Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is a sophisticated hard disk partitioning tool for Windows. You can use it to create, merge and edit partitions on your hard drive but also to backup data for instance. Hard Disks can have several partitions that are then accessible through independent drive letters. My first Samsung hard drive with a capacity of 160 Gigabytes is divided into two partitions with the drive letters C and E for instance.

Categories: Operating Systems, Software, Windows

True Crypt 5 has been released yesterday and I’m very pleased with the new features that the developers have added to this awesome encryption tool. I have been using True Crypt for several years already to encrypt my external hard drives to ensure that no one without the proper password (or backdoor, hehe) would be able to access the data on those hard drives.

Categories: Security, Software

Finally we are seeing the long awaited progress in the Solid State Drives market. Ridata was the first company to announce three new 2.5″ SATA Solid State Drives in 32-, 64-, and 128GB capacities that have read speeds of up to 170 MB / per second and write speeds of up to 105 MB / per second.

Categories: Hardware

A recent forum post from ffolke at the ghacks forum asked about a free method to clone a hard drive to another one. There are actually several freeware tools out there that can do this and they distinguish each other mostly by ease of use and interface. The one tool that I would use for such a purpose is called DriveImage XML which supports SATA drivesn external hard drives and flash memory such as that of my iPod Nano.

Categories: Knowledge, Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Defragmenting the hard drives of your computer is important especially for users who install lots of programs or perform lots of read and write operations on their hard drives (p2p users for instance). In a perfect world files would be written contiguously on the hard drive – in the world of windows they are not. Read operations waste more time because all the bits that make the file are not in one place but scattered around the complete hard drive. Defragmenting the drive moves them closer to each other to speed up loading times.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Automatic Acoustic Management is a feature of most modern hard drives which reduces the seek noice at the cost of perfomance. Most hard drives have this feature disabled but it is possible to enable it using a tool like silent drive which runs on Windows Xp and 2000 only. Please note that silent drive is only working with IDE drives at the moment and that the gui is in german.

Categories: Hardware, Tools

JDiskReportenables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders. The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables. This is a great tool if you are looking for a program that analyses your hard drives content. Shows lots of useful information like which filetypes use the most space on your hard drives, file modification and folder size.

Categories: Tools

Yesterday I´ve written a short tutorial about streamripping and one of the questions that occured was if its possible to rip real audio music as well. Today i present a guide on how to rip the real audio format.

Categories: Tools