Top 10 Hard Drive Upgrades and Fixes
You
should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone
should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems,
upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain
the possibilities and procedures.
10. Quiet It Down
Over time, the moving parts and powered pieces that move your magnetic
disks around at lightning speed will wear, age, and get noisy. In a
desktop computer (a Windows PC, generally), you can quiet the drive with
rubber shock absorbers or
elastic suspension. Toting a laptop? NotebookReview has a good starter guide to
cleaning your laptop,
which reduces noise, removes dust, lowers temperatures, and gives your
drive a bit more life—never a bad thing. (Original posts:
Rubber shocks,
elastic).
9. Erase It Entirely, the Right Way
There's a huge range of tools that offer spy-agency-level data
wiping—some of them are complete overkill. What software actually wipes
the slate clean? Jason ran through them and picked out the good stuff,
along with the physical, take-no-prisoners means of data destruction, in
his advice on how to properly erase your physical media.
If you need to pass on or reuse a disk, those apps and boot CDs will
get you there. When you just need to make sure your credit card numbers
are hidden forever, there's always a hammer. No, seriously.
8. Make a Complete Image
Backups keep your data safe, but a complete image of your system on an
external drive ensures that everything—applications, data, settings,
wallpaper choice, the whole shot—make it back onto your system if things
go wrong. Windows users can image their hard drives with DriveImage
XML, a great free tool. Another free tool, SuperDuper, makes it easy, if
not exactly quick, to mirror your entire Mac onto an external drive.
7. Convert It to an External Drive
Whether it's an old desktop with a surprisingly large drive, or a laptop
that's getting an upgrade, you can save that once built-in storage and
turn it into an external drive, one you can just plug in with a USB
cable and use for backup, media storage, or whatever you need.
6. Visualize Your Usage to Free Up Space
The
strangest stuff ends up clogging up your hard drive unnecessarily.
Leftover files from CD rips, huge data folders from games, backup files
for apps you don't have installed—the list goes on. We've previously
shown how to visualize your usage, but we updated with a new look at
more simple tools for analyzing and freeing up space on your hard drive.
Once you know what's there, and how big it is, you can start toward
getting rid of some of it.
5. Recover Files and Rescue Your System
When things go wrong with your hard drive, they usually go really
wrong—lost files, no booting, and general panic ensues. Adam's rundown
recovering deleted files with free software,
with a focus on Windows utilities, with a few cross-platform goodies
sprinkled in. When you can't get into your system, we heartily recommend
a live Ubuntu thumb drive to grab files and fix things up, though a
system rescue CD session can work wonders, too. When we put the call
out, the answer that came back for the best recovery tool was Recuva, a
Windows utility that can save files from hard drives, SD cards, iPods,
and much more.
4. Install a Drive Yourself
Tech shops and laptop sellers will charge you a good bit over the parts
cost to install a new, likely larger hard drive in a computer. Whether
it's a desktop, a MacBook, or an SSD drive, you can likely take an hour
and tackle it yourself. Adam explained the desktop hard drive
installation, while tech blogger Dwight Silverman has explained a
MacBook hard drive upgrade. Each laptop is built differently, but if a
solid-state drive is in your future, this tutorial on MacBook
installation
should give you some general guidance on the job. It's a good skill to
have, in general, because as Silverman writes, "Whatever you have now,
it's not enough. And when you add more, that won't be enough, either."
(Original post: MacBook hard drive).
3. Dual-Boot Windows, Mac, and/or Linux
Just because your computer only came with one operating system doesn't
mean it has to stay that way. If you're a Mac owner who'd like a little
Windows time now and again, read up on Gina's guide to setting up Boot
Camp for Mac and Windows. If Windows 7 looks appealing, and a
virtualized XP Mode isn't quite enough oomph, you can still boot Windows
7 with XP or Vista, and just choose your Windows flavor at start-up.
And if you're keen on giving Linux a real go, why not dual boot it with
Windows 7 in a way that makes it easy on both systems? It's so nice when
everybody at the (partition) table just gets along.
2. Upgrade It Without Re-Installing
Maybe you've settled on a spacious new hard drive for your laptop, a
solid-state drive for durability, or just need to rescue your stuff
before your drive goes. Time to re-install Windows, right? Not so much.
Using the
Clonezilla Live CD, it's possible to upgrade to a spacious new hard drive
without having to completely re-arrange your operating system and
applications, and tediously transfer all your media over. It's a
step-by-step process, it's fairly straightforward, and you get to trick
Windows, somewhat, into believing that nothing ever happened, which can
be its own reward.
1. Automatically Back It Up
Don't sell your computer data short—even if your documents don't seem
all that important, the time you spent installing applications and
putting everything in order is definitely worth saving. If you've got a
good spare hard drive or a web space you can FTP into, you can set up
automatic hard drive backup through Windows. Most folks, though, will
want to go with one or both of two routes: online backup, for the
entire-house-burns-down security, and/or offline backup, for speedy
backups and convenient restoring. The best tools for doing so, when we
asked, were Dropbox for online syncing—even though it's not exactly
proper backup—and Time Machine
for external hard drive backups. For two solutions that make the
process mostly painless and care-free, try web-based, automated systems
like
Mozy or
Carbonite.
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