Somewhat paradoxically, this makes hard drives more attractive than SSDs. After all, if two products double in price (as SSDs and HDDs have), the absolute dollar gap between them gets much larger. So, if speed isn't your top priority, an HDD might make more financial sense today. That doesn't mean you should grab a spinning hard drive and install Windows on it for your gaming PC. (Please don't.) SSDs are dramatically faster and much better suited for operating systems, apps and the like.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows could lock you out of your PC. Save your recovery key now! If you lose your BitLocker recovery key, Windows can lock you out of your files permanently. Here's how to check and save yours now.

Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. It's Gamescom week, so there have been tons of game announcements. We'll dig into several of those as well as a few new games you can jump into this weekend. You may recall a long-running saga about a guy who tried to gain access to a landfill site because he was convinced it contained a hard drive he accidentally threw away in 2013. The hard drive is said to house a private key for 8,000 Bitcoin, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series SanDisk launches Mew and Mewtwo SSDs and flash drives to celebrate Pokémon's 30th anniversary Soumya is a deals writer who covers consumer tech, shopping deals, and the products people use every day. With experience writing about everything from AI tools and software to smartphones and home gadgets, she enjoys breaking down product research into clear, useful recommendations. When she's not tracking deals, she's usually comparing products, digging through reviews, and figuring out what actually makes a purchase worth it. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

Say More Look Up Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Before you buy more storage, read our quick guide on spotting fake SSDs. Tabitha Britt is an award-winning freelance journalist, editor, and SEO/AEO strategist. Aside from reviewing dating apps and sex toys for Mashable, Tabitha is also the founding editor-in-chief of DO YOU ENDO -- a digital magazine by individuals with endometriosis, for individuals with endometriosis. She has a Master's degree in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School for Social Research and is a grad of Sextech School. You can find more of her work in various online publications, including,, and .

AI agents are a risky business. Even when stuck inside the chatbox window, LLMs will make mistakes and behave badly. Once they have tools that they can use to interact with the outside world, such as web browsers and email addresses, the consequences of those mistakes become far more serious. That might explain why the first breakthrough LLM personal assistant came not from one of the major AI labs, which have to worry about reputation and liability, but from an independent software engineer, Peter Steinberger. In November of 2025, Steinberger uploaded his tool, now called OpenClaw, to GitHub, and in late January the project went viral.

Just don't try to pop it in that old Walkman. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It seemed like this once-groundbreaking piece of technology may have gone the way of the dodo. However, the cassette tape could offer a new way to store our ever increasing amount of digital data-with a biological twist. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is nature's ultimate hard drive because it is dense, compact, and durable.

Human beings have a hard time dealing with numbers that get really big. The speed of light, the number of atoms in apparently small amounts of matter, the energy being burned every time you ask ChatGPT how many days there are in July. It doesn't really fit into our meat brains. Take, for example, Seagate's latest industrial hard drive, which holds 30 terabytes of data. The new Exos M and IronWolf Pro are the most dense drives single I've ever seen in the standard form factor, narrowly beating out existing 28TB models by leveraging Seagate's innovative Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology.

What happens on your computer stays on your computer … usually. While we've been taught to believe everything we do on the computer can stick around forever, there actually are ways to wipe your data for good. If you're looking to do some serious cleaning up on a PC, Data Shredder Stick can help. Making your data unrecoverable may sound daunting, but Data Shredder Stick makes it a straightforward task. Whether you're looking to sell an old device and make a little dough, or you want some peace of mind when it comes to old storage drives piling up in your house, the Data Shredder Stick can help you securely erase files, folders, and drives for good from your Windows PC.

When people talk about the "size" of an AI model, they're referring to the number of "parameters" it contains. A parameter is one variable in the AI model that determines how it generates output, and any given AI model can have billions of these parameters. Also referred to as model weights, these parameters occupy storage space to operate properly -- and when an AI model has billions of parameters, storage requirements can quickly balloon. As you can see, the storage space consumed by an LLM increases with the size of its parameters. The same is true for other types of generative AI models, too.