Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Seriously? A kilo of feathers weighs the same as a kilo of lead, right? A kilo is a kilo, even if the materials have different densities and volumes. Likewise, a TB of storage is a TB of storage, even if the materials change. SSD, HDD, floppy, cassette, punch card, perforated tape — or even written…
It’s odd: Questions about the physical weight of data get asked fairly often — I don’t know what’s prompting it. Perhaps the move to SSDs? The most recent iteration phrased it this way: “Does data have physical weight? If something is 10 gigabytes, does it actually weigh whatever system you have it installed on down?”…
A classic hard drive is a complex mechanical assemblage consisting of a circuit board, one or more spinning platters, a spindle, a hub, bearings, several read/write heads on actuating arms, at least two electric motors, and miscellaneous wiring, connectors, and other parts. (Examples.) In contrast, a SATA SSD contains just air and a circuit board….
(Answer requested by Anthony Dimpu) Sure. In general, drive cloning basically just hoovers up the ones and zeros from a source disk; and lays them down, unchanged and unexamined, in an exactly analogous pattern on another disk. It doesn’t matter to the cloning software what the ones and zeros represent, or whether the data is…
The general rule is: Put the operating system, and your other most-frequently-accessed files, on the fastest drive. NVMe drives can be faster than classic SATA drives; but the fastest SATA SSDs are faster than some run-of-the-mill NVMe SSDs. Plus, some of the spec-sheet advantages of NVMe may not matter all that much under real-world conditions….
Yup. It’s not a widespread practice, but floppies crop up in places you might not expect. One spectacular example: The U.S. is still using floppy disks to run its nuclear program ( https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/us/pentagon-floppy-disks-nuclear/index.html ) US nuclear force still uses floppy disks ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36385839 ) The Pentagon’s Huge Atomic Floppies ( https://time.com/4348494/pentagon-nuclear-floppy-disks/ ) Yes, The Pentagon…
Ah, the ouroboros thing — software eating its own tail, or something. 🙂 If everything works as it should, the uninstaller should successfully uninstall itself, no big deal. Because the uninstaller is running, some of its in-use files may not be able to be properly removed right away. If everything is working as it should,…
The recent post,“Is it possible to retrieve data from an HDD that’s been zeroed out?” generated some interesting mail arguing the technical merits of single vs. multipass, and random vs nonrandom, overwrites. For example, Miles Wolbe sent in this excellent note: Hi Fred, This is a topic that has interested me for some time: Is…
It depends on what level of snooping you want to guard against. But in all cases, it’s smart to start by reformatting and data-wiping any kind of drive/memory that you’re discarding. So, that’s the first step. Next, you can deter casual snoops simply by destroying the physical USB package: Use pliers to break off the…
Depends on what kind of changes you mean; and on variables such as which OS you’re using. For example, if you pre-vacation shutdown included a pending update to a new version of Windows (perhaps without you realizing it), the update would complete when you next turned on the PC — even if that was after…