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Ensuring a Stable Happy Hard Drive
There’s nothing worse than having a hard drive fail or go bad. Especially because it typically means you’ve just lost some valuable data that you’d pay almost anything to have recovered. Well, data recovery isn’t an easy thing to do and often can cost as much as a new car. Occasionally, you can be lucky and the only reason your computer stopped seeing a hard drive is because the BIOS got reset or maybe you power supply stopped being you friend. Either way, the best thing to do is to avoid this horrible fate before it happens and make plenty of data backups. Here are some tips to help you keep your hard drives healthy and long lasting.
Ensure proper airflow. Make sure your computer has plenty of fans and those fans aren’t blocked with papers, DVDs, or dust. Whether your computer is liquid cooled or fan cooled, it is important to keep your room and computer cool. Heat will kill a hard drive.
Don’t shut off computer’s power while data is being accessed from your hard drive. This goes for both internal and external hard drives. When a hard drive is spinning fast and accessing data, if you pull the plug in its power, it can damage the data on the drive. This is why computers typically take some time shutting down. You have to let your operating system know that you’re done so it can slow down the hard drives and get them ready for shut down. If you simply shut off a hard drives power while it’s working, it’s a lot like throwing a stick into your bike spokes. You may do damage that can never be fixed. Sometimes, if a computer freezes, you have no choice but to pull the plug or flip the switch on the power supply. But, it’s best to avoid this when possible.
Don’t let hard drives get too full. Once your hard drive gets above about 80% full, your hard drive will slow down and might possibly have stability issues. This will progressively get worse as the hard drive continues to fill up with data. When choosing a hard drive for data storage, its best to go for something a little larger than you think you might need, simply to give your hard drive’s data room to breathe. If you are constantly moving files from your hard drive to another storage unit, you may need to do some basic hard drive maintenance.
Don’t move your hard drive while it’s running. I know this may sound dumb, but I have seen a friend shake a hard drive while running because he was amazed at the gyroscopic effect a hard drive has. Shaking the hard drive damaged the data on the drive. Hard drives are very similar to a record on a record player. You wouldn’t shake the record player while it was playing your favorite Captain and Tennille record…. no wait, you would. Well, you wouldn’t shake your record player while it was playing your favorite Beatles album in fear that the needle would scratch the record. The same rules apply with a hard drive. Don’t shake it, tip it, spin it, or even risk much movement at all for fear that it will scratch one of those many records that are playing at 7200 rpm’s inside your hard drive. And you thought those old 78’s spun fast!
Do regular maintenance. Especially if you constantly save and erase files on a particular hard drive. When deleting or moving a file, fragments will often get left behind. Doing a Defragmentation of your hard drive will help reorganize the data on the hard drive and can improve its performance and lifespan. Error checking is good also, since sometimes sections of your hard drive may become slightly damaged. After fixing these errors, your hard drive will function more smoothly. All the maintenance tools can be accessed by opening “My Computer”, right clicking on the drive letter you want to work on, selecting “Properties” and then clicking on the “Tools” tab. These tools can tell you if you need to run any maintenance or not.
Keep your data on a separate hard drive then your operating system. If you have the budget for it, you will get better performance results reserving your Operating System drive for your operating system, programs and simple data that doesn’t constantly access the hard drive to view. Data such as text documents or pictures. But other files like videos, games or music that are constantly accessed by the hard drive will function more efficiently if stored on a separate drive than your operating system. That way, the hard drive isn’t battling for data access. You have separate hard drives running separate programs. Bogging down your operating system drive will cause everything to function poorly.
Finally, Back it up! The best way to ensure you’ll never loose another file is to make plenty of back-ups. Whether you decide to save them to DVDs or an external hard drive, it’s the only way you can ever be 100% safe from hard drive failure. So the best way to ensure you’ll keep all your files (and all your hair) is to make plenty of data back-ups. With these simple rules, you should be on the road to a happier and healthier hard drive life.
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