In college, as the burgeoning P2P world opened up before me, I spent four years moving, burning, and ultimately sacrificing the free and ambiguously legal media I had been downloading on my 20GB ...

Modern hard disk drives use a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or SATA interface to attach to a computer motherboard. SATA drives come in speeds of 1.5 gigabits per second, 3.0 Gbps and 6.0 Gbps.

Reader Fred wants to know if a laptop hard drive can be plugged into a desktop PC. “The pin out appears to be the same,” he notes, “but there is no separate power-supply connector.” Short answer: yes.

The traditional reason for replacing or installing a new hard disc drive on a PC is to increase the amount of storage space available. However, prices have fallen so much in the past year or so that ...