disk

Here's a generational test. Look at this table. What do you see? If you see a weird-looking coffee table, then you're young enough to have no idea what a VHS tape or landline telephone is. If you see a floppy disk, then you should probably spend the $930 it takes to get a Floppytable for your living room.

The Floppytable is anything but floppy. It's made from hot-rolled steel and stainless steel, making it much stronger than the plastic originals. The table is nearly 28 inches wide, 18 inches deep, and 26 inches tall, so you won't be able to cram it into the floppy slot on your ancient PC.… Read more

After making changes to the drive configuration in OS X you may run into an issue where the system will not boot as fast as it previously did. In these cases the system may sit at the gray boot screen for a while before the OS loads, but when it finally does, the system will otherwise run just fine.

This problem can happen after several types of drive configuration changes, which include replacing a faulty drive, upgrading the drive to a larger or faster one, or migrating to a new storage approach such as a custom Fusion Drive setup in OS X Lion or later.… Read more

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a tool designed to test the speed of your drives. Why bother? Well, if you are accessing or storing video or other real-time demanding applications, you want a drive that can keep up with the read and write demands of those applications. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is designed to let you know how fast your drives are and report their speed changes over time. The app is free and installs easily.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test launches with a dialog sporting two rotary speed gauges, one for reads and the other for writes. Below those two … Read more

Disk Inventory X is a free disk utility for Mac OS X that gives you a summary of your disk usage, both in text and visually. Need to know how much space is being taken up on your drives by photos or audio files? Disk Inventory X will give you the answer quickly.

The program is easy to install, and its interface is clean. When you run it there's a simple disk selector dialog, which expands to a larger window. A standard hierarchical view of your drive in the left pane shows you the total size of each folder … Read more

Nowadays, it's not uncommon for each of us to have multiple devices for listening to and accessing music, including an iPhone, iPod Touch, and/or an iPad. And it's important to have a program that will easily allow you to transfer files to and from devices without any kind of hassle. DiskAid offers users a means to do this, but the trial version we tested would not let us complete a file transfer.

When installing DiskAid, we encountered our first hiccup: It requires that you have the newest version of iTunes installed, so you'll have to do … Read more

Apple's iPhone and iPad have emerged as poster children for the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs.

Can't Apple make the MacBook, iPad, and iPhone in the U.S.? -- was the plea posed as a question by the CNN moderator Tuesday night -- with both Obama and Romney providing answers relatively lacking in nuance.

So, I decided to ask a different question to IHS iSuppli: How of much the stuff inside the iPhone 5 is provided by U.S. companies -- regardless of where it's made. That's a fair question since focusing on where something's … Read more

Disk Drill for Mac is a useful utility that creates a recovery disk volume with copies of your important files. If you delete a file by accident, you can then recover it from that vault. If the file is recently deleted, you can probably even recover it from the original volume. In addition, Disk Drill for Mac also monitors the state of your hard drive and notifies you of potential failures or capacity limitations. Disk Drill for Mac is a slimmed-down version available for free, with the Pro edition available for $89.99. With the free version, disk scanning and … Read more

Hard drives are easily surpassing 3TB storage capacities, either individually or when used in RAID arrays, and have become attractive options for external storage on various Mac users, not only for various data libraries (i.e., iTunes and iPhoto), but also for Time Machine backups. However, some people have encountered an apparent bug in which using some drives in Mountain Lion results in partitioning errors and the inability to access data on the drives.

When the problems happen, the drive becomes inaccessible, and when checking with Disk Utility users will see an error that states, "Error: Partition map repair … Read more

Defragging your hard drive is an important part of system maintenance; regular defragging can improve performance by making sure that all the parts of each file are stored together, which makes it faster to access them. Auslogics Disk Defrag is a simple way to take care of this task. With a straightforward interface and a few useful extras, Auslogics Disk Defrag is a great choice for users of all skill levels.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, featuring the classic cluster map that displays fragmented, unfragmented, and empty space. Auslogics Disk Defrag took 14 seconds to run a … Read more