This should not be confused with the hardware serial number that gets added in the manufacturing process. The Hard Disk Serial Number Changer (link) can change the serial number that gets assigned when a hard drive is formatted in Windows. This can be really useful if an existing hard drive has to be formatted without loosing an activation or software association. It can also come in handy if a new hard drive is added to a computer system to replace an older one especially if software needs to be transferred or reinstalled on that new hard drive.

The software program is portable and can therefor be executed directly after finishing the download. The program will provide access to all drive letters of connected hard drives and floppy drives and their assigned serial numbers.

A click in the Serial Number text field allows to edit the existing serial which has to be in the form XXXX-XXXX with only hex symbols allowed.

Related posts

• Hard Drive Profiler (1)
• Hard Drive Diagnostic Tool Crystal Disk Info (4)
• Drive Manager (12)
• Youtube Video Search Is A Barebone Youtube Downloader (2)
• Xkcd Comic Wallpaper Changer (2)

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Related posts

• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Top Xp Freeware that every user needs part 3 (5)
• Replace iTunes with Floola (12)
• Manage your Tasks with Task Coach (3)

The software provides a clean interface. It is a bit unfortunate that one has to press the scan button before the storage consumption of a hard drive is shown in the main window. It would have been more elegant to make that an automatic option after clicking on the drive letter.

Still, the files in the root folder and all of its subfolders are displayed once the scan of a drive has finished. Each folder is listed with it’s space consumption on the drive. A nice feature is the ability to click on a folder to be taken to the next level of that folder where the program is again showing all subfolders and the amount of storage space they take up.

That makes it an elegant solution to discover the biggest “space offenders” in a particular directory on the selected drive. The software provides some additional tools like cleaning temporary files on the system, shortcuts or Internet Explorer traces. Nothing that good old CCleaner could not handle as well.

Related posts

• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 (6)
• Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space (5)
• Scan your Hard Disk for Read Errors (4)
• JDiskReport Hard Drive Analyser (1)

SpeedFan is well known program in the category of system monitoring. It is a very good tool for controlling CPU and case fans (kinda obvious from its name) and was mentioned here on ghacks numerous times. However it has an interesting secondary function of analyzing hard drive health by reading and processing SMART data.

SMART (short for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is set of values that roughly expresses the amount of working time, load and errors hard drives have experienced since leaving the factory. Unfortunately for humans SMART is bunch of hexadecimal numbers that are hard to read and even harder to understand. In addition drive manufacturers are using different attributes and values that are not helping either.

Without leaving interface SpeedFan can show (on SMART tab) the values themselves and is trying to mark meaningful ones and calculate two indexes – performance and fitness:

• failing performance index means drive no longer performs its best;
• failing fitness index means drive is preparing to die with all your data.

Since one of the attributes is drive temperature SpeeFan can tie (as it can other temperatures) it to case fans speed and control airflow depending on its value.

Deeper and better analysis is hidden behind the "Perform an in-depth online analysis of this hard disk" button. It unchains you from local interface and submits data of your drive to hddstatus online service. In seconds your browser is forwarded to an automated report on your drive.

Why the need for an online service at all? Big advantage is that the online tool has access to SMART data of all hard drives of all models ever submitted to it. Instead of vaguely guessing it compares your drive with numerous similar drives and gives evaluation that fits exactly the hard drive model.

The report itself is formatted using understandable words like "good" and "not good" plus nice graphical bars showing how far your drive's values are from optimal ones. Interesting extra is the number of drives of that model tested and min/max/average temperatures for them. Sample report.

Related posts

• Hard Drive Health Monitoring (3)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Used Hard Drives Still Haven For Identify Theft (2)
• Use Speedfan to control temperatures (9)
• Use Drive Manager To Manage And Identify Drives (6)

Some information about the drive. I ordered an OCZ 64 Gigabyte Core Series Sata II 2.5″ Solid State Drive which can be connected with the normal SATA cables. It’s pretty tiny, completely silent and I had to think a bit before I found a placement in my computer for it. Since I’m not moving my computer I put it on top of the 3,5″ bay.

