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I can’t believe it is here but we are seeing 1 TB hard drives sold for under $200! This price may be a limited time offer but since it is out there, I would not buy any 1 TB hard drive for any more than $200.

The link for this one is the "eco" friendly drive that has variable speeds from 5400-7200 rpm.

Some advice about high capacity drives: At first I was not sure about the investment in a drive that would operate at 5400 rpm because of slower speeds but I have heard from some people that this may actually be better for drives with really high capacities. It seems that because the densities in these drives are so compact, little movements from case fans or even the fast 7200 rpm cause the drive to error and it spends more time correcting errors than an average drive does. So although these new 1 TB drives may run slower than regular drives, a 5400 drive may be quicker than a 7200 rpm.

Eventually, we all have a spare or old computer we no longer need that is sitting around collecting dust. Some of us might get the idea to sell it but others may decide to give it to charity. Whatever the reason is, you must make sure you properly delete the data on the computer you are donating off of the hard disk.

It is a common misconception that reformatting a drive deletes the data on your hard drive. Actually, when you reformat a drive, you really just the the drive to forget where the data is. The drive in your computer may not show anything there but it is still there until it is written over by saving new data. With proper tools, data from a formatted drive can be recovered quite easily.

DBAN or Derik’s Boot and Nuke is a free utility that will really wipe all data from your drive. Instead of reformatting a drive, DBAN actually writes 0’s or blobs of data over your data. DBAN has a variety of options to overwrite data over and over multiple times for when you want to be really secure.

To find DBAN, do a Google search for "DBAN." Once there, read the instructions on how to create a bootable CD and run DBAN.

!!!Warning!!! If you use DBAN on your C drive, you will erase everything and never be able to recover anything again. This is exactly what you want to do if selling or giving away a computer.

It has been my opinion for quite some time that defraging your hard drive every week it overkill and too intensive on your hard drive. I have no idea if the way Vista defrags your hard drive is with less stress on the drive than XP but Vista by default automatically defrags your drive every week. At this point, until I have more information, I recommend you modify the setting to defrag hard drive to only once a month. To do this, right click on your hard drive, select "properties," then the "tools" tab, "defragment now," and finally "Modify Schedule." In the Modify Schedule box which is called Disk Defragmenter, you can select a different schedule and it should change the schedule for all drives you have in your computer.

If you don’t want your computer to defrag your drives on a schedule, just uncheck the box, "Run on a Schedule (recommended)," when in the Disk Defragmenter dialog box is open. When you want to do a defrag, just go back to the Disk Defragmenter dialog box and select, "Defragment Now."

I have to say, hearing Hitachi and Toshiba announce a 500GB laptop hard drive is amazing and just impressive but they can’t be used in today’s laptops. Hitachi’s and Toshiba’s just add and additional platter which makes the drive thicker so it won’t fit in most of today’s traditional laptops by adding about 3mm. I don’t think this is the wave of the future but this could be a step to smaller desktop computers and for specialized smaller computer. I could see HP putting this in their super small desktop business and home computer or servers. Not entirely useful but seriously amazing to to see how far we have come. We are probably a year away from seeing standardized 500GB drives in most laptops.