Best NAS drive: Overview

NAS (network attached storage) devices certainly aren't the most glamorous gadgets you can have in your home. A network-connected hard drive might seem like a remnant from a home office – a backup necessity for over-paranoid users and not much more.

Early NAS devices – and even some new no-frills budget ones – do little more than allow any computer that's connected to a network to access an external hard drive as if it was physically installed in the computer. However, a lot of new NAS devices have some great features built in, which can completely transform what your home network is capable of.

Not only can they act as media servers throughout your house – letting your devices access and stream music and videos to any device on the network – they can also be used be used to stream your media across the internet, letting you access the files from anywhere in the world, and effectively allowing you to create your own version of Spotify or Netflix.

As for cloud backup and synchronisation services, while you could pay Dropbox the equivalent of $9.99 a month for 50GB of space, with a NAS device you could have your own service with huge amounts of storage (some NAS devices accept hard drives of up to 3TB) without monthly fees or the need to trust your private data to a third party. We've gathered the best NAS devices on the market to find out just what they are capable of.

Buffalo Cloudstation Duo - £240
www.buffalotech.com

Western Digital My Book Live - £147
www.wdc.com

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 - £423
www.netgear.co.uk

Buffalo Linkstation Pro LS-VL - £129
www.buffalotech.com

D-Link ShareCenter - £60
www.dlink.com

Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 - £274
www.iomega.com

Netgear Stora MS2110 - £130
www.netgear.co.uk

Synology DS411 - £485
www.synology.com

Best network storage: 1-6

1. Buffalo Cloudstation Duo

There remains a lingering feeling that setting up a network attached storage device can be complicated, time consuming and fiddly. Buffalo aims to dispel these preconceptions with the Cloudstation Duo, a NAS kit designed to be as user friendly as possible without losing any features or functionality.

The device itself is compact, though quite heavy. Flicking open the front gives quick access to the two 1TB hard drives that come installed. Removing the drives is a bit fiddly at first, but the process is certainly a lot easier than with many other NAS drives.

The fact that the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo is supplied with two large hard drives already installed and set up in a RAID 1 configuration is great, and eliminates a more fiddly and complicated part of the setup procedure.

Read the full Buffalo Cloudstation Duo review

2. Western Digital My Book Live

When it comes to hard drives, Western Digital knows its stuff. While the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo is promoted for its ease of use, the Western Digital My Book Live goes even further in its pursuit of simplicity.

For a start, the small case is completely enclosed, so there is no easy way to open the My Book Live up and replace or upgrade the hard drive as you can with the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo. This means that it's not really suitable as a comprehensive backup device – the lack of hot swappable hard drives means you'd have to physically remove the entire thing if you wanted to store your data safely off site.

The 'My' in the title is evidence that this is a NAS device that focuses on creating your own personal cloud, sharing your own media and files across the internet with as little fuss as possible.

Read the full Digital My Book Live review

3. Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4

NAS devices are a speedy, convenient means of backing up data, and units like the ReadyNAS Ultra 4 featured here are also capable of streaming any multimedia files to any device that can accept them.

Each of the ReadyNAS Ultra 4's bays can accommodate a 2TB drive, resulting in a possible 8TB of storage – that's an awful lot of video, photos and music.

The Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 supports various implementations of RAID technology, which trades off available capacity against protection for your data. If one of the drives fails, you should be able to recover your files.

Features like RAIDar and X-RAID 2 help you make the most of this handy feature. Powered by a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, it's speedy and responsive. The onboard DLNA 1.5 media server worked well with a variety of networked players. Even multiple full HD video streams were glitch-free.

Read the full Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 review

4. Buffalo LinkStation Pro LS-VL

Devices like these are becoming the tool of choice for storing a wide range of digital media, including downloaded movies and TV, music, images and CD/DVD/Blu-ray rips. Speed, capacity and reliability are all essential features, and the Linkstation Pro LS-VL has all three.

This 'Multimedia Shared Network Storage BitTorrent Download Box', ships with a power supply, LAN cable and installation discs, and is available with built-in SATA hard drives in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB sizes. Windows and Mac OS X compatible, the unit is simply plugged into any network Ethernet port or into the back of your wireless router, and is instantly accessible from any networked device.

The device features transfer speeds up to 76MB/s courtesy of a 1.6GHz CPU, which is a big increase from Buffalo's more home user-orientated Cloudstation Duo.

Read the full Buffalo LinkStation Pro LS-VL review

5. D-Link ShareCenter

D-Link has designed its NAS device to be at the centre of your home network, sharing your files and media throughout your home and over the internet – an admirable aim. The installation process is fairly straightforward, though there are a few options that you need to set yourself, and these can be confusing if you're not used to setting up network attached storage devices.

For example, at one point you're asked if you want to enable NTP server, without any explanation of what this is. There's also a step that asks you to enter your email address, along with port number and SMTP server – a pain if you don't have that information readily to hand.

The network drive wasn't mapped during installation – instead we had to run the D-Link Easy Search Utility, which found the D-Link ShareCenter on our network and then let us map it.

As with other aspects of the ShareCenter, the execution was rather cumbersome and inelegant, but it worked.

Read the full D-Link ShareCenter review

6. Iomega's StorCenter ix2-200

This 2TB NAS drive is billed as cloud storage, which means you can access the drive from anywhere with an internet connection. It's nothing hugely new, but Iomega has provided a good web interface for accessing your stored data online.

Unlike some of the other drives in our test, we had to install software to make it appear on our network. Fortunately, the software is well designed and your hand is held firmly through the process, making it ideal for people who have never used a NAS drive before.

From here, every feature of the drive is clearly explained with colourful bold icons, and essential tasks – such as setting up backups – are highlighted.

There's a range of useful tools too, from email updates to let you know if anything's changed on the drive itself, to the rather useful ability to download torrent files. You can also view hardware statistics, such as how full the drive is, and its current temperature. It's ideally suited to a RAID setup, too, and this can be implemented quickly and easily.

Read the full Iomega's StorCenter ix2-200 review

Best network storage: 7,8 and verdict

7. Netgear's Stora MS2110

We had high hopes for Netgear's NAS drive – after all, Netgear's home networking solutions have often trumped the competition in tests like these. However, we found ourselves sorely let down.

As soon as we connected the drive, all other computers on the network lost the ability to connect. It turned out that the drive had been completely locked down to the previous user, forcing us to do a complete hardware reset. That's not hugely unusual, but we're not sure why Netgear insists on you entering a software-style product key for something that's unlikely to ever leave your home or office.

Although the drive is hefty, the build quality is below par. The front panel – which clicks off to access the hard drives – sprang off in our hands. In fact, merely placing it on the floor caused the panel to flop open. Fortunately, the drives inside feel nicely secure, with a latch at the back to eject them.

Read the full Netgear's Stora MS2110 review

8. Synology DS411

The DiskStation feels like it's stuck between being a consumer-friendly NAS drive and a rack-mounted server. It's supplied without any hard drives, and looks like a small PC, complete with thumbscrews at the back and an array of lights at the front.

Synology recommends certain drives for the product, which are formatted on insertion. This isn't an easy process, especially compared to the more user-friendly drives we've looked at.

Hard drives must be mounted and formatted with Synology's software, and then the NAS drive itself has to be configured via a small patch located on the CD. Then any folders you want on the drive need to be added manually. These all seem like features that would be automated on other NAS drives.

Read the full Synology DS411 review

Verdict

This group test proved to be a perfect microcosm of the current state of the NAS market. On one hand you have devices that stick to the old ways of doing things – heaps of functionality, but with little thought of user-friendliness. The main culprits here are the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4, the D-Link ShareCenter and the Synology DS411.

On the other side of the divide are the devices whose manufacturers have acknowledged that there is a growing market for centralised storage in the home, and have tailored their devices to offer easy to use interfaces for creating our very own personal clouds without a single network administrator in sight.

We believe that these devices that will excel in the future, when more homes are equipped with internet enabled devices like smart TVs, leaving the backwards-looking NAS devices in their wake.

Best NAS: Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 - £274

The StorCenter ix2-200 encapsulates everything we were looking for in a NAS device. Its advanced features are wrapped up in a user friendly package that's easy to set up and maintain. It isn't as fast as a professional NAS, but for the internet connected home, this is a great choice.

Best value NAS: Western Digital My Book Live - £147

It's not quite the cheapest NAS device on test here, but the Western Digital My Book Live wins the best value award because it has some great features, is reliable and is easy to use. If you want a relatively cheap NAS device that you can quickly set up and then just leave it to do its job without you having to check on it and tinker every now and then, go for this.

IBM Research has successfully demonstrated that you can store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms – a discovery which could pave the way to smaller, faster and more energy efficient hard drives in our favourite devices.

Current hard-drives need around one million atoms to store a single bit of information, according to IBM's scientists, but that atomic limit of magnetic memory is just 12 atoms.

So what does that actually mean for our tablets, computers, mobile phones and any other device that stores information.

Manipulate matter

Well according to the research: "The ability to manipulate matter by its most basic components – atom by atom – could lead to the vital understanding necessary to build smaller, faster and more energy-efficient devices."

IBM's research was conducted as it became clear that silicon transistor technology has "fundamental physical limitations" which suggest that the current scaling efforts will plateau.

