Category: IDE

Choose the Best Interface for the Job

Here’s another quick tip for tonight. These days, we have all sorts of interfaces in our computers: wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB, Firewire, eSATA, Bluetooth just to name a few. However, sometimes the most convenient interface won’t be the quickest. For instance, when I was transferring all the data from the old drives to the new …

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Windows Home Server Upgrade – Progress Report

Just wanted to share with you my “upgrade” experience going from the original Windows Home Server to Windows Home Server 2011. This morning I made some hardware upgrades, specifically: adding another 4GB RAM, replacing the existing four hard drives totaling 3TB of varying sizes with three 2TB hard drives. This part didn’t take so long …

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Dell XPS 8300 Unboxing

This was an unexpected gadget but a colleague of mine recently bought a new computer to replace an aging laptop that gave up the ghost earlier in the year. Anyway, he’s handed over his Dell XPS 8300 to me to do some basic tweaking for him. So, of course, I had to unbox it. I …

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Hard Drive Revival – Part 1

Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive (Bottom)

I thought I would document my experience with reviving a seemingly dead hard drive that I have taken receipt from a friend and small business owner. To set some background, as is often the case, this hard drive contains precious data which has largely not been backed up elsewhere. Furthermore, any attempts to boot up …

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