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An External Hard drive can come in handy for backing up files or freeing up some disk space on your PC. The only problem is they can be pretty expensive. An easy alternative is to buy a drive enclosure for about $20 and build your own using an ... internal hard drive. Building your own external hard drive enclosure can be done in as little as 5 to 10 minutes time, and without opening up your PC's case. Not only does assembling your own external hard drive save money, it provides flexibility in choosing the connections, capacity and style that fit your needs. It is also an excellent way to make ... (view more)

Last week, Ben M. from Australia wrote about a problem he was having with his 40x CD burner not being able to write at maximum speed under Windows XP. Ben's main problem: both Roxio Easy CD Creator and Nero Burning ROM (CD burning software) only ... allow the burner to write at 16x instead of 40x write speed. Ben's computer is running Windows XP with 256 meg RAM on a 1.7 GHz machine and a 40 gig [7200 RPM] hard drive. In short, here's what Ben has already tried: Replaced the burner with another (same model / brand); Changed the buffer size for CDFS (CD File System) under Windows XP; Updated both ... (view more)

This article is a bit technical and relies on know-how from a previous article I've written about RAID. In brief, the word 'RAID' is a techy-term which stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks. A hard disk array is simply a ... bunch of hard drives chained together. Benefits of using RAID are generally two-fold, and include: increased file read / write performance (known as RAID-0), and data redundancy for backup purposes (known as RAID-1). I've previously written an article about RAID if you would like to read up on it . It is very simplistic and explains RAID essentials ... (view more)