IBM Research suggests that nanostructures – built one atom at a time – could utilise antiferromagnetism and store 100 times more information in the same amount of space.

"The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom, said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research.

"We're taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit -- single atoms -- to build computing devices one atom at a time."

You can check out more of the details on IBM's website.

LaCie has announced the 2big Tunderbolt Series and the eSATA Hub Thunderbolt series at CES 2012.

The storage specialist is showing off its latest Thunderbolt-equipped offerings with the technology offering transfer rates three times that of FireWire 800.

LaCie 2big features RAID security, hot swappable discs and a solid aluminimum case, with capacities up to 8TB for people with massive storage needs.

New lease

The eSATA Hub Thunderbolt "gives new life" to existing eSATA drives by allowing you to connect up two eSATA external drives to its ports and take advantage of the Thunderbolt connection.

"LaCie is proud to offer the widest range of storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology," said Erwan Girard, professional business unit manager at LaCie.

"These products are some of the fastest and most flexible storage solutions on the market. They will dramatically accelerate the workflow of even the most demanding digital users."

Seagate has finalised its purchase of Samsung's hard disk drive business –gaining 'select elements' including assets, infrastructure and employees.

American company Seagate has snapped up the HDD business and takes over the likes of Samsung's high capacity 2.5-inch drives along with bringing over some of the key design engineers and senior managers from the Korean company.

"Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

Exciting time

"It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage."

The deal was announced back in April alongside a strategic partnership that will see Seagate drives used in Samsung laptops and Seagate gaining semi-conductors from Samsung for its solid state drives.

"The companies have also extended and enhanced their existing patent cross-license agreement and have expanded cooperation to co-develop enterprise storage solutions," added Seagate's release.

The price and availability of hard-disk drives has shot up by as much as 150 per cent since the floods in Thailand caused many manufacturing plants to close.

Idealo.co.uk has analysed the price changes on its shopping comparison site, finding that average prices went up 151 per cent from 1 October to 14 November – that means that hard drives that were previously around £44 went selling for £110.

Supplies run low

As well as external hard drives going up in price, Digitimes reports that there is likely to be a shortfall of around 70 million HDD for laptops and desktop computers in the final quarter of 2011.

With demand apparently around the 180 million unit mark, there are only hard drives available for between 110 and 130 million devices.

What that means is that computer manufacturers like Acer, Asus and Dell may increase prices on its notebooks for launch in December to cover the cost of the inflated components.

When will the hard drive squeeze end? It's not clear – but some manufacturers are "relatively optimsitc" that the shortages will ease in the first three months of 2012.

But it seems that the industry as a whole will take between nine and 24 months to recover, which could mean increased notebook prices throughout the whole of next year.

Lest we forget, the flooding in Thailand caused hundreds of deaths, destroyed homes and devastated lives – facts which certainly put the hard drive shortage into context. If you'd like to donate to the recovery effort, you can do so here.

Repair a dead hard drive: Where to start

When a hard drive goes bad, the first thing you'll probably do is have a good old curse at the platter gods for picking on you. You then might decide to have a bit of a panic when you realise that you didn't back up your files.

Shortly after sweating out a few pounds, you'll probably have a go at fixing it. Well, it's worth a shot after all. But chances are, unless you know exactly what the problem is and have the skills necessary to fix it, you're pretty much up poop alley.

If you're lucky and the disk head or motor hasn't been damaged, the problem could lie in the controller board or printed circuit board (PCB). Often, when there's a power surge or the drive overheats, it can damage the board. If this happens, then you can quite easily replace the PCB with one that is working and bring your hard drive back to life.

A common sign that a PCB has been in the wars is a scorch mark, but sometimes there are no visual cues to give the game away.

First things first

The PCB might not be the problem after all, then, but it's the one area of the drive that you should tackle first when something goes wrong. After all, a replacement PCB from a specialist like www.hdd-parts.com will set you back around £25 delivered to your door, so it's a relatively inexpensive way of fixing your drive.

If you were feeling plucky, you could just go to a data specialist and get a man in a white coat in a lab to carefully take your entire hard drive apart and put it all back together, in the hope of rescuing your drive, but you'll be looking at a bill for at least £1,000. Unless you really, really need the files on that drive, you'll avoid this route and go down the PCB road first.

Back to life

Does it really work? Well, we tried it on a drive that had suddenly stopped working one day. There were no horrible clicking sounds, it simply wouldn't power on – the thing was lifeless. So, we replaced the PCB with an identical working one and managed to get it working again.

This wasn't after trying it on many different drives – this was the first one we'd worked on, so it wasn't a fluke.

It's worth mentioning that if this works for you, and there's a pretty good chance that it will, once it's up and running again, don't get lazy and put it back in your PC. If it failed once, there's a probability that it will fail again. Our advice is to transfer all your sacred files to another drive and then bin it… or pop it in the trophy cabinet.

Step-by-step: Fix your hard drive

1. Take drive details down

Get a replacement PCB identical to your current one, otherwise it won't work. Note down the model number (below the S/N), the P/N, the Firmware code, Date code and Site code, as well as the Main Controller IC number, which is located on the main square black chip in the middle of the actual PCB. In our case it was the six-digit code near the top, above the word 'SEAGATE'.

2. Search for it online

Go to hdd-parts.com and enter the model of the dead drive (in our case, it's the 11-digit code two lines down from the top of the drive) into the search box at the top of the page. This won't give you the exact model, but look through the list of results and find the drive that matches all the numbers you noted down in the first step. Now, buy it!

3. Check your parts

The new PCB should take about six to 10 working days to arrive through the post. When the mail man comes round, you should receive a box with a replacement working PCB inside, as well as a torx screwdriver and installation instructions – not that you'll need this last bit. If something is amiss, email the company and they will get back to you within a couple of days.

4. Remove the old PCB

On top of the PCB you'll see five screws connecting it to the hard drive. Undo them using the torx screwdriver included in the kit, making sure that you don't lose any of them. They're pretty tiny, so once you've managed to remove them all, place them into a zip-lock bag so they don't go astray if you decide to have a break between now and the next step.

5. Attach new PCB

Make sure you ground yourself – an easy way of doing this is to put on an anti-static wrist band – and then carefully take the replacement PCB out of its anti-static bag. Pop it onto your old hard drive, making sure you line it up with the original screw holes. Take the screws from your zip-lock bag and screw the PCB down, ensuring each screw is reasonably tight.

6. Try out your drive

Turn on your PC. Then connect your hard drive to your dock, plug it into the PC and power it up. If the problem with your old drive was due to a faulty PCB, replacing it should now allow your drive to be recognised properly. Access the fi les you need, then copy them to your PC. Don't attempt to use the drive once this is done: chances are it might turn faulty in the future.

Secure Digital memory cards could soon hold your personal data and a host of smart applications, after the SD Association revealed plans to make them more functional.

The SD cards, which we're used to slotting into our cameras, smartphones, laptops and other personal devices have traditionally just held files like photos, music and documents.

However, the SD association is planning to integrate GlobalPlatform smart-chip technology which would securely protect on-board personal data, but also see cards hold a host of different information.

For example, it could hold your credit card information and could be used to authenticate purchases by NFC or it could be used as a key for subscription gaming, television or on-demand video.

Electronic wallets

The press release said that the new new smart-chip enabled SD cards in mobile phones could be used to further bring about the advent of a cashless society.

"Standardized authentication services on microSD and full-size SD memory cards would transform consumers' mobile phones and CE devices into electronic wallets carrying cashless currency and paperless identification for use in making everyday purchases such as groceries or train tickets, or in receiving customized subscription services like mobile television," it read.

"Identity features on portable devices would increase consumer control over their personal data compared to today's wallets typically bulging with cards.

"This would provide consumers with greater security than cloud-based solutions since the smart-chip enabled SD memory cards would only be active in an authorized device."

The new SD cards would stick to the existing standard meaning they could be slotted in to any device with an available port.

We certainly like the idea of being able to authenticate subscription on multiple services using an SD card, and although they'd be secure against theft, what happens when one of these go missing?

In our experience, an errant SD card, not to mention microSD cards, can be harder to find than a Liverpool fan at a Gary Neville appreciation dinner.

How to declutter your Mac

Suddenly a dialog box pops up on your screen: 'Your Startup Disk is full'. It's the final confirmation of what you've been dreading - your hard drive has finally run out of space and now you've got to do something about it. The question is, what?

You might be shocked at seeing the message. When you booted up your shiny new Mac for the first time, you couldn't believe how much hard drive space there was - you were confident you'd never fill it up, and yet here you are, a matter of years (or even months) later, and you've gobbled up every last ounce of capacity.

Don't panic, though, because we'll show you everything you need to know to solve the problem. You'll learn to identify the tell-tale signs of a rapidly constricting drive, plus discover what files are likely to be the cause of your woes. You'll then be armed with 10 tips to free up space on your drive.

Once you've fought that fire, we'll reveal more permanent solutions to the problem of keeping your drive empty so it can do its job properly: from moving key libraries and other files to a second drive, to safely upgrading your existing system drive to a larger, faster model. It's all here, so read on to become a disk-cleaning wizard.

Where does all the space go?

With all that free space disappearing fast, you need to understand both where it's gone and the consequences of letting your hard drive fill up to its limits.