It was immediately recognized by the Bios if my computer and by Windows without having to install drivers or do a Bios update. Keep in mind that I have a relatively new Bios from January 2008 though.

The only thing that I did so far was to install Windows XP on the drive and do all the driver and system updates. I have not installed any applications except for Firefox and Thunderbird yet.

Please point me to any benchmarking tests or other tests that you would like to have performed so that we can evaluate how fast the drive actually is. I’m thinking of benchmarking system start and startup of several applications that I will install on both hard drives. (I have another Windows XP system on my old hard drive).

So, if you got anything let me know and I will perform the test if I can grab the right software to do it.

Related posts

• Ridata introduces new Solid State Drives (1)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Solid State Drives Test Results (4)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)

The program recognized IDE, SATA, Firewire and SCSI hard disks. A click on Tasks > Identity opens a new window that displays all information that could be gathered about the hard disk including serial, firmware and manufacturer among 50 or so additional parameters. Those information can be printed if desired.

Far more interesting than those are the tests the user can conduct. Tests are divided into surface tests for all hard disks and special SMART tests for hard disks that support SMART.

Four surface tests are available and the user can select additional parameters like Block Size and Start & End LBA. The tests that are available are Read, Verify, Butterfly Read and Erase and only one test can be selected to run simultaneously.

One interesting option of HDD Scan is the ability to manage certain disk features. Available are AAM, APM and PM which translate to Automatic Acoustic Management, Advanced Power Management and Power Management.

The user could use the first to change the noise of the hard disk if that feature is supported. A slight drop in performance would be the consequence but it’s in my opinion well worth it.

HDD Scan is a very interesting application that provides access to features, especially those to change the Automatic Acoustic Management that are not available in many other tools of its kind. It is compatible to Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. No word on Vista compatibility though.

Related posts

• Hard Drive Diagnostic Tool Crystal Disk Info (4)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• True Crypt 5 adds System Partition Encryption (1)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)

How I know that ? I looked it up in the software Crystal Disk Info. This software basically displays all kind of information about hard drives and Solid State Disks and two that are not displayed in every other of that type are the two I mentioned above.

It does display all the usual information as well. Begins with the hard disk temperature, serial number, transfer mode, drive letters and supported features among other parameters. Two of the aforementioned parameters are worth a closer look if you are experiencing crashes or slow downs.

The temperature of the hard drive can be a cause for system crashes. It if goes to high it can lead to data loss and errors. The transfer mode can be interesting if you think that your hard drive is not as fast as it should be. Check the supported transfer modes of your drive and compare them to the one that is currently being used for it. It might very well be that it’s not the fastest available.

Crystal Disk Info is a portable application that is compatible to Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003 / 2008.

Related posts

• Ridata introduces new Solid State Drives (1)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Got My SSD, Any Questions Or Suggestions? (5)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• True Crypt 5 adds System Partition Encryption (1)

Macrium Reflect is a fast Disk Imaging and File Backup Solution that is compatible to Windows XP 32/64 bit and Windows Vista 32/64 bit. I suggest you head over to my review to find out more about the software. All of the features of the free version are of course included in this one as well.

The commercial version of Macrium Reflect adds a few – very interesting – features. It adds:

• Windows Server 2003 compatibility
• File and Folder backup and restore
• Differential disk images and backups
• Incremental disk images and backups
• VBScript Generator
• Email notifications
• Run programs before or after backup
• Shut down PC after backup
• Windows system event log support
• Windows PE 2.0 Rescue CD with RAID support
• Windows boot menu

The incremental backups will definitely come in handy.

Related posts

• Macrium Reflect Disk Imaging Free Edition (8)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• True Crypt 5 adds System Partition Encryption (1)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)

Green squares indicate no errors while red squares point to read errors in that sector. Pretty much every drive can be scanned including hard disks, floppy disks, CD or DVDs and flash drives.

