One of the most commonly repeated SSD tips is not to fill your drive all the way up to full. It makes perfect sense, and even manufacturers will tell you to leave 10-20% empty, so you should probably listen to them.

When dealing with data corruption, you're much more likely to blame your SSD than anything else. And even if it's not your SSD, it'll be your OS or maybe even the CPU.

I'm no stranger to finding weird things for my USB drives to do, such as repurposing them as "rescue drives." But this year, with the RAM shortage spilling over to every area of the PC market, I've found new ways to make good use of just about every piece of tech that I own. From a tiny file server to a retro gaming console, here's what I used my USB flash drives for in 2026.

Got a spare M.2 slot in your PC? Instead of waiting for SSD prices to drop to finally be able to populate it, which could take a few years, you can use it for something else. As long as it’s an NVMe slot, which means it has PCIe connectivity, and not a SATA-only slot, you can use it for all kinds of purposes, such as hooking up an eGPU, equipping your PC with a local AI accelerator.