The first thing to understand is how your hard drive has become so full. The likelihood is you've installed a fair few applications, some of which you were trying out and forgot all about during those heady days when you thought that space would last forever. That can account for a few gigabytes of space easily, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Next, there are all those files you've downloaded from the internet via your browser, or received as email attachments. Again, it's easy to let them just pile up on the off-chance you might need them at some unspecified point. All well and good, but yet more gigabytes of precious drive space have gone in the meantime.

The biggest drain on your hard drive will, however, be your personal files, and specifically all those photos and videos you've uploaded from your brand spanking new camera and camcorder. Today's high resolutions come at a price - every 10-megapixel photo consumes around 4MB in JPEG format, or up to 15MB in raw format. That equates to anything from 400MB to 1.5GB for every 100 photos on your hard drive.

It's even worse when you look at all the camcorder footage you've got stashed away. The average one hour HDV tape holds 13GB of data, so it doesn't take long to gobble up hundreds of gigabytes with your original footage, never mind the final edited movie.

It doesn't end there either: your iTunes library can consume more than its fair share of space, what with your music collection, podcasts, movies and TV shows to handle.

You might also be surprised to learn how many duplicated files exist on your hard drive - it's bad enough having two or three copies of a file, but when that file is a 10GB movie you can quickly see how it is that the hard drive that looked virtually bottomless a few months ago is suddenly full to the brim.

Facing the consequences

It's therefore obvious that even the largest hard drive can quickly become overwhelmed with all those files you've been copying to it. Having acknowledged that this isn't just a problem for MacBook Air owners with a paltry 64GB of drive space, what are the tell-tale signs that your drive might be starting to reach its limits?

The first landmark isn't one that will necessarily trigger any alerts, and occurs when your drive nears 90% of its capacity. Your Mac needs at least 10% free space on the drive to help it keep files in a neat, contiguous order (a process known as defragmentation).

As your drive fills up and the defrag process grinds to a halt, your files start to get split up into multiple parts to fit the available space, ending up physically scattered all over your drive.

File fragmentation may not be an issue for newer solid-state drives (SSDs) due to their lack of moving parts and an ability to access any part of the drive almost instantaneously. But for the vast majority with traditional drives (HDDs) which utilise rotating platters and mechanical drive arms, fragmentation is the first tell-tale sign that all is not well.

You'll start to notice performance suffer as the drive works harder to read and write files. Your Mac becomes increasingly sluggish. You're not doing your drive's physical health any favours either since its moving parts have to work harder, increasing drive temperature and ultimately shortening its lifespan.

Running out of space

The next milestone is reached as the amount of free space drops below 1GB. Certain applications may start to display warning messages, and performance slows even further.

Your Mac itself will start to tell you the drive is full or almost full, and exhort you to start freeing up space. You'll also start to get error messages every time you try to copy large folders to your drive, informing you there's not enough drive space to complete the operation.

Push things further, and as your free space dips below 100MB you'll find things get even worse. Applications routinely 'borrow' tens or even hundreds of megabytes of space when running, and the most resource-intensive applications will start to complain loudly about a lack of drive space, or even refuse to start at all.

Eventually you'll reach the final point: there will be little or no disk space left at all. Applications won't even be able to launch, while those applications already running may suddenly grind to a halt or begin to quit unexpectedly. Hopefully you'll never reach this point: the time to take action is when your hard drive approaches the 90% full mark, before any warning messages start to appear.

Diagnose the problem

The first thing to do, then, is find out how much free space is left on your system drive. You'll then want to identify which files are taking up the most space on your drive - it's quicker and easier to deal with a handful of large files than to try and free up a relatively small amount of space by working with dozens or even hundreds of smaller files.

It's a relatively simple process to discover how much free space is left on your hard drive: open the Go menu in Finder and select Computer. Click your system drive to select it, then press Command + I. (Alternatively, right-click the hard disk icon in Finder's sidebar and select Get Info.)

On its own, this doesn't really tell you much - simply how much free space is left on the drive. While it's possible to use the Find option in Finder to hunt down those files taking up most space on your hard drive, a better bet is to use a tool like the visually appealing DaisyDisk or Disk Inventory X to find out where those space-hogging files are.

In the case of Disk Inventory X, fire up the program after installing it. Select your drive from the list and click Open Volume. Once the drive is scanned, you can quickly and easily locate the files taking up most space.

What Disk Inventory X will confirm is that the bulk of your files reside in the Users folder inside your Home folder. That's unsurprising seeing as this is where all your movies, photos, music and other files are likely to sit.

Now you've acknowledged there's an issue, identified the likely culprits and taken that all-important backup of your drive, you're ready to start tackling the problem.

Top 10 tips for freeing up space

Reclaim much-needed disk space by removing files you no longer need

01. Empty the trash

When was the last time you emptied your Trash folder? People often make the mistake of simply dragging files into the Trash and forgetting they're still there, continuing to take up precious space on your hard drive.

Assuming you're not foolish enough to use the Trash as some kind of half-way house for files you think you might need at a later date, the quickest way to free up much-needed space is to empty it.

Open the Finder menu and choose Empty Trash to do so - if some files refuse to vanish, repeat the process, holding down Option before you click Empty Trash to remove stubborn files.

02. Clear out downloads

If you regularly download apps and other files from the web you may find one easy way to free up a few gigabytes of space is to check the Downloads folder for files. Delete any you don't need, or drag the lot to the Trash - you can always download them again.

Mail users can also clear up space by deleting long-forgotten file attachments from their mail. These are stored in your personal Library/Mail Downloads folder - it's hidden in Lion, but you can access the Library folder from Finder: hold down the Option key as you click on Go and select Library. Deleting file attachments from here won't affect the original messages. .

03. Remove duplicates

One of the biggest causes of wasted file space is duplicate files. You'll be amazed how many copies of the same file could be clogging up your hard drive. Decent duplicate-finding tools, like Singlemizer, do more than just look for matching filenames - they check the file itself to make sure it's a genuine match.

Singlemizer (£6.99 from the App Store) offers a free trial that lets you perform 20 scans of your drive before registration is required. Simply select the drives or folders you wish to scan, and then leave it to do its work.

All deleted files are sent to the Trash, so until you empty it, you can still get them back.

04. Clear out the junk

You might be surprised at how much drive space is being taken up by files you've long forgotten about. Tracking them down can be difficult, which is where DaisyDisk comes in.

It simplifies the process of identifying large files on your drive, letting you identify and - if they're no longer needed - delete them too. Note you'll need to purchase the full version (£6.99, App Store) to actually delete the files from your drive.

05. Compress old files

If there are files you don't want to lose, but don't necessarily need quick and easy access to, consider compressing them into zip file archives, which - depending on the file type - could free up significant amounts of free space.

Don't try to archive everything in a single zip file. Instead, archive groups of related files or individual folders by selecting them in Finder and choosing File > Compress…

Once complete, delete the original files and folders. To restore the archived files, just double-click the zip file to automatically extract their contents.

06. Streamline your apps

How many apps have you installed that you've never or rarely used? Another way to free up space is to delete these unwanted programs from your drive.

Dragging the program icon to the Trash is a rather imperfect solution; instead, use the free AppCleaner.

Launch the program and click Applications to view all currently installed apps. Tick those you wish to remove and click Search. Deleting programs through AppCleaner ensures a large number of related files are deleted, along with the application itself.

07. Find similar apps

With the help of a site like http://alternativeto.net it's also possible to source alternative applications that take up less drive space than the applications you're using.

Take Adobe Reader for example - why install an app that takes up 450MB of drive space when you can get most of its functionality in Skim, which takes a up a trifling 13MB, instead? Download it from http://skim-app.sourceforge.net.

08. Clear out your browser

Your web browser can build up a significant amount of clutter over time too. All browsers make use of a cache, a special folder where material from websites is downloaded to speed up future browsing of the pages in question. Technically there's no limit to how big these grow, so if you don't empty it regularly, it can soon start taking up lots of drive space.

Thankfully, erasing the cache is a simple process. Safari users can select Safari > Empty Cache, while Chrome users should select Chrome > Clear Browsing Data, tick Empty the cache and click Clear Browsing Data again. Other browsers - like Firefox and Opera - work in a similar way.

09. Clean up after iLife

It's safe to say that media files - photos, videos and music - take up the most space on someone's hard disk. Before you discover how to safely move these to another drive to free up space, start by emptying the Trash in both iPhoto and iMovie - any files deleted in the application go here rather than the actual Trash folder, so expect to free up a large amount of drive space.

You can streamline things further by rebuilding databases - hold down Option+Command as you double-click the app icon to do so. Tick Reclaim unused disk space from databases to free up some extra space.

10. Take the lazy option

If all of this sounds like too much hard work, try an all-in-one tool like MacCleanse (£5.49, Mac App Store) instead.

This will clean out everything you need from within a single app, but be warned: it's possible to make a Mac unbootable if you go too far. Back up before you begin, just in case your cleaning proves to be overzealous.

Long-term solutions

You've cleared a bit of space, but now it's time to sort things out permanently

Hopefully you've now cleared enough space from your drive to help resolve any low disk space messages you've been getting, and to ensure your drive has at least 10% free space.

That's great in the short term, but unless you consider some more permanent solutions, the same problems will reappear. The simplest thing to do is to move as much of your data as you can to an external hard drive.

