Category Archives: Hard Drives

Enable Mapping To C$ In Windows 7

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People who have been using Windows for years, likely know about the administrator share (C$) built into Windows file sharing. You open Windows Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer),type in the computer name followed by the “/” and then “C$” (//MyOldPC/C$) and you could access almost if not everything on the computer. No, you could not ‘run’ programs this way, just access the files and folders.

When you need to move data from one home computer to another such as during a computer replacement or upgrade you want to make it as easy and quick as possible. Continue reading →

Backing up for individuals and home offices

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In the previous article, I wrote on backing up I wrote about how to and what to backup if you are a micro business. Here I want to go into what I believe is needed if you have only 1 to 3 computers to backup. Much of the information is the same, so please excuse the redundancy.

The #1 item I replace on computers is the hard drive, it is a mechanical device and fails. The #2 device is the power supply.

Without a copy / backup of your data, you will lose something and regret it. Yes, I can send off the drive to a “clean” room to recover data. As a rule of thumb it will cost about $1,000 to get your data back, and that is not guaranteed. Continue reading →

Special Update – Thailand flooding impacts disk drive industry

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I attempted to find a direct link to Seagates web site with this information, it came to me in an email from Seagate. We prefer Seagate drives but also use Western Digital (see my previous posts) as they are owned by Seagate.

Below is the text of the email to us partners.

“As has been widely reported, the severe flooding in Thailand is a tragic situation for families and businesses across the region. To aid in the relief and recovery efforts, Seagate is donating US$1 million across a few key organizations in Thailand. Continue reading →

Western Digital hard drives are going to be hard to get

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The flooding in Thailand is causing issue with every life there, their jobs are in trouble too. Western Digital has had to stop producing hard drives for now. 60% of Western digital hard drives are made in Thailand. Also other semiconductor, logic chips, hard drive motors and other technology producing plants are located there too. Expect parts to be hard to come by, expect computer prices to rise, expect repairs to start costing more.

Forbes has an article here  http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2011/10/17/thailand-floods-will-impact-hard-disk-drive-coernmponents/

I also have the Western Digital Press Release here

 

Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) performance

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Many articles have been written about SSD hard drives, Intel recently put out a review of the speeds of these drives new compared to well used and thus fragmented. I would just like to throw my results in to the piles of articles.

A year ago this week I built a test Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate machine with a 40 GB SSD drive from Intel. I have all the same security and misc. software that I use on my other computers so it is a fairly easy one-to-one comparison. Well, talk about fast boot times. From “power on” to ready(and I mean ready, not just at the Windows desktop but still loading background “stuff”) takes 38 seconds. Yes, you read that right, 38 seconds. My next fastest machine takes just shy of 2 minutes. Continue reading →