HardDisk Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

New 27-inch iMac's HDD, SSD and Fusion Drive options benchmarked

by Randy Nelson (Jan 15th, 2013)

The folks at Bare Feats have put together a handy look at the performance of four of the five storage options available when custom-ordering a new 27-inch iMac through Apple. These include a 1 TB and 3 TB hard disk (a 7,200 RPM Seagate Barracuda), 768 GB solid state drive and 1 TB Fusion Drive. ...

Disk Art visualizes hard drive space usage

by Erica Sadun (Apr 20th, 2012)

When an email from the Clean Cut Code, the makers of Disk Art, showed up in our inbox yesterday, I jumped at the chance to take a peek. I'm a huge fan of Grand Perspective's space visualization software and am always happy to try out another app to see how it compares. Disk Art, which is ...

MacBook makeovers bring new life to a couple of old laptops

by Steven Sande (Aug 24th, 2010)

Last weekend provided not one, but two opportunities for me to do some upgrades to some "old" MacBooks to bring 'em up to workable condition. To start with, one client of mine wanted to get rid of an unused MacBook, so I decided to purchase it from her as a machine for training. The other client ...

My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach

by David Winograd (Jul 9th, 2010)

I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule's internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs. Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow ...

TUAW Tip: Swap out your laptop's hard disk for a spiffy new SSD

by Robert Palmer (Apr 14th, 2009)

If you're looking for a significant performance boost for your middle-aged laptop, replacing your aging hard disk with a solid state disk (SSD) could give your computer a new lease on life. Solid-state disks (pictured, bottom) differ from traditional hard disks (top) in that they're not constructed ...

Data recovery: The option of last resort (Part 3 of 3)

by Robert Palmer (Jan 22nd, 2009)

Back to Part I: losing all the data on a hard disk, and Part II: the trials and tribulations of paying to get it back. Now we find out what happened, and what you can expect from a data recovery specialist. Greg, the technician from Iomega Data Recovery, sent back two documents two days later: One ...

Data recovery: The option of last resort (Part 2 of 3)

by Robert Palmer (Jan 22nd, 2009)

Back to Part I of Robert's tale of data recovery. It's a typical geek story: Boy gets data, boy loses data, boy tries to get data back. Because of my former employer's professional relationship with Iomega, I had sent a disk for recovery to Iomega Data Recovery before, and was confident they'd be ...

Data recovery: The option of last resort

by Robert Palmer (Jan 22nd, 2009)

There is no shortage of stories here on TUAW (and elsewhere) that extol the benefits of backing up your data. Apple even makes it ridiculously easy to do so -- with Mac OS X 10.5, Time Machine, a blank drive, and some spare time, you're set. Nevertheless, despite your best efforts, there are ...

DIY MacBook upgrade

by Steven Sande (Sep 1st, 2008)

Yeah, so that black MacBook you bought a couple of years ago with an 80 GB hard drive isn't lookin' so hot now, is it? You know things are bad when you have to delete your pr0n videos to make room for incoming email. You'd like to swap out the hard drive, but your tech skills are sucky. What do you ...

Seagate 1 inch 12 GB drive

by Scott McNulty (Feb 14th, 2006)

Who doesn't love tiny little hard drives with lots of capacity? Seagate recently announced their smallest drive yet, measuring 40x30x5 mm (that's millimeters, which is metric for "frickin' tiny"). Why do you, as an Apple fan, care about this? iPods, my friends, iPods. With smaller, higher ...