Network drives

Network drives act as a central repository for all of your networked computers' spare files, but don't work with all files (such as iMovie Events). Performance will also depend on the speed of your network - use wired or HomePlug connections as opposed to wireless where possible.

Most of your data will be stored inside your Home folder, which resides inside the Users folder on your system drive. By moving some or all of the data inside this folder to your external drive, you'll free up a significant amount of space depending on how many photos, videos and other large files you possess.

The obvious solution is simply to move your entire Home folder to your external drive. While it's technically possible, it's both fiddly and potentially dangerous. If you move the Home folder, then your external drive must always be attached or connected in order for you to log into your account when your Mac starts. If the drive is lost or damaged, you'd be locked out of your profile or - if you're the only user of your Mac - your entire computer.

A safer, better solution is simply to move enough files to free up a comfortable amount of space. Which files should you move? The obvious answer is the largest ones, but you also need to consider convenience: will your external drive always be plugged into your Mac?

If you're a MacBook user, you may not want to be tied to even the slimmest external drive in order to access your files. So it makes sense to ensure those files you can't do without are always accessible on your Mac's system drive, while less essential files are moved to external drives.

Span your media

Which files you decide to keep and which ones you move across ultimately depends on your personal preferences, but you'll probably find it's practical to leave the contents of your Documents folder where it is, while any files you've kept in the Downloads folder can be safely moved across to your external drive.

Where things may get tricky is with your media files - you may find yourself wanting permanent access to certain movies, photos or music, while others can be safely stashed away on your external drive.

When it comes to the contents of your iTunes library, your music, movies, podcasts and TV shows, you have two choices. To move the entire library across to your external drive, follow the step-by-step guide here.

If you'd like to split the library between your system drive and your external drive so that favourite tracks are always available, it's possible to span your collection across two or more disks without messing up your iTunes library.

To do this, install a free program called TuneSpan. The step-by-step guide below reveals all you need to know about using it.

When it comes to your iMovie video collection, it's possible to move selected movies from your Event Library to your external drive.

Fire up iMovie, then click the drive icon next to Event Library to see all available drives. Now Command-click on those Events you wish to move to select them. Finally, hold Command as you click and drag the Events to your external drive to move them to that drive and update iMovie's references.

They'll remain in the library, but will only be accessible when your external drive is connected and switched on.

How to span your iTunes folder across multiple drives

01. Pick tracks to move

Install TuneSpan and launch it. Select an external drive as the location to span selected iTunes content to. Then drag and drop tracks, albums or the entire output for a selected artist to the grey bar near the bottom of the screen. The bar shows the space freed.

02. Start Spanning process

Once enough space is freed, press Command+B to review the items you've added to your queue (press again to return). When ready, click the Span button. Read the warning before clicking Span again - you'll need to manually update the iTunes library for any missing tracks.

03. Spanning in practice

When the drive isn't present, TuneSpan can remind you of what tracks are unavailable in iTunes: select TuneSpan > Preferences > TuneSpan Helper and set both Allow to always run and Auto launch at login to Yes. Close and reopen TuneSpan: click Allow.

Manage iPhoto library

You're probably aware just how large your iPhoto Library file is (you'll find it in your Pictures folder). It's quite unwieldy, but what can you do about it? iPhoto supports multiple libraries, so one solution is to create different libraries for different groups of photos, allowing you to move some libraries to your external drive while keeping others to hand on your system drive.

Use iPhoto Buddy (free) to help manage and switch between multiple libraries in iPhoto quickly and easily. It's also possible to keep the size of your new iPhoto library down.

Before importing any photos, choose iPhoto > Preferences > Advanced tab, then untick Copy items to the iPhoto library. This prevents the photos being duplicated in your library unless you subsequently edit them (they're then duplicated into the library to protect the originals).

That's all well and good if you're just starting out with iPhoto, but if you've got a massive library already in place, packed full of photos you've already edited, what then?

One solution is to right-click the iPhoto Library file and choose Duplicate to create an exact copy. Rename it according to the subset of photos you wish to include (for example, 'Family holiday 2011') and then use iPhoto Buddy to open it in iPhoto. Remove all the photos and folders apart from your family holiday snaps (remember to empty the iPhoto Trash) and then marvel at this slimmer library. Simply repeat the process for each new library you wish to create.

When you're finished, delete the original library. You can now split the remaining libraries between your system hard drive and your data drive accordingly.

How to upgrade your Mac hard drive

Replace your Mac's drive with a bigger, faster model

Ultimately you might decide it's not convenient - particularly if you're a MacBook user - to store your data on a separate external drive to your Mac. If you want to keep everything on a single drive, your final option is to upgrade the drive inside your Mac with a bigger model.

The first question to ask is whether or not it's something you can do yourself. Macs aren't equal, and some models are easier to upgrade than others.

The benefits of upgrading yourself are typically that you get to choose the exact drive you want at a price that's cheaper than paying someone to do the upgrade for you. The downside is that you'll invalidate any warranty you have and could look to face a hefty repair bill if something goes wrong.

If the idea of upgrading doesn't put you off, you need to discover if your Mac is one of those models that can be upgraded, or upgraded without recourse to an Apple Service Provider. As a rule of thumb, Mac Pros and later MacBooks (MacBook Air not included) are the simplest to upgrade, Mac minis are considered somewhat difficult, while iMacs are - to all intents and purposes - impossible.

To see the process you'll need to follow to upgrade your Mac's hard drive by yourself, visit http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/ for a series of instructional videos. If your model isn't listed, or you don't like what you see, it may need to be upgraded by your local Apple Store or Service Provider. If they can help, you'll be tied into their choice of drive and will have to pay an additional premium for fitting.

Pick the right hard drive

It's important you pick the right type of hard drive for your Mac: that means SATA rather than IDE for all Macs since 2006. The other key consideration is that you pick the right size drive for your Mac - 2.5-inch for MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Minis, and 3.5-inch for Mac Pros.

MacBook Airs don't use standard SATA drives - we cover this separately below. You then need to choose between a traditional hard drive (HDD) or the newer, much faster solid-state drive (SSD).

SSDs are unbelievably quick compared to their sloth-like rivals, consume less power and are silent in operation, which makes them a perfect fit for MacBooks. But all of these benefits come with a hefty premium attached. The sad, unpalatable fact is that a 64GB SSD will cost you the same as a 2.5-inch 750MB or 3.5-inch 2TB HDD (around £90-100). You'll get a major performance boost, but you won't solve your disk space problem.

There is a third way in the form of a 2.5-inch hybrid drive from Seagate. As its name suggests, the MomentusXT Hybrid combines traditional HDD storage with a tiny amount of SSD (4GB). Thanks to the drive's adaptive technology, your most frequently accessed files are placed on the SSD portion of the drive, which helps provide a notable performance improvement with reading (but not writing) files.

It's a lot less expensive at £80 for 500GB, but it's not all good news, particularly for MacBook owners. That's because the drive can cause some vibration and actually consumes more power than a traditional HDD drive.

Whatever type and size of drive you decide to purchase, there are some other considerations to make that will have an effect on the performance of your new drive. All 2011 Mac models utilise the newer SATA-600 (6Gbp/s) standard, so opt for a SATA-600 model over the older SATA-300 model if possible.

Other considerations

If you're buying a HDD, also look to replace your drive with a 7,200rpm model for maximum performance, although be aware this will generate more heat and consume more power than a slower 5,400rpm model. Also, look at the size of the onboard cache - a drive offering 32MB or even 64MB will outperform one offering 8MB.

If all of this sounds like too much hard work, we've dug out a few models that tick all the right boxes depending on your Mac. If SSD floats your boat, and you can afford the hefty premium, the Crucial 128GB M4 SATA-600 (£170) is worth considering. Mac Pro users will need a special adaptor, such as Icy Dock's MB-882SP (£12) to fit it.

Mac Pro users get the best deal in terms of value and capacity thanks to the fact that 3.5-inch drives are cheaper and more versatile than 2.5-inch models. 2TB drives are now widely available, and Hitachi's Deskstar 7K3000 ticks all the right boxes in terms of performance: 7,200rpm, SATA-600, 64MB cache. Expect to pay around £75.

1TB models are starting to make an appearance on 2.5-inch drives, but SATA-600 models are still a rarity, and come with a hefty price premium (expect to pay around £150 for a 1TB model).

If you can live with the slower SATA-300 standard, however, look at Western Digital's Scorpio Black range, one of the few to offer 7,200rpm and 16MB (as opposed to a measly 8MB) cache on its mobile drives. Its 750GB model costs around £73.

MacBook Air

As we hinted earlier, if you're looking to upgrade your MacBook Air's internal storage, it's a different kettle of fish altogether.

The 2010 and 2011 models both utilise SSD storage with mini-SATA connectors, so you'll need a special drive if you want to go down this route, and with a hefty premium to pay (as much as €1,400 for the Aura Pro Express 480GB from http://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/) it's something you might want to reconsider.

Fitting your new drive

If you're upgrading your drive yourself, make sure you take one last Time Machine backup before you swap out your old drive for your new one. Once the new drive has been fitted, switch on your Mac.

Lion users should create a boot drive or disk; Snow Leopard users should insert their OS X install disc and hold down the C key.