Ariolic Disk Scanner is a portable application that can be run from any location without installation. The main differences to Windows Scan Disk are the visual representation of the results, the portability of the application and no error correction.

Scan Disk tries to correct errors that it discovered while the Disk Scanner is only showing them but not doing anything about them.

Related posts

• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.0 Special Edition (10)
• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 (6)
• Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space (5)

Macrium Reflect is a disk imaging software for Windows XP, Windows Server and Windows Vista that’s available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It can backup partitions or full hard disks even when Windows is running which is definitely a nice to have feature. The backups can be stored on another hard drive, network drive or optical drive which is probably not the best choice if the size of the data is bigger than ten Gigabytes.

The backup can be compressed to save space which will in turn increase the time it takes to create the backup. The user has the choice between no, medium or high compression with medium being the default value. Two additional options are noteworthy: The option to choose between an intelligent sector copy which will not copy the Windows Pagefile and Hibernation file or an exact copy of the selected hard disk or partition.

The second option is to set a maximum file size which can be set to automatic or user defined. The automatic file size will use the file system of the partition to determine the size. The full edition has a few features that the free does not have, especially incremental backups are worth to be mentioned.

It’s also worth to note that the computer has to be restarted before the first backup can be started. I tried it without restarting and received an error message but it worked fine after the first restart. A backup of my Windows partition with 38 Gigabyte of data did not take longer than 18 minutes to create which is definitely fast, not sure if it’s the fastest software though. The size on the hard disk was 29.4 Gigabytes.

Another important step is the creation of a rescue disk to be able to recover the backups when it’s necessary to do that. The last feature that deserves to be mentioned is the option to browse the images in Windows Explorer as if they were normal partitions. Great if you want to pick a file or folder from the image.

Related posts

• Macrium Reflect Full Download (3)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• True Crypt 5 adds System Partition Encryption (1)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)

When you start Ultimate Defrag for the first time you notice that is is displaying an image of your hard drive in the main pane and information i the left pane. You can select a different hard drive in the left pane or hit the analyze button to analyze the defragmentation level of the hard drive.

Once the hard disk has been analyzed one out of six methods to defragment and optimize the hard disk can be selected from the left pane. This includes the following options:

• Fragmented Files Only: Defragments the hard drive, comparable to the classic Windows defragmentation
• Consolidate: Places all directories next to each other on the hard drive to reduce seek time
• Folder / File Name: Places files and folders on the hard drive based on folder name order
• Recency: ideal for data drives. Sorts files and folders according to last access dates, modify dates and file creation dates.
• Volatile: A variation of the Recency optimization. Will order folders last modification data and files alphabetically
• Auto: The program uses its own optimization algorithm to defrag the hard disk and optimize its performance.

The user can select specific files and folders that should receive the best positions on the hard disk to achieve the best performance possible. This can be for instance the Windows directory, a game, dynamic link libraries or applications. On the other hand files and folders that do not require the best performance can be selected to be placed in the slower sectors of the hard drive. This includes archives, images and backup files.

The help file of Ultimate Defrag is excellent. It gives an explanation of hard disk performance at the beginning, explains all the settings and functions in a non-geeky way and even provides examples of how to optimize computers based on usage, say gaming, office and home.

The Ultimate Defrag Free version is available at Freeware Geeks. I would like to mention that I’m not a lab and I do not have the possibility to check the performance before and after the defragmentation scientifically. My computer is relatively new with not enough files to test the new performance. It does make sense however that this could indeed increase system performance.

Related posts

• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 (6)
• Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space (5)
• Scan your Hard Disk for Read Errors (4)
• How to Speed Up the Defragmentation (1)

The Special Edition looks much like the Hard Disk Manager 2008 Suite from Paragon which retails for $49.95. To get your free serial number for the application you need to visit the registration page and fill in your information. The serial number will be send to your email account. The download of the actual software has to be done from the Computeractive website.

The information have to be entered during installation of the software and a restart of the system is necessary before all functions become available.

