News

• Men chuck or reformat old devices more so than women

  A study commissioned by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICOI) has revealed that just 11 per cent of 230 discarded second hand hard drives contained personal information.

• Free Tools to Wipe Your Drives Securely

  Your PC's hard drive is packed with your personal data. So when you want to get rid of your system or drive, you should permanently erase your storage device drives before you get rid of them. If your drives are encrypted and you trust the encryption protocol (full disk encryption is pretty safe), all you have to do is delete your encryption keys. If you want to safeguard your privacy further--and prevent data theft down the road--here are a few cheap and simple tools designed to wipe your hard drive, solid-state drive, or USB flash drive thoroughly before you dispose of it.

• How to Choose the Right NAS System for Your Business

  We've put together a list of the most desirable features below, grouped into several broad categories. You may not need everything mentioned, though it is hoped that this will help you arrive at a decision about the right NAS for your organization.

• LaCie CloudBox: Compact drive tightly integrates with Cloud storage

  The minimum "best practice" backup arrangement for your vital data is to maintain three copies of the data: the original, a local backup, and a second backup offsite. With LaCie's CloudBox NAS device, you simply back up to the ethernet-connected unit, which then automatically backs up to LaCie's own online backup service. But easy as it is, CloudBox is also expensive, capacity-challenged, and slower than average.

• Seagate offers data recovery with hard drive purchase

  Hard drive crashes are a nightmare for computer users for many reasons. Not only can data held dear to one's heart be lost, but trying to recover it can cost an arm and a leg, if not more. Hard drive maker Seagate attempts to address both those problems with the release today of its GoFlex Turbo drive with SafetyNet data recovery services.

• 5 more PC upgrade mistakes (and how to avoid them)

  As PCs get more powerful and easier to use, the challenges involved with upgrading them have remained about the same. For the novice, a hard drive upgrade can appear downright daunting. For more experienced tinkerers, the upgrade itself may be easy, but it's easier still to overlook factors that could streamline the whole process and better protect both the hardware and the data stored on it.

• Technology examined in drug case

  Computers, sim cards and mobile phones are being examined in relation to an alleged crime syndicate that imported $6.6 million worth of drugs, a court has heard.

• TestDisk, PhotoRec fix disks, recover files

  If you're a fan of character-based interfaces -- such as DOS -- and free data recovery, you're going to love TestDisk and its companion utility, PhotoRec (a brother program included in the TestDisk download). Both free programs run in a DOS box or from a command line and test, report on, fix common disk boot problems, and recover files from damaged hard drives. All this is done at low level, below the operating system.

• New Seagate solid state drives mean business

  Seagate has unveiled new models of its Pulsar line of solid state drives (SSD) -- delivering performance, endurance, and reliability that business can trust. The new drives bring the benefits of SSD to organizations with demanding data storage needs.

• Erase data permanently with SecureClean

  It's well-known that "deleting" a file from Windows doesn't fully remove it, but you may not understand just how much data can remain on your disk after a file is gone. Even fragments of a file such as a crucial e-mail or spreadsheet can contain valuable data. Browsing histories, cookies, and more can linger a long time. SecureClean ($US50, 14-day free trial) will remove all such detritus permanently.

• Cloud storage ahead: Proceed at your own risk

  The IT mantra for the past few years has been all about the cloud, and the myriad benefits of cloud-based servers and storage. While there are some advantages, there are also some serious drawbacks that you should consider carefully before entrusting your valuable and sensitive data to the cloud.

• Need large-capacity data storage? Try your intestine.

  If you needed to score 900,000GB of data, how much do you think your storage system would weigh?

• Rocstor Embraces USB 3.0 For New Hard Drives

  Storage company Rocstor has added two new USB 3.0 devices to their product line up, just in time for CES 2011.

• Seagate debuts fast green drive

  Seagate has introduced a new high-speed, eco-friendly hard drive for low-power personal computers. The 3.5-inch desktop drive spins at 5900 RPM and includes the company's SmartAlign technology.

• Fearing more Wikileaks, military bans DVDs, thumb drives

  Removable media such as CDs, DVDs and USB drives are no longer allowed on classified military computers.