Buying a new computer, upgrading or troubleshooting on older system can leave you trapped in a mess of acronyms, jargon and numbers that may look like English but can leave you baffled. We looked at some of the key specs on modern PCs and used our nerd-to-human translator to help you make sense of them.

Researchers at the Netherland’s Radboud University have uncovered serious security issues with several solid-state drives that use hardware-based encryption—vulnerabilities. This could allow an attacker to access a drive’s “encrypted” contents without needing the password that decrypts it.

Drives fail. And no matter how many backups you have, losing a drive when you're in the middle of working on something important -- my namesake's law -- can be a real pain in the arse. Thankfully, replacing your old-and-busted drive with a brand-new drive is one of the easiest upgrades you can make.

Eventually, we all run out of storage. And we all want to get our hands on our information as fast as possible. In most cases, that combination of requirements means looking for an array of SSDs. But Samsung has upped the ante with a massive 30.72TB SSD - one of the most capacious 2.5" drives ever made.

While cloud storage has put a huge dent in the need for small storage devices to act as a kind of sneaker-net, there's still a place for external storage devices. When it comes to remote backups or moving large volumes of data, external hard drives are still very useful. With portable hard drives, reliability and performance are of paramount concern. That's why I've been looking forward to testing the Western Digital My Passport SSD and LaCie Rugged USB-C drives out.

Seagate has announced enhanced versions of two flash technologies; the Nytro 5000 M.2 non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD and the Nytro 3000 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD. The Nytro 5000 NVMe M.2 SSD and Nytro 3000 SAS SSD offer 2TB of capacity and random write performance levels as high as 67,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) — double the performance levels of the previous version.

WD has released their new My Passport SSD - the fastest portable drive the company has released. It ships with USB Type-C connectivity but adds an adapter to use with USB Type-A ports. The My Passport SSD boasts 256-bit AES hardware encryption, password protection, and is also 6.5-foot drop tested to withstand 1500G of force, to protect your data.

Western Digital has announced the world’s first client solid state drives built with its 64-layer 3D NAND technology. The company says this will allow them to deliver SSDs with lower power consumption and higher performance, endurance and capacities. The new drives will come in tow broad product groups with one focused on DIY enthusiasts, resellers and system builders and the other for gaming and creative enthusiasts.

Intel has introduced the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series and Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series for the data centre. The performances bump these drives offer, according to Intel, will help drive AI and machine learning applications.

Solid State Drives (SSD) work a little differently than hard drives, and no amount of drilling holes, degaussing, or zeroing out will actually properly secure the SSD. If you need to get rid of an SSD, you have a couple of options: Encrypt or shred. Here's what you need to know.

Your hard drive failing is one of the worst things that can happen to your computer, since you lose a ton of data. Fortunately, most drives include a tool set called SMART that can monitor your drive and let you know when you're about to have a problem.

If you're weighing your option between SSDs and you can't quite justify buying the bigger version, this might tip you over the edge: Generally, larger SSDs are also faster.

Windows 10's Fast Startup feature is a handy way to boot up your machine quicker. However, if you don't use the hibernate function, it can take up a lot of hard drive space. Here's how to fix that.

Hi Lifehacker, I just bought a new Seagate 1TB SSHD. I'm wondering whether or not this hybrid drive can be defragmented, as I have been seeing some very conflicting answers when Googling.

Lots of Mac owners run Windows in a Boot Camp partition, but if you want to save some space (for example on a Macbook with limited storage) and have Windows run faster, try a USB SSD.

The last time we read anything about SSD longevity, it was courtesy of the Tech Report's ambitious project to punish a variety of SSDs over the course of many months. That was at 500TB of constant writes, where all the drives were still in the race. At two petabytes however... some losers have appeared.

You know what's even better than one solid state drive? Two solid state drives. If you want dramatically faster performance from your drives, pair them together in a RAID 0 configuration.

Mac: With the release of OS X 10.6.8, Apple introduced TRIM support for its solid state drives that makes the drive a little faster. Apple's operating systems don't support non-stock drives though. Chameleon is a simple tool that allows you to speed up that third-party SSD drive.

Hi Lifehacker, I have an early 2011 15" MacBook Pro which is just about to hit its three-year anniversary. I have been thinking about upgrading it with a 500GB SSD, which will cost me about $380. I'm just not sure if it's worth the investment, or if I'd be better off selling it on eBay and putting that money plus the $380 towards a new Retina 13" MacBook Pro. Any thoughts?