Northern Micro Spirit Q370-AS, User Manual

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Fragmented files
After storing and removing many pieces of data, the hard disk can get fragmented —
information for the same file may be scattered everywhere. On traditional disks, when
you call up that file, the heads must move many times back and forth to recall the
information. Defragmenting the disk puts these pieces back together and gets your
computer running fast again.
Your
operating system may offer a feature to consolidate your disk. There are also
several programs available that examine and, if necessary, defragment the disk.
Erased files
If you erased a file by mistake, most operating systems offer an undelete or restore
feature to recover some or all of your material. The more work you do on the computer
after deleting the program, the lower the probability of full recovery.
The fact that erased files remain on the disk may be a concern for some security
applications. If security-sensitive information is erased and the computer or file passes
to another person, security may be breached. To prevent this from happening, you can
do a low-level format on a hard drive, or reformat an external storage device such as a
USB key. Programs for low-level operating system formats are readily available.
M.2 Storage
With computers shrinking in size, a new form factor for solid state storage has started to
become popular. The M.2 form factor is an expansion card that fits into a dedicated slot on
some motherboards. These cards can run on the PCI Express 3.0 bus (PCIe), the Serial ATA
3.0 bus (SATA) or the Universal Serial Bus 3.0 (USB) depending on the motherboard
configuration. M.2 slots can also be used for other purposes such as Wi-Fi cards, Bluetooth
cards, satellite navigation modules, near field communication modules (NFC), wireless WAN
(WWAN) modules and Wireless Gigabit Alliance modules (WiGig) but can be limited by the
motherboard configuration. M.2 modules come in different lengths since there are chips on
only one side of the card. The dimensions of the M.2 modules are evident in their
names. The first two digits of the M.2 size indicates the width and the remaining digits
indicate the length. For example, an M.2 2280 card is 22mm wide and 80mm in
length. The most commonly supported form factors are 2242 and 2280 but there are also
some cards that are 2230, 2260 and 22110. M.2 cards are also keyed differently which can
be used by manufacturers to provide more lanes of bandwidth. The slot on the motherboard
determines which keying is required. Currently, the keying is labelled B, M or B+M.