Hard drive rotational speed (RPM) plays a major role in storage performance. Faster platters provide shorter access times and higher throughput, which leads many users to wonder whether RPM also affects reliability. Does a 7,200 RPM drive wear out faster than a 5,400 RPM model? Across engineering data, manufacturer documentation, and field experience, the conclusion […]
Clean Room
Table of Contents Risks of Opening a Hard Drive Outside a Clean Room Inside a hard drive, read/write heads float a tiny distance above spinning platters.A single dust particle can scratch tracks, destroy servo information, and wipe out entire file systems. When someone opens a drive on a desk or in a workshop, dust, fibers, […]
Compression Ratio
Table of Contents Storage Pressure and the Role of Compression Backups, log archives, and disk images grow faster than most storage budgets.You can add more disks, but that only delays the next capacity problem. Compression introduces a smarter option.Instead of storing every repeated pattern again, you reduce redundancy and keep a smaller representation that still […]
The Pros and Cons of SSDs as External Hard Drives
Table of Contents Introduction: Why External SSDs Are Rising in Popularity The rise of mobile workflows, 4K and 8K content creation, and remote collaboration has pushed portable storage into an essential role for many users. As these workloads expand, external solid-state drives (often called portable SSDs) have gained traction for their speed, reliability, and compact […]
Context Switch
Table of Contents CPU Time as a Shared Resource Modern operating systems juggle dozens or hundreds of active threads.Only a few CPU cores exist, so most threads wait in queues while a small subset runs. A context switch lets the scheduler pause one running thread and resume another.This rapid switching creates the illusion of parallelism […]
Data Acquisition
Table of Contents Incident Scene: Data at Risk Before Collection When an incident occurs, the first instinct often involves “looking around” the live system.Unplanned clicks, root logins, or file copies can alter timestamps, logs, and unallocated space before anyone records a clean state. Data acquisition solves this problem.It focuses on collecting data in a controlled […]
Data Migration
Table of Contents Data Migration as a Planned Change, Not a File Copy Organizations rarely move data just once.New storage, new SaaS platforms, and system upgrades all push information from one place to another. Data migration handles that change as a controlled project, not a simple copy.The goal is to move data between systems or […]
Data Imaging
Table of Contents Disk Imaging as a Safety Net for Damaged Drives When a disk starts clicking, throwing I/O errors, or reporting bad sectors, every extra read increases the risk of failure.In that moment, copying individual files often does more harm than good. Disk imaging offers an alternative.You capture a complete, block-level copy of the […]
Digital Forensics
Table of Contents Digital Forensics in Modern Incidents A laptop leaks sensitive documents.A server runs strange processes at night.An employee deletes critical files right before leaving. In each case, someone has to answer three questions: what happened, when, and who was involved.Digital forensics provides the structured process to collect, preserve, and analyze digital evidence so those […]