I think that the Paragon Hard Disk Manager is one of the better products and will come in handy from time to time. You should definitely give it a try for as long as the offer lasts.

Related posts

• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 (6)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Steganos Security Suite 2007 for free (18)
• Scan your Hard Disk for Read Errors (4)

The article explained how to take care of the vibration but it did not tell that you would still hear the hard drive if it was noisy when reading, writing or seeking. The easiest way to take care of vibrations without paying money at all is to use some foam rubber that is placed beneath the hard drive. I’m using this technique for years with great success. This does not take care of the normal noises of the hard drive though.

The only thing that is really helping here is to either buy hard drives that have very low running noises or silence the hard drive, meaning putting it into a noise reduction case or the complete PC tower. If you do that you need to take care of a problem that is arising: heat. If you put the hard drive in a case that is reducing noises you will notice that it will run at a higher temperature which can lead to data loss and errors over time.

This means that if you silence the hard drive or the PC tower you need to make sure that everything is staying cool inside. Here is what I did. I first bought a hard drive that was making a high pitching sound whenever it was running. This was not endurable at all and I decided to trade it in for a almost silent hard drive which was causing vibration in my PC case. I placed the hard drive on the rubber foam which got rid of that problem.

That’s one reason why I really like the Flash SSD drives. They don’t produce such noises. It will take some time before they become affordable enough but it will be a great relief for everyone who likes silent PCs.

Related posts

• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Silence or Speed up your Hard Drive (5)
• Ridata introduces new Solid State Drives (1)
• JDiskReport Hard Drive Analyser (1)

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is a commercial software currently retailing for $49 according to the Paragon website. Computer Active, a British PC magazine ran a promotion last year which was announced to expire on April 11, 2007. Users were able to download a special edition of  Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 and grab a free serial number for it as well.

Jawwad found out that the offer is still valid and that it is still possible to download the special edition and generate a serial number at the Paragon website.

All you need to do to grab a free copy of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is the following:

• Download the software from the Computer Active Website
• Register it at the Paragon Website

The serial number will be send to the email that you use in the registration process.

Related posts

• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.0 Special Edition (10)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space (5)
• Steganos Security Suite 2007 for free (18)

Yet there was always the danger of temporary files, history records and the like that could give valuable clues to a possible attacker. This is no longer a point to worry about with System Partition encryption. This allows a user to encrypt his system partition, i.e. the partition or hard drive with Windows or another operating system on the fly so that no one may access the data on the system if he can’t provide the password during bootup.

True Crypt 5 adds a boot loader to the system which will ask for the password so that the system can boot. I’m planning to encrypt my whole system in the next few days. If you plan to do the same make sure you create a rescue disc to be on the safe side if something goes wrong.

Never had a problem with True Crypt in the entire years though. This major release has seen several other changes which are worth mentioning. True Crypt 5 is available for Mac OS X as well which means all major operating systems (Windows, Linux Mac) are supported right now.

The Linux version received a graphical user interface and the read / write speed was increased by up to 100% on Windows systems due to pipelined operations.

Last but not least a new algorithm was added and one removed. The SHA-512 hash algorithm replaced the SHA-1 algorithm).

What are you waiting for ? Go grab it now !

Related posts

• True Crypt 6 released (3)
• Securing your Pc with True Crypt (27)
• Increase True Crypt AES performance (7)
• Encrypting an USB Drive with True Crypt (11)
• Encrypt USB Drives (8)

We will probably see lots of announcements regarding Solid State Drives in the coming months and hopefully some huge price drops as well. As you might now I’m planning to buy one SSD for my soon to be build desktop computer to use it as my boot hard drive.

I think the problem that most users face at the moment is that many SSD don’t live up to the promise of faster speeds and that the new generation of SSD will deliver what they are expecting. It would be really awful to buy a 32 Gigabyte SSD for $600+ only to find out that it is slower than a normal 7200rpm SATA drive.

