using resource intensive applications, one can often face system hangs without knowing that the CPU usage has reached 100% utilization. In such an instance, it is not possible to quickly launch System Monitor to view CPU usage as the system is hanged. Although, Ubuntu is meant to be less resource intensive as an operating system, installing too many applications and packages can lead to frequent hangs. SysPeek is a system monitor indicator which displays CPU resource utilization , memory and swap usage, disk usage, and network traffic from system tray. The biggest convenience of this applindicator app is that it displays a CPU usage indicator which turns red when it finds 100% utilization of CPU. Read More

StressMyPC Tests PC Performance Under Extreme Conditions

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Gaming enthusiasts and IT professionals are known for spending a large amount of money on computer hardware. But sometimes system from the most well known brands contain faulty parts which do not provided optimum performance. If you have spent a good amount of money on your new system or would simply like to test the stress capability of your PC, then you should try StressMyPC. It is a portable application which is designed to test your hard disk, graphic card and CPU under stress conditions to help you determine if your system components will do well under stressful conditions, e.g. during gameplay or when a resource hogging applications are being used. This app is from the same developer who has brought us IsMyLcdOK and the quad pane file explorer Q-Dir. Read More