Hard drives are critical components in every personal computer. They store the data that you are working with and a failure or defect could lead to data loss sometimes without the possibility of recovering the data. Backups are of course a good idea but monitoring the hard drives performance is another method to check if it is likely that your hard drives might be at the end of their life cycle.

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If you think that your IDE hard drives are slow you might want to check their transfer mode by going into Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. Click on IDE ATA / ATAPI Controllers and right click the primary ide channel (and secondary ide channel if you have hard drives there too) and select properties from the menu. Select advanced setttings from the tab and check the setting under current transfer mode. If you see Pio or a low Ultra DMA mode you might want to try the following fix to increase the speed of your drive(s).

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Raid which means Redundant Array Of Independent Disks has been mostly used as a technology for servers. This is slowly changing as users are becoming aware of the possibilities of a raid system. There are many RAID configurations out there the most common ones are Raid 0 (Striped Disk Array) and Raid 1 (Mirroring).

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Only a few days ago I wrote a first small article about true crypt and recommended it. Back then I bought a usb 2.0 hard drive with 300 GB capacity and encrypted its entire partition with true crypt. This was done to test the programs functionality but also to see if it would slow down my main computer (athlon 64 3000+, 1 gb ram).

To my great suprise it did not slow down the pc and I decided to expand the encryption to cover all my hard drives. Let me tell you why and how i did this and why you should also be considering this.

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I thought about encrypting my hard disks, or at least part of them that contain personal data, for at least one year. I never did it because I thought it would be a lot of work involved. I had to find a good program, one that would offer good encryption algorithms, would be free and easy to use.

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