drive

Seagate's involvement in solid-state storage market shifted into high gear today as the company unveiled four new drives: the Seagate 600 SSD, the Seagate 600 Pro SSD, the Seagate 1200 SSD, and the Seagate X8 Accelerator.

Among these new drives, the Seagate 600 SSD is the first from the storage vendor that's designed for general consumers; the rest are geared toward enterprise use.

The Seagate 600 SSD comes in both 7-millimeter and, for the first time among SSDs, 5-millimeter thicknesses. The drive retains the 2.5-inch laptop design, supports SATA 3 (6Gbps), and offers up to 80,000 … Read more

Many parents apparently still aren't getting the message about the dangers of distracted driving.

Among 618 parents surveyed for a study out today from the American Academy of Pediatrics, almost 90 percent of them admitted to chatting on the phone, texting, fiddling with the GPS, or doing other things while driving with their children in the car.

The parents who participated in the poll were asked specifically how often they engaged in distracting activities while driving with their child over the last month. Those activities included talking or texting on a cell phone, surfing the Internet, finding directions on a GPS or map, and changing a CD or DVD, as well as eating or grooming, and taking care of their child.… Read more

Apple buyers eyeing an iMac now have a choice between a conventional hard drive and a solid-state drive.

Speedier than their mechanical counterparts, solid-state drives are available as options on both the 21.5-inch and the 27-inch iMacs. The 21.5-inch iMac offers a 256GB SSD for an extra $300 and a 512GB SSD for an extra $600. The 27-inch model presents the same options and throws in a 768GB SSD for an additional $900.

If those figures seem too pricey, buyers can stick with a regular serial ATA hard drive. Apple includes a 1TB hard drive in the overall … Read more

Samsung has been good about providing online simulators for its smartphones, like the Galaxy Nexus and the Note. With the release of its new flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, it has updated the simulator's interface to make the tutorials easier to navigate and much easier to read. The simulator is great if you want to get an idea of what the phone is like or if you want to learn more about it, either for yourself, or for someone that you're helping.

You can get to the Galaxy S4 simulator by pointing your Web browser to http://www.samsungmobileusa.com/simulators/GalaxyS4.… Read more

Many portable drives come with a limited amount of free online storage included. The Canvio Connect, which Toshiba introduced today, offers that and more.

The new USB 3.0 portable drive comes with 10GB of free online storage space. When you plug it into a computer, you can access its contents, as well as those stored on another computer, be it a Windows or a Mac, via the Internet.

This is because the Canvio Connect comes with a lifetime subscription to the Pogoplug PC cloud engine, a software product that works similarly to the Pogoplug Series 4 adapter, which makes … Read more

While using OS X, you may discover a folder at the root of the hard drive, called Damaged Files. You may wonder why it's there and what's in it.

This folder, which less commonly is found at the root of secondary storage volumes you have mounted, results from the system's automatic file system checking routines (fsck). These routines may run after a power failure, a kernel panic, or if you boot to Safe Mode by holding the Shift key at startup. In this routine, the system will check the inodes in the file system structure (folders and … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in asking about the inability to format a drive due to "partition map" errors, how to determine what is using up space rapidly on the hard drive, how to restore a missing Safari program, and the options for tackling an iMac that continually shuts off in the middle of use. I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Unable to format a … Read more

The most common portable hard drives have USB 2.0 connections, which are great for compatibility, but terrible for performance. If you have an old USB 2.0 portable hard drive, you can increase its transfer rates by upgrading it to USB 3.0. For as little as $15, you can double your drive's real-world performance. Here's how:

Disclaimer: Opening your portable hard drive's enclosure will likely void your warranty. It's also possible that you'll damage the original enclosure and or the internal hard drive. We recommend you back up any data that may be … Read more

Rather than write regulations, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released finalized guidelines for automakers to build cabin electronics into vehicle that will not distract drivers. These guidelines come after a comment period on a draft release by NHTSA last year.

NHTSA included its responses to comments and the new guidelines in a 281 page PDF made available on its Web site.

In justification of the new guidelines, NHTSA revealed that a recent test of distracted driving it conducted showed that texting doubled the risk of a 'near-crash' over attentive driving. While the test found that manually operating a … Read more