Harvey Liu, Advanced Media President. “The read rate of our 2.5″ SATA SSD drive provides users with a phenomenally fast speed. For instance, it reduces boot up and seek times to mere seconds, while installation of new software programs can be accomplished in seconds rather than minutes

Related posts

• How many hours have your hard disks been running ? (18)
• Got My SSD, Any Questions Or Suggestions? (5)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)

Drive Image XML has a real nice gui which can be run in Windows. To clone a hard drive to another one click on the drive to drive entry on the lower left side of the main window. Drive Image XML scans all drives that are currently connected to your computer and displays them all in a list. Just select a drive that you do want to clone in the first step. After that you may select to use a raw mode copy which would copy all of the sectors of the drive to another one which means that even the unused sectors would be cloned to the new location.

The hot imaging strategies only apply if you clone a drive that is currently in use. Drive Image XML tries first to lock the drive and make everything read only for the time of creating the clone and if that fails use the Volume Shadow Service to create a shadow copy of the file that can’t be locked.

Once that is set you select the drive that you want to clone the files to. Again all drives connected to the computer are available to choose from.  You should make sure to select a drive that is at least slightly larger than the drive that you want to clone.

Please note that all data on the destination partition will be overwritten and deleted in the process. I would suggest to create a partition just for cloning the drive to make sure that no data is ever overwritten or deleted on the destination drive.

Related posts

• Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space (5)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 (6)
• Tweak Vista Freeware (3)

I’m lazy. I do not want to right-click the drive, select Properties, change to the Tools tab and click on Defragment Now. Fortunately for users like me there is a workaround that adds the option to defragment your hard drive to the right-click menu when you perform that operation on a drive. We only need to add one new key to the registry and the option appears whenever we right-click a drive from then on.

Open your registry by hitting the windows key and R. The run dialog appears, enter regedit and hit enter. Navigate to the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell. If the shell key is missing create it by right-clicking on Drive and selecting NEW, KEY and enter the name shell. Create a subkey the same way naming it defragnow. Double-click the default value on the left side and add a name for the command that will appear in the right-click menu, defrag for instance.

Right-click on defragnow and create a new subkey called command. Double-Click the Default entry on the left side again and enter the following value: defrag.exe %1 -v

Once done close the registry and right-click a drive to see if the new option defrag appears. If it does test it by left-clicking on it, a new window should appear and the defragmentation should automatically start.

Related posts

• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• JkDefrag Updated Now Known As MyDefrag (7)
• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• True Crypt 5 adds System Partition Encryption (1)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)

Run silent drive after unzipping the 18K freeware to a location on your hard drive. It should automatically detect your IDE drives and display the drives current setting, it will most likely be disabled. To silence your hard drive you would select the
leise (silent) switch, mittel (medium) means a balance between performance and noise and laut (noisy) means maximum performance but more noise. Click on seek-test after you changed the setting to hear how noisy your hard drive is.

You can change the settings back to default of course and everything will be as it was. The settings you make are saved by the hard drive itself. It might be that your bios is reverting the changes on every start. This would mean that your only option would be to add silent drive to your autostart.

The parameter would look the following:

SlilentDrive -d0 -mo

with -d0 to -d3 identifying the hard drive and -m0 (off), -mm (medium) and -mq (silent)

An alternative that also works with SATA hard drives is Hitachis Feature tool that is also working with most hard drives out there. Hitachi provides a download of a boot disk or iso image of the tool which you have to boot from to use. The great thing about this is that users that are not using Windows XP or 2000 will be able to change the settings with the boot disks.

Related posts

• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)
• Ridata introduces new Solid State Drives (1)
• Lower the noise of your hard drives (3)

This is ad- and nag-free uncrippled binary multi-platform software that is free of charge and that never expires.

Related posts

• Visualize Hard Drive Space (3)
• Ultimate Defrag (16)
• Silencing your hard drives (6)
• Silence or Speed up your Hard Drive (5)
• Ridata introduces new Solid State Drives (1)