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folders.pngJust because hard drives are cheap doesn't mean you should keep every file you ever come across. The Unclutterer weblog, which usually focuses on your home and office, turns its organizing eye to your hard drive and runs down ways to herd all the bits and pieces we collect on our computers all day. They suggest deleting everything you don't need, creating folders that mirror your life, using descriptive file names, and making liberal use of a temporary folder. There's lots of similarity here to my six-folder system for organizing "My Documents." Also, remember you can use automated tools like Belvedere for Windows and read more »

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speed-up-disks.pngWindows Vista tip: Web site OCModShop details how to speed up your hard drive performance in Vista by tweaking an advanced setting to enable write caching and advanced performance on your SATA hard drive. The net effect of this tweak should certainly bring improved disk performance, but there is a catch: If you're not using a backup power supply—either a battery on your laptop or an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on your desktop—enabling these features increases the likelihood of data loss in the event of a power outage. Either way, this tweak is worth a look if you're looking to beef up your disk performance, and besides—you should already be using a UPS anyway.
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elasticsuspension.png When they're in use, hard drives vibrate, and that means they can get noisy—unless they have the right shock absorbers. In an oldie-but-goodie article, the folks at the Silent PC Review rigged up a hard drive bay with thick elastic bands they picked up at the local crafts store. The resulting setup suspends the drives in space with the elastic, which absorbs vibrations and gives the drives plenty of breathing room. Writer Mike Chin says: As a simple test, when I touch the drive while it was running, I can feel a fair amount of vibration. But when I touch touch the case right next to the hard drive—or any part of the case, there is NO vibration from the drive. None at all.When I showed one of my suspended drive systems to my favorite local dealer, it was the complete absence of vibration in the case tha read more »

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Windows only: Analyze your hard drive usage and find out what's eating up your disk space with freeware application DriveSpacio. Similar to previously mentioned WinDirStat, DriveSpacio sets itself apart with a different approach to displaying your drive usage. Many users will likely prefer the bar graphs and pie charts of DriveSpacio to WinDirStat, but the biggest drawback is that—unlike WinDirStat—it doesn't currently allow you to directly delete or launch a folder from within its interface. That means that once you find something you want to delete, you still have to navigate to it manually in Explorer to delete it. Regardless, the freeware, Windows only DriveSpacio is a g read more »

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Linux only: Linux systems are constantly writing status updates to a variety of different system logs—great news for debugging developer-types, not so great for anyone trying to save battery life on the go or get more life from their hard drives. Ramlog is a straightforward program that has your Linux system write log updates to RAM during a session, then dumps them onto the hard drive when shutting down. Ramlog creates a fixed-size RAM disk, so your memory won't be overrun by over-active processes, and experienced users can still check out their logs. I can't attest to long-term proof of the savings, but the hard drive conservation alone makes it worth running this simple program. Ramlog is a free download for Linux systems only, with a few pre-built packages; otherwise, hit the "via" link for instructions on installing from source. Ramlog [via Linux.com]
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Hard Drive Inspector is a powerful, effective and easy-to-use program that monitors hard drive health. The value of information stored on an average computer hard drive often exceeds the value of the computer itself. read more »

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Modern hard drives support S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) that was specially developed to detect upcoming disk failures. Using this technology Hard Drive Inspector can monitor the current state of various life-critical parameters describing a disk's reliability and performance. read more »

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