I won’t repeat what the article says here, but it’s extensive and he’s gone into some depth.  I would like to add my voice to a choir though.

I built myself a new desktop PC back in July 2010 around an Intel Core i7 860 running at 2.80GHz, 6Gb of DDR3 RAM and an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD.  I bought this particular SSD on the recommendation of PC Pro magazine here in the UK who had only the month before group tested a great deal of them.

I also bought a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1Tb hard disk, a couple of them actually, for data storage as they too had come recommended in a group test.  Both of these components I selected for sheer speed.

Now I can attest that not only is booting Windows 7 from an SSD significantly quicker than from any conventional hard disk, but running it from the SSD is also significantly quicker day to day.  If that is, you buy the correct SSD!

One of the things that the PC Pro group test revealed is that the wrong SSD can be as slow as a normal, ordinary middle of the road, mechanical hard disk.

If you intend to buy an SSD it’s worth checking the computer magazines and online to see group tests that compare the current crop of disks side-by-side as the differences in read/write and general access times can vary dramatically.

So have a look at Ed’s article as it’s extremely informative, but before you rush out to buy yourself an SSD, do your homework and make sure that you’re not throwing your money away on an expensive gadget which will provide no real-world benefits.

Installation

Surprise! If you are using a modern Ubuntu distribution you should find Baobab pre-installed and located in Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer. If you do not find it installed on your machine, you will find it in your standard repository, so just follow these steps:

1. Open up Ubuntu Software Center.
2. Search for “baobab” (No quotes).
3. Click Install.
4. Let the installation finish.

Features

• Scan entire file system.
• Scan specific directories.
• Scan remote server.
• View as Ring Chart or Treemap.

Usage

Figure 1

When you fire up Baobab you can immediately initiate a scan by clicking the button associated with the scan you want to run (see Figure 1). If you want to just scan your ~/ (HOME) directory click the Scan Home button. To scan the entire file system click the disk button (second button from left).

Figure 1 shows the results of a full file system scan displaying in a Ring Chart view. If you hover your cursor over a specific ring the details of that ring will appear (really, it only gives you the location associated with that ring). If you hover your cursor over the center circle you will see the details of each ring.

Figure 2

But let’s say you want to take a peek at a specific directory on that file system. To do this you can navigate to that directory in the left pane and then select the specific directory you want to view. Figure 2 illustrates the details shown when you hover your mouse over the center circle.

Instead of navigating from the left pane, you can also navigate your file system hierarchy by clicking on the various rings. When you click on a ring you will dive deeper into that ring to reveal sub folders. Once you have reached the deepest child directory the only graphic displayed will be the gray circle.

Scanning a remote folder

To scan a remote folder you click the remote folder button (the up and down arrows) and then walk through a wizard that should be familiar (It’s the same wizard you use in GNOME to connect to a server from within the Places menu). Once connected, the scanning process is exactly the same as it is when you run a local scan.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a tool to help you keep track of how your file systems are filling up, Baobab is an outstanding tool to fill this need. It’s simple to use, flexible, interactive, and works well locally and remotely.

The hard disk, which you can see in the image below, follows National Geographic’s external hard disk containing their own back catalogue and it’s certainly a very valuable asset to bundle with the drive given how much back copies of such a cult-magazine can sell for.

The question does need to be asked though are the same people who would like to have electronic copies of all the back issues of Playboy the same people who would happily carry around a Playboy hard disk to their friends, family or even a work premises?

There’s also the issue of price.  Those magazines don’t come completely free as the drive will set you back $300 (£190).

There have always been a huge variety of hard disk wiping packages available from third-parties, but did you know that Windows 7 has it’s own free in-built tool for securely erasing, not just whole hard disks, but specific folders as well?

The cipher.exe tool has been around for years now and is used for managing the EFS (Encrypted File System) feature that preceeded Bitlocker and was first introduced with Windows 2000.  It’s run from the Command Prompt (as an Administrator).

With Windows 7 though Microsoft have added a new switch to the tool, and it’s one you should definitely use with care!

 The command is Simply cipher /w x:\folder where you would substitute x:\folder for the location you want wiped, for instance your D:\ drive or your C:\Users\Mike Halsey\Music folder.

This will write a series of 0s, 1s and then random characters to every sector of the drive or folder to securely erase the data that’s stored there.  Believe me, if you do this casually you’re not going to get your data back afterwards.

Microsoft say that this feature is here for clearing empty folders and drives that need to be erased, and it’s an excellent way to save money on expensive third-party software.

So the next time you’re upgrading your hard disk, don’t waste your money, just cipher the thing instead.

I decided to run a hard disk analyzer for a visual display of the files and folders that used most of the space on the hard drive. Disk Space Fan was my choice but any hard disk analyzer will do.

I noticed two files that were using 14 Gigabytes of space together: hiberfil.sys with 6 Gigabytes and pagefile.sys with 8 Gigabytes. Hiberfil.sys is used for hibernation, a feature that I’m not using at all while pagefile.sys was the data that the pagefile in Windows allocated for disk caching purposes. Eight Gigabyte sounded a lot considering that the computer had eight Gigabytes of computer memory installed.

I therefore decided to disable hibernation completely to free up the six Gigabytes it was using and reduce the pagefile from eight Gigabytes to a maximum of two thus freeing up 12 Gigabytes of hard disk space on a 80 Gigabyte hard drive, not bad I would say.

Disabling Hibernation

The easiest way to do this is to open an elevated command prompt (by right-clicking the cmd tool in the start menu and selecting the run as administrator option). The command to turn off hibernation in Windows is “powercfg.exe -h off” without the “”. A restart is required for the changes to take effect. Windows will remove hiberfil.sys from the system which frees up the allocated disk space.

Reducing the size of the pagefile

The pagefile can be controlled in the Windows control panel. A click on System and Security > System > Advanced System Settings will display a new configuration window. A click on the Settings button under Performance and the selection of the Advanced tab in the opening menu will display the current pagefile settings. A click on the Change button makes it possible to reduce the size of the pagefile by manually selecting a value for the file.

The two little configuration changes freed up 12 Gigabytes of storage space on the hard drive allowing me to install the applications that I wanted without breaking the 20% rule. Do you have additional tips for saving up space on the primary partition? Let us hear them in the comments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 !