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Smart home: The best automation devices â and how to use them
So, youâve heard about the smart home and wondered is it for me or is it just a fad? Do I really need to yell at my lightbulbs? Will automating my toaster make life better? Weâre here to answer those burning questions and help you figure out whether home automation is a good fit for your household.
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Before we dive in, we should point out that while it may seem very futuristic, smart home tech is here now and will soon be standard in most every electrical household item you buy. Connecting appliances, thermostats, kettles, TVs, and lighting to each other and the internet provides an extra layer of convenience to you today, but tomorrow this Internet of Things will allow our homes to learn our patterns and respond to our needs without us lifting a finger.
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Your hard drive hasn t been acting the same lately. It s starting to make clicking or screeching noises, it can t seem to find your files, and it s moving really slowly. It might be time to say farewell, but here s what you should do before it goes to the big data center in the sky.
Every hard drive dies eventually, and when it s near death, you ll see the signs. Strange noises, corrupted files, crashing during boot, and glacial transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end. This is normal, especially if your drive is more than a few years old. On older spinning drives, moving parts like the motor can degrade over time, or the drives magnetic sectors can go bad.
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PassMark DiskCheckup allows the user to monitor the SMART attributes of a particular hard disk drive. SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a feature on a computer s hard disk for providing various monitoring indicators of disk reliability. If SMART is enabled on a hard disk, the system administrator can receive analytical information from the hard drive to determine a possible future failure of the hard drive.
SMART monitors elements of possible long term drive failure, such as Spin Up Time , the number of start/stops, the number of hours powered on and the hard disk temperature.
DiskCheckup displays the current values of the SMART attributes, along with the Threshold value for that attribute. If an attribute drops below its threshold, the drive cannot guarantee that it will be able to meet its specifications in the future.
5 Pointers to Hard Drive Failure : ThyBlackMan com thyblackman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thyblackman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How to check your Intel and M1 Mac’s SSD health using Terminal Follow our step-by-step guide to get important stats on the viability of your Mac’s SSD using Terminal and smartmontools. IDG
If you have a newer Mac, it likely uses a speedy solid-state drive to store files, apps, music, videos, and a lot of other important stuff. But there’s one thing you may not know about SSDs: They wear out over time.
Since the SSD is such a vital part of your Mac, it’s a good idea to keeps tabs on its health. While it usually takes a really long time to wear out an SSD likely far longer than you’ll keep your Mac problems can arise. Most recently, users started noticing that new M1 Macs and some Intel-based ones are showing advanced wear after just a few months of use, a troubling sign that could cause drives to burn out years before expected.