Then it's a simple a case of following the step-by-step guide below to restore your latest backup to your new drive using Time Machine.

Once done, you'll be booted back into OS X as if nothing had happened, except now you'll be able to take advantage of the extra speed and larger size of your new hard drive.

How to restore your Time Machine backup

01. Prepare new drive

Open the Utilities menu and select Disk Utility. Click your drive, then either choose Partition, or Erase to set it up as a single drive. If selecting Erase, give the drive a name and click Erase again. Once the process is complete close Disk Utility to return to the main menu.

02. Select a backup

From the main screen either click Restore from Time Machine Backup (Lion) or select the option from the Utilities menu (Snow Leopard). Click Continue for it to detect your drive. Select the one with your backup and click Continue to view a list of available backups.

03. Select destination

Pick the latest backup from the list and click Continue. Select your new drive from the list and click Restore followed by Continue. Your last backup will now be restored to your new drive. Once done, restart your Mac and it should take you to your desktop.

Speed up your hard drive: Intel Smart Response

We're living in the 21st century right? Sure, if you look out of the windows there may be no flying cars or orbiting space hotels, and you're definitely not basking in the heat of a fusion reactor generating endless free power.

But, if you wait several minutes, your Windows PC may just manage to provide a desktop that you can check the date with.

Despite it being a new century and there being an abundance of silicon storage, the world is still plagued by slow-spinning mechanical hard drives.

It seems you're not the only person to notice this dichotomy, as Intel with its latest Z68 chipset has introduced a technology that enables you to break free of those mechanical shackles and unleash the lightning speed of solid state storage.

Its Smart Response Technology (SRT) offers a flexible caching system based on SSD flash storage but it's currently limited, artificially so, to just the Z68 chipset.

The truth is that SRT isn't even a new idea or something that's not available through other means. The old Microsoft ReadyBoost technology still exists inside Windows 7 and new hyper-fast USB 3.0 flash drives can still make use of this. While devices such as the IcyDock Xpander hybrid SSD/HDD offers similar caching abilities, turning a lumbering spinning hard drive into a nimble solid state drive.

But the burning question remains: which is best? Which is going to boost your drive speed the most and for how much?

We've decided to find out by pitching Windows ReadyBoost backed up with a seeringly fast USB 3.0 thumb drive, against the new Intel Smart Response Technology, and all of that against third-party caching options. So we can see which, if any, is worth spending your hard earned cash on or perhaps to see if you're simply better off just getting a basic standalone SSD.

The world is going solid state and it's not so much a matter of when, but of how. Look around yourself, everything is using more and more solid state storage.

From every MP3 player to every phone, as long as storage requirements are limited then it's flash or SD storage all of the way. Not that even here things are that 'limited' with USB thumb drives hitting the 64GB level and ever increasing.

For desktop PCs the situation is far more confused. On the one hand you have gorgeous high-speed SSD drives, but with comparatively limited capacities and potentially astronomical price tags. On the other hand you have these enormous capacity spinning-disk HDDs that cost next to nothing.

Getting SMART

Enter, then, Intel's latest Sandy Bridge Z68 chipset and its Smart Response Technology. This is an extension of the existing Intel Rapid Response Technology that usually handles standard SATA drives and RAID configurations. In fact, SRT is a software extension of the standard RAID controller but let's not sell it short.

What it also is, is an exceptionally well executed hard drive caching scheme. It can make use of any SSD of any size that's attached to the chipset on either the SATA controller or what we think is hoped for: an internal mini-PCI-e slot using the purpose designed Intel 310 40GB mini-PCI-e SSD.

It promises to combine the speed of an SSD with the large capacity of a spinning HDD, which is attractive. For the cash strapped it's an interesting compromise, ideally most people would opt for a dedicated SSD boot drive with a dedicated HDD for storage.

The problem is that currently affordable SSDs simply don't have the capacity to make them truly usable as a boot drive. Models around the 80GB point are tipping well over the £120 price point. SRT promises to offer a solution to that for around £120 that provides the speed of an SSD with the multi-terabyte capacity of a HDD.

SRT's promises come at a price. That price is that currently it's only available on the Z68 Express chipset and even then the board has to come with the potentially optional Rapid Storage Technology, which is Intel code for RAID controller.

More simply put the motherboard has to use a Sandy Bridge 1155 socketed Core processor, you'll also need Windows 7 or Vista, a SATA-based SSD with at least 19GB of free space, plus a HDD without a recovery volume. Got all that?

For testing we've got the latest Zotac Z68 ITX Wi-Fi A mini-ITX motherboard, this comes with a built-in mini-PCI-e slot. Foolishly Zotac envisioned this to be used with the Wi-Fi module, but we're commandeering it and popping in an Intel 310 80GB mini-PCI-e SSD.

As long as you start with the SATA controller set to RAID, you'll be able to happily install Windows and use the system as normal. It's then possible to just drop in the SSD cache at any point. It's also possible to remove it at any point, but we'll come back to that in a little while.

The RAID BIOS will recognise and configure the SSD at boot time, this means once activated the cache acceleration works from the moment you power the PC.

To enable the acceleration Intel provides a new section in its Rapid Storage Technology utility called Accelerate. Use this to enable the system; the default settings will be fine. Just check the acceleration is being applied to the correct HDD, if you have more than one installed.

Intel has taken the decision that the cache used is no larger than 64GB. If you do try to use a larger one it'll still work with the remaining capacity partitioned off.

Matter of modes

The SRT can function in two modes Enhanced and Maximized. With Enhanced a write-through cache is maintained where data is concurrently written to both the SSD and HDD. This has the advantage of data integrity: if the power goes nothing is lost but writes can be no faster than the HDD can function.

The Maximized setting uses a write-back cache, this caches write data on the SSD and will 'write it back' to the HDD when it has to be cleared from the cache. This can greatly speed up disk writes but there is a danger of losing this data if there's a power cut. A recovery mode is available within the BIOS, this synchronises lost data between the two drives.

So the Maximized mode does add an additional risk, but the payoff is that you can see increased write throughput in the benchmarks.

Once fired up you'll initially notice no change, but before running off to flame inflammatory forum posts comparing Intel to genitalia, this is because the SSD cache is empty. On a Maximized strategy writes will be accelerated from the get-go, but for both modes reads require at least a single read of the data from the HDD for the data to be cached.

This is where Intel's smarts pay dividends. The caching strategy works on a block rather than file basis and Intel prioritises data based on a number of criteria: application, boot, user and low-priority data. The first three should be obvious as they're all blocks accessed on a regular basis. The latter category encompasses sequentially accessed data, such as watching a film, running virus scans or copying files. How Intel detects these will be a key part in maximising the cache performance.

What strikes us as odd is that despite the awesomeness of SRT, it's more than likely going to be utterly wasted on owners of Z68 boards. Any early adopter that can afford to splash out on such a bleeding-edge board, processor and memory, can certainly afford a suitably high-capacity SSD. We'd hope that this technology, much like Hyperthreading and money from the rich, trickles down to those that actually need it.

Doing a notional audit of a base Windows 7 install, that's around 16GB of space and with a few software installations on top. We'd suggest that 20GB isn't an awful amount of SSD cache to be using. Shifting to a 40GB SSD would cover far more bases such as games, with the SRT providing the smart caching for access to the most used blocks.

It's more than possible to pick up a good Intel or other 40GB SSD for around £70. Couple that with a 2TB HDD at around the £50 price point and that's going to compete well with the dedicated 80GB SSD for around the same price but with 25 times the capacity.

Speed up your hard drive: Ready for a boost?

So it's great that anyone capable of upgrading to Intel's latest technological offspring can benefit from this cache, but what about the rest of us?

The first obvious answer that springs to mind is that older Microsoft Windows Vista technology called ReadyBoost, it's still in Windows 7 and with the arrival of USB 3.0 and ultra-fast thumb drives surely it can finally make a difference for the rest of us?

ReadyBoost is much maligned and misunderstood, but largely that's the fault of Microsoft. It did a reasonable job of trying to protect ReadyBoost by enforcing a minimum-performance barrier but did very little to explain or demonstrate what ReadyBoost was doing. While end results were hard to quantify or verify.

It is a disk-caching system, which attempts to augment traditional hard drives with parallel, low-latency access to flash storage. It's also highly flexible under Windows 7, supporting up to eight devices storing a total of 256GB of cached data.

There's also a misnomer that somehow ReadyBoost is locked to or connected to system memory or the pagefile. It's not, it's entirely connected to drive caching. The misnomer comes into play from the fact a 1GB system is going to benefit far more than an 8GB system.

In fact ReadyBoost won't touch the pagefile, as it assumes the ReadyBoost drive could be removed or fail at any point, which would be very bad if it was storing pagefile data.

Under Windows 7 and Vista, ReadyBoost is activated in the same way. Plug in the USB drive and by default the Autoplay window opens asking what action should be taken. You're able to activate ReadyBoost here. Otherwise open My Computer > right-click on the drive > select Properties > ReadyBoost and choose to activate it.

If you're using a flash device larger than 4GB for the love of all that's good, make sure you format it as NTFS or exFAT, otherwise this will limit ReadyBoost to a mere 4GB for FAT32 and only 2GB for FAT16.

