hard drive

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is ready to murder your Mac’s hard drive

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Black Ops III
You can just buy the multiplayer starter pack if you don’t want the full game.
Photo: Treyarch

Call of Duty: Black Ops III has finally made its way to the Mac after being available on Windows PC since its launch over three years ago.

The Mac version of Call of Duty: Black Ops III was revealed by Aspyr today. It comes all the same content in the Windows version, plus 64-bit and Metal support. If you’re ready to rack up some kills though you better be ready to say goodbye to all the free space on your hard drive.

Western Digital’s new USB-C hard drive can also charge MacBooks

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The G-Drive packs 45 watts of charging power.
The G-Drive packs 45 watts of charging power.
Photo: Western Digital

Owners of the new MacBook Pro with USB-C can now connect an external hard drive and get their charge on at the same time.

The folks at Western Digital introduced the new G-Drive USB-C external hard drive today, which combines up to 10TB of hard disk storage with 45 watts of charging power so MacBook owners have fewer dongles and cables to worry about.

Streamline and safeguard your Mac’s hard drive with Drive Genius 4 at 50% off [Deals]

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Drive Genius 4 is the leading app for maintaining, repairing and protecting your Mac's hard drive.
Drive Genius 4 is the leading app for maintaining, repairing and protecting your Mac's hard drive.

We trust our Macs to be solid and reliable, but what if there’s a problem lurking under its silvery hood? Drive Genius is an award-winning app that leads the market in maintaining, optimizing, preventing and even reversing problems in your computer’s main brain, it’s hard drive. Right now you can get peace of mind and peak performance from your Mac with Drive Genius 4 for $49.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Which massive hard drives are too big to fail?

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Looking for a new hard drive? Stay away from 3TB units. Photo: Backblaze Media

One year ago we were given some insight into which hard drives last the longest thanks to Backblaze media’s analysis of the tens of thousands of hard drives in their data center. The company uses regular consumer-grade hard drives due to the cheaper costs to power their unlimited storage offerings for customers, and this year they’re back with a new study revealing which 4TB hard drives are too big to fail.

After spinning 41,213 disk drives in its data center, Backblaze crunched the numbers at the end of 2014 to find that if want a hard drive with the lowest failure rate possible, go with an HGST drive.

Fix Your Damaged Drive And Recover Your Lost Files At The Data Rescue Center [Sponsored Post]

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TDRC

 

This post is brought to you by the Data Rescue Center and Prosoft Engineering, Inc.

Have a physically damaged hard drive or lost or deleted files you can’t recover? If you are facing data loss, contact The Data Rescue Center to recover your lost storage media. Based in Livermore, CA, The Data Rescue Center is a state-of-the-art facility with a secure vault to safely store and service your corrupted hard drive.

Visualize Your Hard Drive Space With GrandPerspective [OS X Tips]

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grand perspective

When you’re running a Macbook Air or Pro with an SSD in it, you’re probably concerned about space on your drive. You can easily sort files in the Finder by size to see what you might want to delete or at least put on an external drive, but sometimes it’s nicer to visualize your data in a different way.

That’s where apps like GrandPerspective come in. This one is simple to use, works well, and is entirely free. It helps you see your data as an image, and then you can decide what to do with your files from there.

How To Repair & Verify Your Hard Drive From The Command Line [OS X Tips]

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verify volume

OS X offers a very nice graphical user interface to verify and repair your hard drive, located in the Utilities folder. It’s called Disk Utility, and you can use it as the first line of defense when weird disk-related things happen to your Mac’s hard drive.

If, however, you want to dig in a bit deeper, or you’re already running Terminal a lot and don’t want to launch a separate app, you can use the following commands to both verify (check for problems) and repair any problems that you might find when verifying.

Use A Different Hard Drive To Startup Your Mac With These Keyboard Tips [OS X Tips]

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keyboardOptionblk

Starting up your Mac each day may seem a simple thing, right? Just press the power key on your keyboard or main Mac unit, hear the Mac chime, and then get to work, right?

Sometimes, though, you might want to boot a Windows partition with Boot Camp, or start up from a network volume. Heck, you might even want to start from a completely different OS X disk.

In that case, use the following keyboard shortcuts to do so.

Save Space On Your Hard Drive – Delete System Logs And QuickLook Cache Files [OS X Tips]

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QuickLook and System Logs

There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.

QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.

Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.

Save Space On Your Hard Drive – Check Application Support Folder For Steam Game Files [OS X Tips]

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Application Support Steam

I suppose since I’m a gamer, I assume everyone else is. If you’re not, or you don’t use the fantastic cross-platform digital gaming portal, Steam, this tip won’t apply to you. Check out the last couple of tips for great space saving ideas, instead. Or, heck, read a review or two on Cult of Mac. I hear they’re pretty good.

For you Steam gamers looking to save some space on your hard drive, there’s one place you should really look.

Save space on your Mac hard drive: Delete user cache files [OS X Tips]

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Delete User Cache Files

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.

Apple Online Store Showing Up To Four Week Delays For 27-inch iMac, 10 Days for 21.5-inch Model

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Not until February, it looks like.

