| Keeping Your Memories Safe |
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 Are you like a lot of people around the world with your digital camera or camcorder at the ready to record all of life's special moments? If so, you may find yourself running short on hard drive space. But fear not! There are lots of options to increase your hard drive space that are both affordable and easy to install.
The most popular is the USB/firewire external hard drive. By storing your video and photos on one of these drives, not only do you regain valuable hard drive space on your computer, you are also making strides towards protecting your memories from problems which can result in data loss.
The typical photo from an average camera stored in .jpeg format will take up about 2-2.5 megabyte (MB) of space. If you do the math (or just take our word for it), that means that for every 1 gigabyte (GB) of storage you have, you can store between 400-510 pictures! That's a whole lot of snapping shots of the baby, vacation, ballgame or whatever.
Video files need a lot more space than pictures. Digital video typically uses 3.6MB of space per second, which (since we've already done the math) means that you need 1GB of space to hold about 5 minutes of video. So as you can see, depending on how much video you want to save, you could need lots of storage space for your video. Rest assured that there are many high-capacity drives which will hold your videos.
There are literally hundreds of USB/firewire external hard drives on the market. They range in capacity from just a few gigabytes to several hundred gigabytes. Many have various features, pretty cases and blinking lights which really do not improve storage, or make downloading faster. Choosing one that is right for you should be a combination of price, capacity and features.
An added benefit of the USB external hard drives: they are recognized as "fixed drives" in Windows. This means that as far as Windows is concerned, they are the same as the hard drive in your computer. External USB/firewire hard drives can take advantage of the benefits of defragmentation and file placement strategies. Running a regular defragmentation pass on your external USB hard drive, with a file placement strategy such as PerfectDisk's SMARTPlacement, will optimize your drive, reduce future fragmentation, speed up file access times and help keep your memories safe and easily accessible for years to come. |
| Cool Tool of the Month Winner |
We want this newsletter to provide you with as much useful information and tools as we can. This month we're starting a feature which will alert you to a website with a cool tool you can use.
To get the ball rolling, we think Wordcounter is a cool tool worth your time. We'd love to have you nominate a 'cool tool' of the month. If we choose your pick, we'll send you a free t-shirt! Click on the 'quick link' above left and send us your nominee. |
Volume 1 Issue 6
Welcome to another edition of our newsletter for the healthy PC. Our subscriber base continues to grow fast, and we thank you all for your feedback and support.