Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Amazon's logo issues, travel news, a Target enhanced Apple shopping experience, Apple Stores reopening in Texas, and more.

Our guest this hour:

Paul Raley, Founder and CEO of Audality

Don in Middletown, Delaware listens on Delawares News Radio WDEL and asked: "I was looking into purchasing a new laptop and I wanted to get as much memory as possible. I was looking at the 1TB HDD which I believe is a mechanical hard drive. And then out comes these devices, laptops, with 256 SSD. I asked the clerk what the difference was and she said the SSD was a solid state device and the HDD is a mechanical hard drive. My questions is, how do the mechanical hard drives equate to memory quantity and the SSDs?"

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Don, the storage capacity is what the number says on both SSDs and HDDs.

In this case the 1TB hard disk drive will be able to store roughly four times the data the 256GB solid-state drive can hold.

You will find that traditional hard disk drives are cheaper than solid state drives of similar capacity, but there's a good reason for that.

SSD are much, much faster, particularly their read speed is much faster. The difference is enough to be easily noticeable by regular users. If you swap out an HDD for an SSD it often feels like you upgraded the RAM, the computer feels much faster.

If what youre looking for is just the most storage you can get for your money, and HDD is the way to go, but since youre purchasing a new laptop you may want to have a good look at computers equipped with SSD too just because of how much better the performance is.

If you dont want to spend the money on a 1TB SSD, you can still use an external drive to expand your storage and the benefits in how quickly the laptop boots up and generally operates will be very noticeable.

Tim in Anchorage, Alaska listens on 700AM KBYR Alaska Talks Here and asked: "How would you recommend one protect a list of passwords?"

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Tim, if you want to, you can encrypt the file but if this is just passwords your best bet is to get a dedicated password manager.

Password managers are built specifically to store your passwords securely and can suggest new strong passwords as well. Some will also alert you if one of your passwords has been compromised in a data breach so you know to update it before anything bad can happen.

There are many very popular subscription-based options like 1-Password and LastPass, but there are also free versions you can use if youre not ready to pay a yearly fee for the protection.

Some of the free offerings include Aviras password manager and Bitwarden.

If you do switch to a free version, keep an eye out for free on up to one device or similar phrasing. The ones we mentioned are just free (for personal use, there are paid team plans that allow multiple users), but some are only free on one device as a hook to get you to pay to get access on your phone or other devices as wel...