Part of the problem with ReadyBoost is it can be hard to tell if it's actually doing anything, which really isn't a good thing for a caching technology. We've come up with a way of monitoring its effectiveness through the standard Windows Performance Monitor, read 'Ready, steady, boost' on page 68 for more details on just how.

Generally ReadyBoost caches all writes to the local filesystem and mirrors the Superfetch system, Windows will then opt for taking from the ReadyBoost file if it thinks that's faster than reading it from the standard drive.

On our clean test system with 2GB or 4GB it seemed reluctant to ever use it. However, switch to our work machine with 4GB and it was often in action loading files on a stressed system, though it showed only minor reductions in boot or application load times.

Driving the point

The options don't just end there. We shouldn't overlook the Seagate Momentus XT drives, these combine a standard 2.5-inch HDD with a 4GB NAND cache. Available in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities, with the most expensive costing around £80 these remain more suited to laptops, as most 3.5-inch devices will match it for raw sequential read/writes.

Having said that the Momentus still retains an advantage for startup and application load times. It's just not enough in our eyes for what Seagate are charging, perhaps if they ever produced a true 3.5-inch desktop version we'd be more excited.

Finally, there's always the crazy mad-scientist option of creating your own hybrid HDD/SSD drive. IcyBox has its own Xpander Hybrid Adaptor, which is exactly that. It provides some type of hybrid RAID, as it requires storage on the HDD equal to half that of the SSD.

While this does work to a degree, in that it increases many disk operations, it doesn't manage it to the excellence of the Intel SRT. But then the Intel solution is, as you'd expect, somewhat more elegantly implemented and costs a banker's bonus.

One area we've not looked at in this feature are laptops, and the news is the mobile HM67 and QM67 chipsets will also be capable of enabling SSD caching. We're inclined to think the technology is less applicable to the mobile market, as out-and-out capacity isn't such an issue.

The technology is muddied further as the caching policy will differ on AC and DC power, which we read as being switched off under DC power. There's no question if you look at the benchmark results that the Intel Smart Response Technology works superbly. Put simply it accelerates the slow parts of Windows that you want to run faster, these are booting, starting applications and loading games. And it does it faster and better than the other solutions we've tried.

Step-by-step: boosting drive speed

Ready, steady, boost?

Unconvinced by ReadyBoost? Track its caching to see what it's up to

1. Watch the watchers

As we've mentioned part of the issue with ReadyBoost is knowing if the damn thing is providing any boost in speed in the first place. It's possible to monitor through the standard Windows Performance Monitor. To run this select Start, type 'perfmon' into the console. In the Windows that opens click 'Performance Monitor' in the top left.

2. Counting beans

By default the Performance Monitor has a CPU usage counter running. Right-click the graph area and select 'Remove All Counters'. Do the same again but select 'Add Counters', and a huge list of available counters will appear. Track down 'ReadyBoost Cache' and add suitable counters, you can [Ctrl]-click multiple ones.

3. It's doing nothing!

At this point ReadyBoost may or may not be doing something but at least you'll be able to tell if it is or not! It's certainly worth giving ReadyBoost a chance to cache files and open and close items. Keep an eye on the skipped reads measure as this indicates the flash drive is being deemed too slow to be worth using.

Getting a Smart Response

Blast the wax out of your drives with some serious acceleration

1. It's a RAID

The vital thing to do with your Z68-based installation, even if you don't have a suitable solid state drive yet, is to make sure you set the SATA controller to RAID within the BIOS and not IDE or the more usual AHCI. If you don't do this it's highly likely you'll need to reinstall Windows from scratch.

2. Smart'en up

The new Smart Response Technology is part of the longer-standing Intel Rapid Storage Technology, which manages the Intel drive controllers and RAID configuration. When a suitable SSD is installed alongside your existing drive, but not actually confi gured as a RAID, a new Accelerate option appears.

3. Too smart to fail

The Smart Response Technology is a fire and forget tech; once you've activated it just works. However, there's a BIOS section that kicks in; when the PC is first fired up press [Ctrl] + [i] to access it. This provides emergency recovery options, plus a way to safely disable and remove the cache disk if you need to.

Benchmarks

It's an impressive, or rather utterly dominating first outing for the Intel Smart Response Technology. There's no question as to its success, the only question remaining is how long will it remain relevant?

With NAND prices effectively halving every 18 months, as capacity doubles, 80GB SSDs will soon fall to the £50 level. At which point your average Joe is probably going to opt for the straight SSD boot-drive solution.

Having said that, if for another £25 you can turbocharge a 2TB HDD with a drop-in 40GB SSD, that's something people will still probably want to do and by then, hopefully, SRT will be more widely available.

We remain disappointed by ReadyBoost, it's such an obvious technology that should offer – especially when combined with USB 3.0 – a similarly efficient boost. Yet even given all the chances to shine it remains stubbornly mediocre at best.

That's especially true in light of the IcyBox Xpander - while it didn't blow us away, it did deliver measurable and tangible real-world results. But all of these are simple distraction until SSDs, and even further down the line, continuous cloud-based storage become the primary storage mediums for everyone.

Storage manufacturer Buffalo has brought out its ultra-tough MiniStation Extreme portable hard drive.

The drive is certified to US Military Standard MIL-STD-810F 516.5 Procedure IV, which means - if you don't know your US Military standards - it can survive free-fall drops of up to 2.3 metres.

It achieves this level of toughness thanks to a highly shock-resistant body and rubberised elements.

'Globetrotters'

The MiniStation Extreme also packs an integrated USB 3.0 cable, which snaps into the chassis, and Buffalo TurboPC EX technology to provide data speeds of up to 5Gbps.

"This latest addition to the MiniStation family is ideal for globetrotters who travel with their PCs and portable HDDs and demand a robust, fast and secure high performance portable storage device," said Paul Hudson, Buffalo's sales director for Northern Europe.

"The MiniStation Extreme can withstand free-fall drops of up to 2.3m making it the most robust MiniStation ever."

The drive is available in piano-black, silver and red - although we're not sure how scratch-resistant its glossy finish is.

It comes in 500GB and 1TB varieties, with the 500GB version currently retailing for £74, and the 1TB capacity priced at £134.

Solid state drive manufacturer OCZ has fixed a blue screens of death and disconnect issue with its Sandforce SF-2000 series drives, such as the Agility 3.

The problem was caused by bugs in the drives' firmware, and resulted in a blue screen error when a primary-configured drive was woken from its SATA slumber or S3 and S4 modes.

It also caused unattributable blue screen errors when set as the primary drive with the OS installed, and stuttering and freezing within Windows.

In addition, the fix prevents low-level data structure corruption and improves TRIM handling.

OCZ noted that the problems are "rare", although internet support forums suggest otherwise.

The Sand People

In a statement, OCZ said: "We highly recommend that any customers that have experienced the BSOD issue update their firmware to 2.15.

"We sincerely appreciate the support from our customers, and if any customers have any questions or require additional support please do not hesitate to contact a customer service representative and we will be happy to address any questions or concerns."

It's worth pointing out that the issues afflict all drives with Sandforce SF-2000 series chips, such as Kingston's HyperX, but OCZ has been the first vendor to directly offer a fix.

SandForce itself has also released a firmware update, number 3.3.2. And, unsurprisingly, all new OCZ SSDs will be released with the update pre-installed.

Scientists at Singapore's Agency for Science Technology and Research have upped the storage densities of hard drives - with humble table salt.

Traditionally, hard disks use randomly distributed nanoscopic grains about seven to eight nanometres in size to hold data, with a cluster of a few tens of grains holding one bit.

But the scientists - led by Dr Joel Yang - were able to add table salt to the extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography process to make grains that could hold a single bit of data, while measuring 10 nanometres.

The salty solution

The result is a super-dense form of storage that could see huge hard drives manufactured using existing processes, with today's one terabyte drives holding six times as much data.

Referred to as the "salty developer solution", which sounds incredibly wrong, Dr Yang said: "What we have shown is that bits can be patterned more densely together by reducing the number of processing steps."

The scientists are currently working on increasing the storage density further.

Buffalo Technology's latest hard drives, the DriveStation Velocity range, claim to have the ability to transfer 1,000 digital photos in under than 7 seconds.

That's all thanks to the 7,200 RPM drive along with the TurboPC Ex utility for Windows PCs which add up to a data transfer rate of 5Gbps. So while it's not the fastest hard drive we've ever heard of, it's not bad for a desk buddy for your average joe.

Unsurprisingly, it's a USB 3.0 affair but it is backwardly compatible with USB 2.0 if you're yet to upgrade and don't mind the slower speeds.

Looker

It's not a bad looking device either, coming in shiny piano black and a fairly compact frame.

Spies and other secretive sorts will be pleased to hear that it comes with 256-bit AES Full Disk Encryption to keep all those secret files and photos safe from prying eyes.

The Buffalo DriveStation Velocity is available to buy now, and will set you back the fairly reasonable prices of £89.99 for 1TB, £112 for 2TB and £164 for 3TB.

Dell's CEO, Michael Dell, has made a subtle swipe at HP's deliberation over leaving the PC market.

During his speech at Oracle Open World, Dell made it clear that his company had no intention of abandoning PCs.

"There are many reasons to stay committed to personal computing," said Dell.

"It seems these days not everyone is so totally committed... [HP] used to say the computer is personal again. I guess you might take that personally if you brought a PC from them."

