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Tagged by 'hard drive'

  • Memories are what give life purpose. They allow us to go back to the past, into a time that shall forever be stateless. Most importantly memories are experiences that mould us into the person we are today.

    For some reason, when I think about the word memories the first thing that come to mind are pictures... Photos to be exact. I only started thinking how important photos are to me whilst I was having a conversation with my cousin Tajesh. Tajesh popped over this weekend gone by and like always has many fascinating stories to tell. One story in particular got my attention. He told me about an amazing trip he had in Australia many many years ago and how he lost all the photos he had taken after recently damaging his hard drive. On hearing his predicament, I was profoundly moved and imagined how I'd feel if I was in his position.

    Even though our brains are wired to remember events and experiences, memories seem to somehow fade away over time and we start forgetting the little detail of images until it forms into a hazy recall. We remember enough to transport us back to a time or a place, but the brain has a strange way of patching together what we once saw. As if they are pieces of a larger puzzle. If your brain is anything like mine where you can only selectively retrieve one piece of the puzzle that is most meaningful, we're missing a vast array of information.

    I decided I'd make an attempt to try and recover my cousins lost photos. He handed over his Western Digital Caviar edition hard drive carefully enclosed in an old VHS box, entrusting I'll have it's best interests at heart and keeping whatever memories that maybe locked away safe inside... A damaged hard drive is in some ways like our brains selective recall. The data is stored somewhere but we sometimes have problems accessing them.

    I'm no hard disk recovery expert and I am hoping some off the shelf software will help me in getting at least some photos back from his holiday. So what's the game plan?

    I'll start with using a piece of software I blogged about back in 2011 - EaseUs. EaseUs provides a line of software ranging from backup to recovery. It helped me then and (fingers crossed) it'll help me now. I'll also need a 3.5 inch disk caddy to allow the hard drive to be connected via USB and start the recovery process.

    As it stands, my cousins Western Digital Caviar disk doesn't seem to have any visible damage and there are no noises when run. It just doesn't boot.

    Stay tuned for future posts on how I get on.

    To be continued...

  • Crucial 480GB SSDThe plan originally was to ditch my current laptop, Alienware M11x R3 for something a little more recent with a better build quality. Even though my Alienware is an amazing workhorse for the type of work I do (with a very high spec), I started to get annoyed with the common issue these laptop's have: screen touching the keyboard when closed.

    I wanted to get an Apple MacBook Pro Retina. But that got thrown completely out the window when I decided to go on the path of getting a property! Eek! So I had to make do with what I currently have on a very modest budget.

    As of late, I started noticing that my laptop was getting very sluggish and kept freezing every so often. This continued even after carrying a full factory format to give my Operating System a fresh install. The only thing I could amount this to was that my hard drive was on its way out.

    Luckily for me, at the same time, Amazon had some great offers in their computer components section and managed to get a Crucial 480GB Solid State Drive at a price that was an absolute steal!

    I've heard online and from a few friends of mine that once you go SSD, you definitely won't go back...and this truly is the case. I wasn't expecting to see so much of a performance increase. My laptop has never performed this well.

    At the same time, I decided to upgrade my current Operating System to Windows 8. I was getting a little bored of Windows 7. Plus, I quite like the new tiles interface. Very pretty! I don't understand the complaints or negativity. Some are obviously scared of change...but that's for a future blog post.

    Here are a few things I've noticed since my upgrade:

    • Boot times have minimised substantially.
    • My laptop always used to feel very warm during long-term usage. Now it always feels cool.
    • I'm sure battery times have improved.
    • Virtual Machines load in seconds, rather than minutes.

    Upgrading to a SSD is a very cheap and easy way to get more out of your machine. Highly recommended!