redundancy

Digital storage basics, Part 4: SSD explained

Editors' note: This post is Part 4 of an ongoing series that aims to explain digital storage, based on questions and inquiries from readers. For the other parts, check out the related stories.

Made to replace hard drives in many applications, SSDs have nothing in common with hard drives in terms of how they handle data. By popular demand, I am explaining in this post how they work in layman's terms. I'll also answer other SSD-related questions.

How SSDs work

To understand how an SSD works, let's start with two most important parts: the controller and the … Read more

Digital storage basics, Part 3: Backup vs. redundancy

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series, for the other parts, check out the related stories. This post was updated on March 29, 2013, to add more information on backing up.

One of a storage device's most important roles, if not the most important, is to keep the information stored on it safe, especially from hardware failure. Redundancy and backup are the two popular types of data protection. They are not the same, however, and it's important to understand the differences between the two.

Redundancy

In a nutshell, redundancy in consumer-grade digital storage means using … Read more

Barry Sonnenfeld never knows what time it is

At D5, I sat next to Barry Sonnenfeld during the George Lucas session. You may know Sonnenfeld as the director of Men in Black and Get Shorty, but he's also a gadget fiend, and writes a tech column for Esquire magazine. It was cool to sit next to a famous Hollywood guy and talk about Thinkpads.

I couldn't help noticing the man was wearing two watches. He explained why. He's a watch nut, he said, and on his left wrist, he wears his watch of the moment. At D5 he was sporting a gigantic Swiss windup (sorry, … Read more

Save your blog with BlogBackupOnline

If you're the owner of a blog, there's a chance that, come one day, you might lose some or all of your posts. In order to avoid this, there's BlogBackupOnline, a free solution that will grab everything you've ever done and make a backup of it off site.

Registering your blog (or anyone else's for that matter) is easy, just give it the URL, and if the site is on a popular blogging platform like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress, it will start backing up posts right away. You don't actually need to give it … Read more