Componos mentis

He went on to point out that 95 per cent of processors, disk drives and other components go into PCs, with the remaining five per cent going into storage and servers.

Because of HP's immense buying power, its decision to leave the market could lead to huge price hikes from component manufacturers - which would affect both customers and PC manufacturers.

"Give up that scale and you need to raise your prices," commented Dell.

HP has yet to make a decision on the future of its PC business, with new CEO Meg Whitman aiming to have a firm answer by the end of October.

Whitman replaced CEO Leo Apotheker, who was booted out after suggesting HP leaves the PC business.

Whatever decision Whitman comes to, for now it looks like HP will still be manufacturing computers at least in the short term - even if the division is spun off as a separate company.

Intel reckons its next consumer SSD, code-named Cherryville, will be the fastest SSD on the market when it launches this Autumn.

It briefly disclosed a few details of Cherryville at today's round of technical sessions at this year's Intel Developer Forum (IDF), hidden amongst a sea of enterprise-level announcements.

The Cherryville SSD will be based on 25nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory and, according to Troy Winslow, Marketing Manager of Intel's NAND Solutions Group, will be "the highest performing SSD in the marketplace."

That's quite a claim with the likes of OCZ's Vertex 3, ADATA's S511 and Patriot's Wildfire SSDs already pretty much maxing out the bandwidth of the SATA 6Gbps interface.

"The Cherryville product will be a no compromise solution," said Winslow. "It will have better sequential and better random than any prior SSD from Intel and will lead the industry."

All those other drives run with the latest and greatest SandForce memory controller, the SF 2281. Intel studiously left off what controller it was using for this newest drive, despite releasing news about the proprietary Intel controller on its later Smart Response-based Hawley Creek mSATA SSD.

So you'd think it wasn't going to be an Intel controller in the Cherryville product; so whose controller could it be?

There's a possibility that it will use a Marvell controller similar to the SATA 6Gbps Intel 510 edition SSD, though that wouldn't necessarily give it the performance lead Winslow is confident of.

More likely Intel is avoiding Marvell or its own controller's for its high-end consumer SSD and jumping on the SandForce bandwagon with some seriously funky firmware to give it that boost.

The drive will be out in a few short months mind – we should have samples in mid-October – and we'll know for sure then, but it could be a landmark moment for both Intel SSDs.

Best cheap SSD: 6 drives reviewed and rated

We recently ran our roundup of best SSDs where we looked at six of the top solid state drives, but what if you're after something a little cheaper?

We shopped around and found six solid state drives which offer great value, but which is the top performer?

Read on as we test six affordable, last-generation SSDs to see which one is the best.

Corsair Nova V64 64GB - £92
Web: www.corsair.com

At first glance, Corsair's budget-oriented drive nails every feature you'd want from a storage device: capacity, performance and price.

It's powered by the proven Indilinx Barefoot controller - not the fastest SSD chip in town, perhaps; but thanks to frequent firmware polishing, it's now a very consistent performer. In fact, the Nova V64 beats all comers in our file decompression benchmark.

We don't think the V64 is actually the fastest drive here in any objective sense. But then, it's now a sub-£100 drive. When it comes to real-world performance, it's clearly no slouch.

Subjectively, the end-user experience is up there with the best. It also packs support for the crucial TRIM command along with a cleaner tool enabling you to buff the drive manually. All of which means our only major concern is the drive's capacity. Is 59.5GB formatted truly enough?

Read the full Corsair Nova V64 review

Verdict: 85%

Corsair P128 128GB - £143
Web: www.corsair.com

With the Force F100 drive and its SandForce controller slotting in as Corsair's mainstream SSD in the 100GB-ish segment, the P128's days are numbered. But it still has lots to offer, for around £150 less than at release.

In fact, now Kingston's bargain basement SSDNow V+ isn't available, this is the cheapest 128GB drive of the old school.

You're also getting a drive that delivers fantastic real-world performance. It's the cream of last gen's crop for file decompression, app installation and game level loading. And thanks to its Samsung controller chipset, the drive not only supports the TRIM command, but also benefits from self-healing technology claimed to restore it to full performance if left idle.

Put it all together and you have a decent drive. That said though Corsair's latest SF-2281 powered Force 3 is only £30 more expensive in 120GB trim.

Read the full Corsair P128 review

Verdict: 82%

Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB - £166
Web: www.crucial.com

Benefiting from all the lessons learned during the dodgy early days of SSD engineering, the C300 is still relatively new technology. The fact that Crucial still managed to cock things up early on with the RealSSD C300 just goes to show how difficult it is to knock up a decent solid state drive.

There were several firmware updates before the C300 got back on track, addressing TRIM support issues and a problem with the update tool. One of the most obvious benefits of the Marvell controller is support for SATA-III and thus 6Gbps I/O, as SATA-III mobos become more commonplace.

However, in 128GB form the C300 is nothing special, clocking 145MB/s (its bigger 256GB brother breaches the 200MB/s barrier). As far as the synthetics go, it's 4k random performance that shows off the C300 best. Sadly, its application performance isn't quite as world-beating.

Read the full Crucial RealSSD review

Verdict: 79%

Intel X25-V 40GB - £59
Web: www.intel.com

Fancy Intel's second generation SSD tech for less than a ton? After all, it certainly had the performance chops upon release.

The 4k random read and write numbers are impressive for a budget drive, which bodes well for real-world workloads. Sequential write performance of under 50MB/s is less competitive, but with fewer channels than a full-fat Intel drive, raw write throughput has never been the X25-V's strong point.

No, the real problem for Intel's value-orientated 40GB drive is, well, value. The price hasn't dropped nearly as much as its rivals' since release. What's more, it's a bit of stinker in our application tests.

When you factor in everything, it doesn't live up to its X25 name - it's hard to ignore such poor results. It was actually our favourite of the sub-50GB drives upon release. But price is the big problem today, as it was then.

Read the full Intel X25-V review

Verdict: 73%

Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB - £50/ £100 (RAID)
Web: www.kingston.com

RAIDing up a pair of SSDs in 0 configuration is a sexy idea and there's no better drive to do it with than Kingston's bargainous 30GB V Series, at just £50 a pop.

What you won't get with those single drives is the insane maximum throughput of a pair of V Series SSDs. 372MB/s sequential reads, anyone?

Unfortunately, peak read performance is the V Series' single party trick. Even in RAID 0, you only get write performance of 108MB/s, while 4K throughput is a measly 5MB/s. The news wasn't much better in our application tests, either. One minute and nine seconds in the software install test, for instance, leaves the RAIDed Kingstons over 30 seconds off fellow last-generation SSDs.

With a capacity of 30GB, it'd be well suited as a cache device for a larger capacity hard disk with Intel's Smart Response tech, where raw performance isn't quite as important.

Read the full SSDNow V Series review

Verdict: 75%

OCZ Onyx 32GB - £47
Web: www.ocztechnology.com

There's little room for manoeuvre with 32GB drives like OCZ's old Onyx. Fully formatted, you're left with 29.7GB of storage. That sounds reasonable for a 32GB drive - but once Windows 7's installed you're only left with around 15GB for other programs.

It's a shame, the Onyx has plenty going for it. For starters, it's powered by an Indilinx controller, designed for smaller, cheaper drives. So the Onyx not only supports TRIM, but also cranks out reasonable results in the toughest of our synthetic performance tests - the 4K random read and write benchmarks, where it scores 16MB/s and 6MB/s respectively.

It lags behind in most performance tests, but does at least have the edge on its closest rival, Kingston's 30GB SSDNow V Series. Sadly, there's no getting away from that claustrophobic capacity: plump for a 64GB drive if you want more than a Smart Response cache device.

Read the full OCZ Onyx review

Verdict: 75%

Japanese technology company Hitachi has followed in the footsteps of rival Seagate with the announcement that it's squeezed an entire terabyte of storage onto a single 3.5-inch hard drive platter.

The new disks are targeted at desktop PCs and storage-based TVs and digital video recorders, and feature only a single 1TB platter in order to reduce power consumption and reduce the chances of the drives failing.

The Deskstar 7K1000.D and Deskstar 5K1000.B are designed for "power-friendly consumer and commercial desktop computers", and ship with a SATA 6Gbps interface.

The Deskstar 7K1000.D includes eighth-generation power management and HiVERT technology to ensure a low voltage draw and spins at 7,200RPM with a 32MB cache buffer.

Bone idle

The 5K1000.B provides 23 percent idle power savings over the 7K1000.D, but runs at a lower speed thanks to Hitachi's Coolspin technology.

The CinemaStar 7K1000.D and 5K1000.B drives offer the same 1TB capacities, but use Coolspin technology to limit the RPM, which results in quieter operation.

The CinemaStar drives also include "more than 10 features and technologies optimised for A/V streaming".

The drives are available immediately, and will appear at retailers and in Hitachi's channel partners' products.

Memory maestro Corsair has announced that its bigger capacity Force Series GT solid state drives (SSDs) are now available.

The new SSDs up the capacity of Corsair's Force Series GT to 180GB and 240GB, which are big increases on the already-available 60GB and 120GB sizes.

Corsair's SSDs include a SandForce SF-2280 processor, which natively supports SATA 6Gb/s, as well as ONFI synchronous flash memory.

