disk

Hard-disk shortage hits consumer outlets

The fallout of the hard-disk drive shortage is now raining down on consumers, according to analysts and resellers.

The most immediate impact is rising prices and falling inventory of standalone drives, in the wake of the flooding in Thailand where roughly half of the world's drives are made. "Prices are going up. We're running out of stock and no longer taking back orders," said a sales representative at PC Connection, a major online reseller.

"We have half the stock we used to have," the sales rep added.

A sales representative at CDW, another major … Read more

Hard disk shortage will get worse: Piper Jaffray

The scarcity of hard disk drives will only get worse in the coming weeks and months, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

"We could run out of drives by the end of November," Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard said in an interview Tuesday while discussing the shortage in the wake of the severe flooding in Thailand, where roughly half of the world's production of HDDs takes place.

"Availability is really going to tighten up. I'm seeing prices quoted anywhere from up 10 to up 60 percent," he said. And Richard said he is … Read more

LaCie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk SSD review: You pay for what you get, maybe

Since Intel's Apple-only Thunderbolt standard offers up to 10Gbps of bandwidth, it doesn't seem to make sense to use it in a single-volume external storage device. This is because the device's internal drive, which would currently cap at the 6Gbps of the latest SATA 3 standard, will be the bottleneck of the whole package's performance.

LaCie, however, believes otherwise. Case in point: the Little Big Disk SSD, the first single-volume Thunderbolt storage device that's also based on an internal solid-state drive. And for the most part, it's a success.

The new external drive is … Read more

Managing and installing applications distributed with DMG files

When you purchase an application or download it from a the Internet, often it will download as a .dmg file instead of the application itself. The file will likely be named similarly to the application, and some people may be a bit confused about how to properly use what they have downloaded.

MacFixIt reader Mary wrote in with a question about this:

"How do you use these DMG files properly when downloading applications? Sometimes when I download apps a DMG file opens and there are instructions to install the program when I open it. At other times when I … Read more

PC forecast cut in wake of HDD shortage: analyst

Barclays Capital has slashed its PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter due to the shortage of hard disk drives and continued weakness in the PC market, according to reports.

The investment bank cut its global PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter to 4.3 percent from 7.2 percent "due to continued weak demand and a shortage of hard drive disks (HDD) resulting from the flooding in Thailand," according to a number of Asia-based outlets such as the China Post, citing a Barclay's research note.

And the bank didn't stop there, lowering its full-year … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

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

This week people wrote in with questions about apparent incorrect file size and disk usage calculations in the Finder, recreating a lost playlist after upgrading iTunes, whether Lion install media should be kept updated, and Mail messages appearing blank. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: File size and disk space calculations not adding up MacFixIt reader Malcolm asks:

Answer: The folders … Read more

Defrag your disks with Disk SpeedUp

Glaryutilities' Disk SpeedUp is a free standalone utility that analyzes, defragments, and optimizes your disk drives or individual folders. It offers manual and automatic defrag options as well as automatic shutdown after defragmenting finishes.

Like many system utilities, Disk SpeedUp has a colorful interface with large, clearly labeled buttons and tabs labeled Defrag Show and Settings. The Defrag Show tab showed our two disk drives and their capacity, free space, status, and percentage of fragmentation. In the middle was a standard defrag map, while at the bottom of the interface, Disk SpeedUp displayed tabs with our three partitions, each with … Read more

Hard drives could get scarce: Apple, analysts

The humble hard disk drive may become a more precious commodity in the coming months, according to analysts and Apple.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made this very clear this week in the company's earnings conference call, referring to the impact of the floods in Thailand. "Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point," he said.

Cook continued. "We would say that our primary exposure is … Read more

Has the hybrid hard drive arrived via the Ultrabook?

Are future mainstream Ultrabooks going to usher in the hybrid hard-disk drive?

Acer may have kicked off this trend with the hybrid-drive-packing Ultrabook Aspire S3, which sports a 20GB solid-state drive matched with a standard 320GB spinning hard disk. So, will others follow? Yes, says a report in Digitimes.

Though a hybrid system can't match the performance of a 128GB SSD-only laptop, an ancillary 20GB drive is a relatively large chunk of flash compared with, for example, the 4GB SSD (or flash drive, if that's what you choose to call it) in the Seagate Momentus hybrid drive.

How … Read more