Hard Drive

FantecA drive enclosure for 4 SATA drives, connected to the host via USB 3.0 and presented as JOBDs is a great and inexpensive method of adding a lot of hard drive capacity to your computer, e.g. for backup purposes. The enclosure model I have bought is the Fantec QB-35US3. It is compact, the fan not too loud and vibrations from the four drives are kept amazingly low. It can be connected via USB 3.0 and eSATA, but USB is simpler because eSATA requires a port with a multiplier-capable chipset, which is rare. At a retail price of around € 150 the Fantec is relatively inexpensive.

DiskLED is a small tool that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. The new version 1.1 comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you choose from all performance counters available on the local system - you can monitor network throughput just as easily as hard disk activity or memory usage. In this article, I am going to show you how to do that.

What do you do when your computer reacts sluggishly to even the simplest commands? You probably look at its hard disk LED to determine if the disk is busy, because if it is, the only thing that really helps is waiting (apart from buying a faster disk or SSD). Problem solved - if you are sitting right next to the machine. But what if you are using a protocol like RDP or ICA to connect to a remote computer or VM? No HDD LED, no quick and simple way to check for hard drive activity. This has been bugging me enough to write a software replacement: DiskLED.

I just had the “pleasure” of having to copy the contents of a terabyte USB disk to another similar USB drive. At first, I did not give this simple task much thought. I plugged the USB cables in and made my faithful Total Commander do the work. It did not take me long, though, to notice a strange phenomenon: the copy speed would oscillate between 8 and 24 MB/s.