Expandable storage is a wonderful thing, but its implementation can sometimes leave something to be desired. Take Windows 8, for instance -- its photo, movie and music apps leverage Windows libraries to access users' media collections, but won't allow users to include removable storage in the app-accessed party of indexed folders. Sure, you can keep all your media on one device, but half it will need to be accessed in a slightly roundabout way. This simply wasn't good enough for Toni Fowlie, who wanted all of her media -- from both her Surface's local storage and its microSD card -- to appear in the same library. She used an old NTFS feature to trick Windows into thinking her microSD was part of her device's local storage, and her efforts are worth sharing.

Filed under: Tablets, Software, Microsoft

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Source: Team radicus

PC users of a certain age will be all too familiar with defragging and disk checking, normally as a last-ditch attempt to reinvigorate a flagging or faulty system. Fast-forward to 2012, and Microsoft is reassessing the role of the whole NTFS health model for the modern world (well, Windows 8 at least). It turns out that these days actual corruptions are rare, but people still like to run chkdsk just in case -- or out of habit. In the old approach, health check was either happy or unhappy, and the machine was taken offline for as long as was needed to fix. Even with optimization and improvements in later versions, the galloping sizes of hard drives has swallowed up much of the benefit. In the redesigned model there are four states: healthy, spot verification needed, scan needed and spot fix needed. In any of these states, the system remains online, with the user deciding when to restart if a fix is needed. The reboot process should also be much quicker, with the spot fix already targeted. Advanced users can go a stage further and invoke the spot fix while still online for sections of the disk not in use. The proof, of course, is in the pudding, but anything that involves less death-staring at a disk check is a good thing in our book. Hit the source for a blow-by-blow breakdown.

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Hungry for a shiny new file system? Windows 8's got your back, or at least, Windows Server 8 will. In his latest Building Windows 8 post, Steven Sinofsky introduces the Resilient File System, or ReFS, as a "next generation file system" built on the foundations of the NTFS. By reusing NTFS' API / semantics engine, ReFS hopes to retain a high level of compatibility with NTFS features. Underneath the existing semantics engine, the new file system introduces a new storage engine that hopes to protect against latent disk errors, resist data corruption, uphold metadata integrity, grant large volume, file and directory size -- and well, just build a better storage system in general. It's all quite complicated, but if you feel up to the technical snuff, click through the source link below.

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Gallery: WD announces 3TB single-drive My Book Essential, two USB 3.0 Passport drives

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

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