Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Alan M.: I replaced the 320GB hard drive in my Acer Aspire desktop computer with a Crucial 512GB SSD.
I was able to clone the hard drive’s contents onto the SSD with no problem and everything works great, but when I view the drive in “Computer” it shows up as a 320GB drive instead of 512GB.
What do I need to do to make Windows 7 see the entire 512GB?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Randy F.: My hard drive started making a combination of loud whining and clicking sounds last night.
I did some research (thanks Google!) and found a forum post that said to run chkdsk to see if the drive has any bad sectors. It then said if bad sectors are found to run chkdsk/r to fix them.
I ran chkdsk and it did find a bunch of bad sectors. I started to run chkdsk /r to fix the bad sectors but then I remembered reading a follow-up post that said running chkdsk /r can kill a hard drive outright.
What’s your advice on this? I’d like to fix the drive and not have to replace it if that’s possible, but I don’t want to lose my pictures and other files by killing the drive. I need some advice on how to proceed.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Western Digital has been making outstanding hard drives for decades, and now they have released their very first line of WD branded solid state drives (SSDs). (#ad)
WD has actually sold SSDs under different brand names for some time now, but I believe the release of these new WD branded SSDs shows how confident they are in their SSD technology. [Read more…]
Have you been wanting to upgrade your PC by swapping out the hard drive for a super-fast SSD?
If so, you might be reluctant to do so right now because of the relatively low storage capacities that SSDs are famous for.
Well, thanks to recent breakthroughs in solid state storage technologies, those low SSD storage capacities will soon be a thing of the past. [Read more…]
You are probably already aware that a Solid State Drive (SSD) is a LOT faster than even the fastest spinning hard drives, and they are getting cheaper all the time.
But did you know that SSDs vary in speed from model to model?
Well, they do, and they’re getting faster all the time. And SandDisk has one of the fastest consumer grade SSD’s out there, SanDisk Extreme PRO.
Without a doubt, this is one of the best SSDs I have ever tested. [Read more…]