Hoping to get your hands on a new 27-inch iMac model, with its delightfully thin flat panel display and Fusion Drive goodness? Well, if you order now, you’ll have to wait up to four weeks for it to ship, as seen at the Apple Store website.

It appears that Apple hasn’t been able to manage to overcome its supply constraints, which we reported back in November, to make enough of these glorious machines to meet demand.

Vantec’s NexStar Hard Drive Dock Bumps Your Smartphone & Tablet Storage Over Wi-Fi

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There’s a problem I often run into with my mobile devices, and that’s not enough storage space. I insist on purchasing devices with just 16GB of memory, and then I have to find ways to manage that storage the best I can. Some devices will take microSD cards that will allow you to bump their storage as and when you need it, but others — like Apple’s iOS devices — don’t come with that luxury.

Vantec’s new NexStar WiFi hard drive dock lets you bump your smartphone, tablet, and even PC storage over Wi-Fi. You can use it to store your audio and video collections on your home network, then use Vantec’s dedicated apps to access them wirelessly when you need to.

LaCie’s Slick d2 External Hard Drive Is Now Thunderbolt And USB 3.0 Friendly

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d2_TB_MBP

LaCie, the fantastic data storage company that was recently acquired by Seagate, has updated its d2 external hard drive with USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. It comes in a sleek, minimal, fan-free, aluminum shell that looks great next to any Mac.

With speeds of up to 180MB/s, the only real downside to this drive is that it’s not solid state. LaCie is selling both 3TB and 4TB models.

Find Out How Fast Your SSD Or Hard Drive Really Is [OS X Tips]

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Geeky, yes. Cool? Yes, again.
Geeky, yes. Cool? Yes, again.

Sometimes, it’s just fun to compare scores with your friends. Without the urge to compete, we wouldn’t have sports, national videogame competitions, or reality television. Now there’s a new way to measure up against those around you – Solid State Drive (SSD) speed.

Ok, so it’s not really a thing, but here’s how you can benchmark your own SSD to compare it with other SSD devices, if you need to know how much faster one computer you own is than another. In fact, it’s a ton of fun to compare the speed of an SSD, say in this here Macbook Air, and that of a hard drive, like in my Mac Mini. Here’s how.

Why Businesses Should Think (And Think Twice) About Going SSD

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Should businesses consider SSD options for Macs running OS X Server like the Mac mini Server?
Should businesses consider SSD options for Macs running OS X Server like the Mac mini Server?

Mac and iOS users are strangers to NAND flash storage. After all, Apple has been using flash as a storage medium for years now. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and some MacBooks all rely on NAND flash as a storage medium of choice. The success of those products has led Apple to be world’s biggest buyer of NAND chips and was no doubt a factor to mention the company’s purchase of Israeli flash memory firm Anobit.

Solid state storage based on NAND flash isn’t Apple-specific. Plenty of other companies offer flash storage in an array of form factors for a huge variety of uses including smartphones and mobile devices. Solid state drives (SSD) drives are available as options for a range of PCs. They’re also becoming common options for servers and network devices. For businesses looking to implement Lion or Mountain Lion, SSDs can be an attractive option. They can also be an expensive prospect, and there may be better ways to spend your business dollars.

The Best iPhone Cases & Protectors [Best Of]

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Ideally, we’d all carry our iPhones as God intended — naked. But just as our pink and delicate human bodies need protection from the elements, so does the iPhone. Sometimes all it needs is a skimpy Speedo, other times a full suit of body armor, but you can be sure there’s a case for every occasion. Here’s our roundup of the best iPhone cases out there.

48% Of Used Hard Drives Contain Sensitive Data – How To Be Sure Yours Won’t

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Discarded hard drives often have residual personal data on them
Discarded hard drives often have residual personal data on them.

Many of us pass our Macs and some external devices on to others when we upgrade. Family and friends may get our hand-me-downs, but quite frequently we’ll sell an old Mac, printer, or external drive on eBay or some other venue. Regardless of where our computers and related technology end up when we outgrow them, it’s important to make sure we scrub any personal data from them.

The importance of securely erasing personal and/or business data from hardware that is being passed on, sold, or even recycled was highlighted in a recent study by Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which discovered that half of all used hard drives contained information from their previous owners.

Put The Wasted Space Inside Your New iMac To Good Use With iFixit’s Dual Hard Drive Kits

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Take apart one of Apple’s latest iMacs and inside you’ll find plenty of space for mounting an additional hard drive. Of course, it’s useless if you don’t have the tools for the job, but that’s where iFixit comes in. The teardown specialists have released a new kit that provides you with everything you need for installing an additional hard drive in your new iMac.

Win a Free Copy of Disk Drill Pro! [Giveaway]

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diskdrillpro_screenshot

The newest app to grace the Deals.CultofMac.com hub is a nifty little tool called Disk Drill Pro. This is a sort of app that you hope you never have to use, but is a lifesaver when it’s called to the line of duty. In almost any situation Disk Drill Pro can assist in recovering lost data on your Mac. It has patented technology to deep-scan your hard drive and find files you thought were gone forever. Currently, the app is on sale at deals.cultofmac.com for $30 (that’s 66% off its usual $89 price-tag).

Today we’re holding a giveaway for 2 app codes of Disk Drill Pro. You have to actually play to win the giveaway though, so here are the rules for the contest: