hard drives

Shooting a lot of photos and/or videos? Ripping a lot of Blu-ray movies? Recording a lot of TV shows? Activities like these require a lot of storage -- the more, the better.

Through tomorrow, or until they sell out, Newegg has the Western Digital My Book 3TB external USB 3.0 hard drive for $79.99 shipped. That's after applying coupon code 72HRSL066 at checkout. (Note that you must be a registered Newegg user in order to use the code.)

Update: Well, folks, the universe has conspired against me once again. I promise you I tested that code … Read more

If you use an external disk drive with OS X, you may notice that when it is mounted, it becomes available for all users on the system. Therefore, if you have files you have saved to a USB drive and you attach it to your system and you switch user accounts, those files will be viewable within the second account.

In addition, if you have network file sharing enabled, the files on this drive will be accessible to any user who logs in via the network.

This behavior may seem a bit concerning, especially for those who have set up … Read more

Do you have an external hard drive that you cannot write to on your Mac? While most external storage media's default formatting and other setups should make them both readable and writable on most Mac systems, there may be times when this is not the case.

NTFS formatting The first detail to check is if the drive is formatted to the popular NTFS format used in Windows systems. Often commercially available drives will be formatted to FAT32 and therefore be fully compatible with both Windows and OS X; however, many popular drives (especially high-capacity ones) may be formatted to … Read more

Intel today introduced the DC S3500 series solid-state drive, which brings enterprise performance at a cost that general consumers can afford. The new drive is optimized for read performance, which is important for data centers, or storage servers.

The new drive supports the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and is available in both 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch designs. The former is available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 240GB, 300GB, 480GB, 600GB, and 800GB capacities, while the latter is available in 80GB, 240GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities. Both designs are 7mm thick.

Intel says the new SSD uses its 20nm NAND flash … Read more

The other day I asked if it still made sense to buy a mammoth hard drive. For my money, the smarter buy is a compact, portable, smaller-capacity drive that's fast, affordable, and USB-powered.

Like this one: While supplies last, TigerDirect has the Western Digital Elements SE 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive for $59.99, plus around $4 for shipping. That's after redeeming a $10 mail-in rebate (PDF). It sells elsewhere (Newegg, Staples, etc.) for at least $80.

Compatible with Windows and Mac systems alike (though you'll need to reformat it for use with the latter), the … Read more

Today only, over at Rakuten.com, you can buy a Seagate Expansion 4TB USB 3.0 hard drive for $139.99 shipped when you apply coupon code 5419C15 at checkout.

Four terabytes. For $140. That's quite possibly the best storage deal I've ever seen, at least in terms of price per terabyte.

On the other hand, what on earth would a person do with that much space? Sure, if you use your PC as a media center and record a lot of high-def TV shows and movies, this would be great. (Flip side: If you're hoarding 4TB … Read more

When you attach an external drive or other secondary drive to a Mac, the volume on it will mount and become available in the Finder and the Finder sidebar for your various uses. To eject the drive, you simply need to click the eject button next to the drive's name in the sidebar, or select the drive and press Command-E, choosing the option to do so from the contextual menu, or even drag it to the trash.

These actions can be performed on one or more selected volumes; once it's ejected, you can safely remove the drive from … Read more

Western Digital announced today the WD Se SATA 3.5-inch standard hard drive, which offers up to 4TB of storage space.

While it's not the first hard drive with this top capacity -- both WD and Seagate have had other 4TB hard drives -- WD says that the new WD Se is the first that's designed for scale-out data center deployments, yet is still affordable. The hard drive supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard, comes with 64MB of cache memory, and spins at 7,200rpm.

According to WD, the new hard drive uses enterprise components and technologies … Read more

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

This week, readers asked about how to batch-edit files to add missing file extensions so they can be read in an applicable program, the options for adding more space to a MacBook Pro system with fixed flash memory, and the possibilities for secure-erasing e-mail messages from within Apple's Mail program.

I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Batch-addition of file extensions to unreadable files. MacFixIt reader … Read more