Corsair says that the drives offer "outstanding read/write performance" and "significantly faster system response, boot times, and application load times than SATA 2 SSDs." The drives can read at speeds of up to 555 MB/s, and write at up to 525 MB/s.

'Premium systems'

Thi La, vice president of memory products at Corsair, said, "The new 180GB and 240GB models are ideal for premium systems which require large amounts of high-performance storage."

The drives are backwards-compatible with the SATA 2 interface, and include a 3.5-inch adapter for larger drive bays.

As SSDs become more capacious, we've reached a stage where there's little need to use them in conjunction with traditional platter-based hard disk drives.

Corsair's do come with mighty price tags, though - $379 USD (£232) for the 180GB model, and $489 USD (£299) for the 240GB drive.

The future of the hard drive revealed

All the recent fuss about solid state storage might make you think that the traditional hard drive is not long for this world. Capacities have increased, but the basic design is still recognisable from the very first IBM RAMAC drive, introduced in 1956, albeit in a considerably smaller form.

Surely the future of storage can't be based on something so primitive? Think again, because nothing comes close to a traditional hard drive for storing the ever increasing amount of data the modern world produces.

And while the physical limits of current hard drive technology are rapidly being reached in terms of the number of bits that can be stored within an inch square of platter, it won't be too long before a two terabyte drive looks like a floppy disk to us today.

That's thanks to a new way of getting information on and off of a platter called, excitingly, 'heat assisted'.

The basics of a traditional hard drive are quite simple. Data is stored on circular platters made from a glass and ceramic mix, sometimes aluminium, and coated in a thin layer of magnetic material made of varying mixtures of cobalt, chromium, tantalum, nickel and platinum on the top and bottom.

In a desktop drive, these platters spin at 7,200rpm. That rises to 15,000rpm for a top performance server drive and drops to 5,400rpm for general laptop storage. It means the outer edge of a platter is moving at around 67mph while the drive in use.

Both sides are recordable, so for high capacity drives, read/write heads are sandwiched between platter layers with one head for each surface. These heads contain three elements: two magnetic coils for reading and writing data to the platter, and one air bearing, which helps the head maintain a steady distance of just a few nanometers above the disk surface.

Hard Drives just keep getting bigger. Seagate has just announced a family of drives that can fit a full 1TB of data on each platter, which is 625GB per square inch. It's reckoned that drive capacities have doubled every 24 months or so over the last 60 years.

Now and then

At the moment, drives work using a technique called 'perpendicular magnetic recording' (PMR). The recording layer on a platter surface is filled with tiny molecular particles called 'grains'. A single bit of data takes around 100 grains to store securely, and the trick to increasing capacity is to cram more of these grains into a smaller space.

In a PMR disk, grains are arranged at right angles to the platter surface, so they're standing up. Previously, in 'longitudinal magnetic recording' they were arranged end to end horizontally. It stands to reason that you can squeeze more in with the newer technology, which has been commonplace for the last five years.

Physical limits

The problem that has always dogged hard drive manufacturers is that there are physical limits to the number of particles you can fit into a square inch before grains begin to randomly flip their charge and destroy data. PMR is already getting close to those limits.

In order to carry on increasing capacity at historical rates, something completely new is required. That something is looking increasingly likely to be 'heat assisted magnetic recording', or HAMR for short.

A steering committee called the Advanced Technology Consortium was recently set up by the International Disc Drive Equipment and Materials Association, which includes representatives from all the hard drive manufacturers, to produce a common roadmap for the shift to HAMR technology.

This has a strong precedent, thanks to a similar initiative to help transition hard drives from the decades-old method of laying down information on a hard drive in 512 byte logical sectors to a larger, more efficient 4kb technique. That transition was finally completed this year, so hopefully the next goal will be met just as smoothly.

But what is HAMR? Basically, researchers discovered several years ago that heating up a magnetic surface prior to writing information to it can increase the accuracy and efficiency of write heads astronomically, while cooling them down improves the ability of a read head to take that data back.

The future involves a small and highly focused laser, mounted on the drive head, which heats up the area of the platter about to be written to. This area then rapidly cools down as the drive spins ready for long-term storage and reading operations.

There are a few details to be sorted out, such as whether a laser point is better at two or ten nanometers, that kind of thing, but ultimately it should lead to drives capable of cramming ten times as much data into the same amount of space that they use today - and at little extra cost.

Tech demos

We spoke to Rich Rutledge, Vice-President of storage giant, Western Digital, about this new HAMR technology and how it's being implemented right now.

"We've all [hard drive manufacturers] done demos of the technology that have demonstrated functionality, but we haven't quite crossed over in terms of technology yet," he said.

So it is up and running, but at the moment it's not ready to be simply dropped into the sort of hard drives we've got backing up our media libraries at home.

"We're able to use last year's technology with heat assisted. What we're not able to do yet is next year's technology with heat assisted," says Rutledge.

But hopefully the technology isn't too far off. The first drives to use actual heat-assisted write heads could be here within the next two years.

Best USB 3.0 flash drive

Looking for a USB 3.0 flash drive which is worthy of carrying all your files around?

Here are five of the best to choose from.

1. Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB USB 3.0 - £59
Web: www.corsair.com

With great disk space comes great responsibility, Uncle Ben could have said. If he had, then maybe Peter Parker wouldn't have become Spider-Man, but instead pursued a career in Currys. Due to their high capacity, USB flash drives end up holding a vast amount of data that can be incredibly important, and would prove to be irreplaceable if something were to happen to the device.

Because they are easier to be carried around, they are more likely to be damaged, and Corsair has taken this threat seriously with the Flash Voyager, encasing it in a durable and largely shock-proof rubber outer casing.

The Flash Voyager has a healthy 32GB capacity; which is enough to hold a lot of files. Transferring the 700MB test file took 23 seconds, which although much faster than USB 2.0 devices, isn't the fastest.

On average you're looking at 32.6MB/s average. It's not the fastest USB 3.0 flash drive then, but if you want your data protected, the Corsair Flash Voyager is still worth considering.

Verdict: 84%

2. Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 16GB - £40
Web: www.kingston.com

The DataTraveler Ultimate isn't a particularly pretty device, looking a little like an art deco carbuncle compared to its sleeker rivals. It's added bulk does mean that it is more robust than other flash drives though, which will be a major selling point to anyone who has lost a drive due to it being crushed at the bottom of a bag, or sat on when placed in a pocket.

The writing speed of this disk is less solid: taking 25 seconds to transfer our 700MB test file over, with an average write speed of 31.5 MB/s.

The drive comes formatted using FAT32, so if you want to use this drive for transferring large files above 4GB then you'll need to quickly reformat it as NTFS.

Given the lowly performance and relatively high cost per gigabyte, this is a drive that's hard to recommend.

Verdict: 74%

3. Lacie FastKey 120GB - £359
Web: www.lacie.com

As you can probably tell from both the capacity of this USB stick and the price, this is no ordinary USB flash drive. In fact the LaCie FastKey bridges the gap between traditional USB drives and external hard drives. This in turn come with a number of pros and cons.

In the plus column it means that the flash drive has fast transfer times (taking only 16 seconds to copy our test files across, with an average of 93MB/s) and a huge storage capacity. The operating system also treats it as if it is a standard internal hard drive, making it a much more versatile device. This is especially useful for system backups due to the added protection of by its Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256 encryption.

The big downside to the Fastkey is its price (quite obviously). There are cheaper, lower capacity models, and the fact that once plugged in, you have to fiddle about in Windows to get it recognised and visible as a hard drive, has us looking elsewhere. One for speed-freaks only then.

Verdict: 82%

4. Patriot Memory Supersonic 64GB - £130
Web: www.patriot memory.com

There's a hell of a lot to like about the Patriot Memory Supersonic. The no nonsense design is simple but functional, making it easy to carry around while not catching the attention of magpie-like thieves.

Then there's the capacity: at 64GB this is one of the largest USB drives you can get before you start shelling out mega bucks, as is the case of the LaCie FastKey. This is a huge amount of data to carry around, and for most of us this will prove to be more than enough disk space.

Finally, there's the performance. This is a fast USB 3.0 flash drive, with average write speeds of 70MB/s. It might not be supersonic, but it's pretty damn fast. Our test files flew over in 17 seconds, and overall this disk was one of the fastest on test.

The price seems high, but at a shade over £2 per gigabyte, it still offers strong value for money. Quality.

Verdict: 87%

5. Transcend JetFlash 700 32GB - £49
Web: www.transcend-uk.com

Considering the large amount of storage space the Transcend JetFlash 700 packs, it's amazing how small it is. It's easily the smallest device in this test.

Looks can be deceiving though, and this little wonder can still compete with its more flashy rivals. It's a mark of Transcend's quiet confidence in this product that it hasn't felt the need to plaster USB 3.0 branding everywhere, or design the casing to scream 'THIS IS A POWERFUL AND IMPRESSIVE PRODUCT'.

Transcend has relied on the product's performance to sell it, and it's a trust that has paid off. The 700MB file transferred in a speedy 18 seconds, with an average speed of 38.9MB/s. It's not the fastest here, but in real terms its speedy enough.

Of course, the small physical size of the drive could prove to be a problem, as you're entrusting a lot of files to a device that could easily be lost. On the flip side - it's certainly convenient.

Verdict: 90%