Save Your Precious Data!

Today was my son’s first day of first grade. Like any proud parent, I took a bunch of pictures to document the momentous occasion. Like any digital photographer, I downloaded the pictures to my computer where I have year after year of my life documented in photographs. If you have a digital camera like most other people these days, you also have those priceless photos stored on your home computer. As important as those photos are, they are dangerously close to being lost forever.

All those priceless photos of birthdays, graduations and vacations can be lost in an instant if you have a hard drive failure or virus. A family member could accidentally delete them. Someone could steal your computer. A fire could incinerate your memories, or a tornado could wipe your computer from the face of the earth. Almost all of the possibilities I have described above have happened to people I know. Typically the first question I always ask is: Did you have a backup? Unfortunately many times they did not. What a terrible loss. If they would have only taken some simple steps, the loss could have easily been avoided.

Thanks to broadband Internet access and cheap online storage solutions, you can easily backup your data AUTOMATICALLY for little or no money. Continue reading “Save Your Precious Data!”

My love for solid-state drives is SOLID.

I was talking to a colleague today and the topic of solid state drives came up.  He had been considering using a solid-state hard drive, but had heard too many “horror” stories about performance or data loss.  I was surprised to S128hear this.  I have been using solid state drives for well over a year now and have had nothing but success.  When I originally investigated using a solid-state drive, I read many poor reviews on certain models of solid-state drives.  So when I selected my first drive, I was careful to read all of the reviews I could, and check all of the specs.  I settled on a drive from Corsair that had excellent reviews and decent specs for the price.

The first system I built with a solid-state drive was a terminal server for demo purposes.  That was the fastest terminal server I ever worked on.  The server would boot in about 30 seconds, logins took 2 seconds, and applications would launch instantaneously.  From that point forward, I was sold. 

I am currently running a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with a Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG1D solid state hard drive.  I swapped out the standard hard drive that came with the laptop.  It was as simple as Continue reading “My love for solid-state drives is SOLID.”