hard drives

Choosing the best storage drive for your PC has never been so complicated.

New dual processor in WD black, designed for gamers and enthusiasts, has twice the performance of its predecessor.

Hybrid hard drives promise to deliver the speed of an SSD plus the capacity of a mechanical drive.

With worldwide demand and prices at an all-time high, Western Digital's plans to use helium in its drives may be ill-timed as the world's reserves are quickly drawing down.

Toshiba released what it said is its smallest external hard drive, the Canvio Slim, which comes with only USB 3.0 and not Thunderbolt.

The siren has sung and you've finally succumbed to her call: You're the proud owner of a shiny new PC; a faster, better SSD; or a bigger, better hard drive. It's time to toss your old equipment in the trash and start playing with your new toys, right? Not so fast.

If your laptop's hard drive has gone down for the count, or if you want to swap it out in favor of something larger or faster (a solid-state drive can perk up a laptop's performance considerably), I have good news for you: Replacing a hard drive is usually a simple and straightforward procedure; and if things get tricky, our walkthrough will help you do the job safely and efficiently.

It's all too easy to run out of disk space.

Solid-state drives are all the rage lately, thanks to their high transfer speeds and ultrafast access times, but most people still use cheap, spacious mechanical hard drives. Unfortunately, mechanical hard drives also constitute one of the most significant performance bottlenecks in modern computer systems. Even when paired with the fastest processors and lots of memory, a slow hard drive will drag down the a system's overall performance and responsiveness, which is why upgrading to an SSD usually yields such significant performance gains.

We expect hard-drive capacity to grow over time. Now that hard drives have jumped from 2TB to 3TB, however, upgraders face some challenges: These new hard drives may have issues in some drive enclosures and in older PCs, which aren't prepared to address the entire capacity of a 3TB model. Even if you can work such storage into your system, it may not be in a single 3TB volume, but in a 2.2TB volume and a 800GB volume instead.

In an effort to keep sensitive data from prying eye, Toshiba today announced a new family of hard disk drives for a number of devices, including PCs and printers, that automatically wipe themselves of data when connected to unauthorized hosts.